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One of the enduring memories of my childhood, spent partly in London, is walking in smog, then commonly known as a pea-souper. The combination of dense fog and smoke was so thick I could barely make out street lights, and the streets were for once almost empty, as vehicles could only proceed at walking pace.

This weekend I present a selection of paintings of mist, fog and maybe even a touch of smog on the River Thames, in and near London. Today’s paintings come from the pioneers of the nineteenth century, and tomorrow’s from the twentieth.

Many of JMW Turner’s greatest paintings take advantage of the optical effects of mist and fog. Being a Londoner, he must have experienced these all too frequently.

These peaked in Turner’s famous painting of a Great Western Railway train crossing the River Thames at Maidenhead: Rain, Steam, and Speed, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1844. The whole image is fogbound and vague, and proved a precursor to the approach of the Impressionists after his death.

Less than thirty years later, when he was taking refuge from the Franco-Prussian War, Claude Monet’s The Thames below Westminster (1871) is less Impressionist. Painted from the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge, near what is now Whitehall, the three towers to the south are almost superimposed, and aerial perspective is exaggerated by the mist. The river is bustling with small paddleboat steamers. In the foreground a pier under construction is shown almost in silhouette. Small waves and reflections on the river are indicated with coarse brushstrokes, suggesting this is a rapid and spontaneous work.

A decade later, The Houses of Parliament is Winslow Homer’s faithful representation of the Palace of Westminster when viewed from the opposite bank of the Thames, to the north (downstream) of the end of Westminster Bridge. The tide is high under the arches of Westminster Bridge, and small boats are on the river. This classic watercolour makes an interesting contrast with Monet’s later oil paintings I show tomorrow: Homer provides little more detail, the Palace being shown largely in silhouette, but works with the texture of the paper and careful choice of pigment to add granularity. He provides just sufficient visual cues to fine detail, in the lamps and people on Westminster Bridge, and in the boats, to make this a masterly watercolour.

The following year, Jules Bastien-Lepage paid a return visit to the city, when he painted The Thames, London. This view of industrial docklands further downstream maintains detail into the far distance, except where it’s affected by the smoky and hazy atmosphere typical of the city at that time. It was this section of the river that was also painted on several occasions by James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Tom Roberts’ Fog, Thames Embankment (1884) is painted from a similar location to Monet’s The Thames below Westminster above, on the Embankment to the north of Westminster Bridge, but is cropped more tightly, cutting off the tops of the Victoria and Elizabeth Towers. The Palace and first couple of arches of Westminster Bridge appear in misty silhouette, with moored barges and buildings on a pier shown closer and crisper. He renders the ruffled surface of the river with coarse brushstrokes, different from those of Monet.

Among six paintings that Camille Pissarro started work on during his visit to England in 1890 was this view of Charing Cross Bridge, London from Waterloo Bridge. For this he made a sketch in front of the motif, then following his return to his studio in Éragny he painted this in oils. This looks south-west, towards a skyline broken by the Palace of Westminster and the familiar tower of Big Ben.

In Frederick Childe Hassam’s Houses of Parliament, Early Evening (1898), the sun has already set, and he is viewing the Palace in the gathering dusk from a point on the opposite (‘south’) bank, perhaps not as far south as Lambeth Palace. The Victoria Tower is prominent in the left of the painting, the Central Tower is in the centre, and the most distant Elizabeth Tower is distinctive with its illuminated clock face. Moored boats in the foreground provide the only other detail. His rough facture gives a textured surface to the water.

Until the court imposes limits, the administration will keep acting as if there are none.

Oil paint has been applied to many different supports, of which the most popular and enduring have been wooden panels and stretched canvas. Panels have tended to become uncommon in recent centuries because of their weight and cost, but in the nineteenth century reappeared in novel form among those sketching in front of the motif, who took to using wood from cigar boxes.

Smoking cigars became popular during that century, particularly among the better-off living in cities. Made from chopped tobacco wrapped in a tobacco leaf, cigars are delicate and affected by humidity, so are sold in small wooden boxes often made from cedar wood. Their lids, particularly those of about 13 by 26 cm (5 x 10 inches) size, were repurposed as the support for many oil sketches. When reading their description, if they’re given as oil on panel with similar dimensions, you should suspect that they may well have been painted on a cigar-box.

The earliest artists who are known to have painted on cigar-boxes are the Italian painters known as the Macchiaioli, a breakaway movement centred on Tuscany in northern Italy from about 1850, that in many ways anticipated Impressionism.

Odoardo Borrani joined the Macchiaioli in 1855, and in about 1865 painted this Peasant Child at Castiglioncello on a wooden panel of 23.3 x 14.7 cm that had almost certainly originated in a cigar box. The unusual linear cracks seen here are characteristic of the thin cedar wood popular in cigar boxes, when used without an adequate ground.

Giovanni Fattori’s plein air paintings are characteristic of the Macchiaioli: using small panoramic wood panels, he painted in macchia (taches or patches), in a style not dissimilar to that of the Barbizon School in France. This panel showing The Rotonda at Palmieri (1866) is slightly wider at 12 x 35 cm.

Fattori’s Portrait of Silvestro Lega, Painting Beside the Sea from 1866-67 is on another panel of 12.5 x 28 cm. This also shows the underlying grain, and its lack of any substantial ground. The artist shown appears to be painting in a pochade box onto another panel that may well be a cigar box.

Later in the century others followed, among them James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

In the 1880s, Whistler painted small outdoor views on panels, such as Harmony in Blue and Pearl: The Sands, Dieppe from about 1885. Although its dimensions are slightly different at 14 x 22.9 cm, this is almost certainly on a cigar box. The vertical streaks seen here are probably the result of a thin ground underneath the surface paint layer.

The greatest European exponent of painting on these small wooden panels was Georges Seurat, who mostly used them for studies made in preparation for his larger paintings. When Seurat started work on his monumental painting Les Poseuses (Posers, or Models) in 1886, he made a series of figure studies that are now in the Musée d’Orsay.

Each was painted using Seurat’s Divisionist technique on the wooden lid of a cigar box of about 24 by 15 cm size, which the artist termed a croqueton, his favourite support for such sketches.

In the late 1880s, several artists started painting in the rural area of Heidelberg, east of Melbourne, adopting a style that later became known as Australian Impressionism. They came together in a momentous exhibition in the history of Australian art, the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition, in Melbourne, in 1889, named from the dimensions in inches of the standard Australian cigar-box lid of 13 by 23 cm.

Its principal artists were Charles Conder, Tom Roberts, and Arthur Streeton, many of whose rough-worked and colourful plein air sketches were painted on cigar boxes.

Roberts’ Going Home from about 1889 has dimensions of 23.4 x 13.6 cm. Linear marks in the lower section appear to be the result of the grain in the wood.

His oil sketch of Hutt Valley from 1900 is slightly smaller at 10.3 x 19.1 cm.

Conder’s view of the Dandenongs from Heidelberg from about 1889 uses a more standard size of 11.5 x 23.5 cm.

His Ricketts Point, Beaumaris (1890) is 12 x 21.5 cm with rounded corners.

In the twentieth century, many smokers switched to cigarettes sold in cardboard packets, and the supply of cigar-boxes dried up.