The Thames near London

By 1900, when Witsen painted this stretch of the Thames, he had been away from London for nearly a decade. He lived there between 1888 and 1891, and the city's river never quite let go of him. He went on drawing and etching its bridges and embankments for years afterward, working from studies and memory. What had drawn him was the London fog and the new gaslight burning through it, the way haze softened the hard edges of a modern city into something calmer. You can see that here. The far bank dissolves, the water holds more light than the sky, and nothing is stated sharply. He had found this way of seeing in the smoky river nocturnes of the American painter Whistler, whose work he discovered during his London years, though the two men never actually met. The Thames gave Witsen a subject built for the low, muted tones he preferred, grey laid over grey, with the sun somewhere behind the mist rather than in the sky.