#fog

He worked on a whole stack of these canvases at once, swapping them as the light shifted, then finished them off back home in France rather than on the spot — which sounds like cheating until you consider how fast the weather moves. He's supposed to have said London wouldn't be worth painting without the fog.

They say he worked on a whole stack of canvases at once from a hospital terrace across the river, swapping to a fresh one every time the light shifted, then spent years finishing the lot back home in France. The fog wasn't getting in the way of what he came for — from what I've read it was the reason he came.

No one seems fully sure who the man is supposed to be — some accounts say a friend, others think he's simply invented to give the scene someone to stand in for. Paintings like this get filed under Romanticism, when nature itself started getting treated as something close to religious.