Fog has no shape and no color of its own, so a painter can only show it through what it hides. That is what made it useful. Several of the fogs on this page were painted far from any fog, from memory or in a studio months later, and one was carried into a London courtroom as evidence.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
Fog has no outline, so a painter can show it only through what it does to everything behind it. Leonardo da Vinci wrote that a building five times farther away should be painted five times bluer. Fog applies that rule at close range, pushing everything behind it toward white or gray.
Painters liked it for that reason. Fog lets them leave detail out and still be accurate, and it gives depth cheaply, since each row of trees or buildings only has to be a little paler than the one in front.
Each picture below was chosen because its fog does real work. Take it away and the painting would mean something else, or would have been painted another way. The list runs from the least known to the most famous.
12. George Inness, The Home of the Heron (1893)
At the lower left of The Home of the Heron, a heron stands in a strip of shallow water that glows orange, and above it a golden haze fills every gap between tall, thin pines. George Inness, the American landscape painter, made the picture in 1893 at Tarpon Springs, a small town on Florida's Gulf Coast where he spent his last winters. The pines there grow tall and almost bare of branches, and they gave him his subject.
To paint them, Inness let the haze take away every sharp edge. The treetops are scrubbed into the sky until leaves and air run together, and toward the horizon nothing marks where the ground stops. Haze, trees, earth and water all stay within one range of brown, ochre and orange, and the heron itself is only a handful of dark strokes.
The picture had still not found a buyer when Inness died in Scotland in August 1894. At his estate sale, in February 1895, it appeared under another title, The Sun's Last Reflection.
That second title points to something the canvas keeps out of sight. The sun itself is hidden behind the haze and the trees, and the orange water around the heron is the only trace it leaves.
At a Glance
Artist: George Inness (1825 to 1894)
Painted: 1893, Florida
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 76.2 × 115.2 cm (30 × 45.4 in)
Where to see it: Art Institute of Chicago
11. Winslow Homer, The Fog Warning (1885)
Two big halibut lie at the feet of the fisherman in The Fog Warning, painted by Winslow Homer in 1885 on the coast of Maine. The catch is good. The man rides a gray swell in a small wooden boat and turns his head toward his schooner on the horizon, the only shelter he has out there. Behind that ship, a bank of fog is rising off the sea.