I used to think atmospheric perspective was just something painters stumbled into by accident.
Turns out, the whole business of making air visible—of rendering that peculiar quality where distant mountains fade into milky blue nothingness—has roots tangled up in a 19th-century American art movement that most people have never heard of. Tonalism emerged around the 1880s, championed by painters like George Inness and James McNeill Whistler, who became obsessed with mood over detail, with the emotional weight of fog and twilight rather than the crisp delineation of every tree branch. These artists stripped away the hyperrealism that dominated landscape painting and instead focused on limited color palettes, soft edges, and this almost suffocating sense of atmosphere. They weren’t trying to document what a place looked like—they were trying to capture how it felt, which is a much messier proposition. The movement lasted maybe three decades before modernism steamrolled over it, but its influence on how we think about visual space, especially in digital contexts, is weirdly persistent.
Here’s the thing: modern concept artists and environment designers are basically doing Tonalism without knowing it. I’ve seen dozens of video game landscapes and film storyboards that lean heavily on graduated tonal shifts, where foreground elements sit in saturated warmth while backgrounds dissolve into cool, desaturated haze. It’s the same principle Inness used when he painted “The Monk” in 1873—layers of atmosphere defining spatial depth through color temperature and value compression rather than linear perspective.
When Digital Fog Became an Aesthetic Choice Rather Than a Technical Limitation in Contemporary Visual Storytelling
Wait—maybe I should back up. Early digital rendering had fog because hardware couldn’t handle drawing distant objects. Game developers in the 1990s used distance fog to mask the limited draw distance of 3D engines, which was a technical compromise that accidentally looked kind of beautiful. Players wandered through Silent Hill’s oppressive mist not because the designers were making a conscious aesthetic choice inspired by 19th-century landscape painting, but because the PlayStation couldn’t render more than about 20 meters ahead without choking. Except that limitation created an emotional response, a sense of claustrophobia and mystery that designers realized they could exploit intentionally. By the time hardware caught up, fog had become a deliberate design tool rather than a crutch, and suddenly we’re back in Tonalist territory—using atmospheric effects to manipulate mood and guide the viewer’s emotional experience rather than just showing them what’s there.
The technical term for this in visual design is “atmospheric occlusion,” though I’ve heard concept artists just call it “that hazy thing.” It’s the gradual lightening and desaturation of objects as they recede into the background, combined with reduced contrast and cooler color shifts. Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it in his notebooks around 1490, calling it “aerial perspective,” but the Tonalists made it the entire point of the painting rather than just a supporting technique. George Inness, who I think was maybe the most interesting of the bunch, actually studied the spiritual writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and believed that this soft, veiled approach to landscape painting could convey deeper truths about the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds. Which sounds pretty out there until you realize that modern environment artists talk about creating “believable spaces” in almost mystical terms—it’s not about photographic accuracy but about emotional believability, about making the viewer feel like they could step into that world and breathe its air.
Honestly, I get why this approach keeps resurfacing.
How Contemporary Film Cinematography Borrowed Tonalist Principles Without Acknowledging the Debt to 19th-Century American Landscape Traditions
Roger Deakins, the cinematographer behind Blade Runner 2049 and 1917, uses atmospheric haze and carefully controlled color grading in ways that would make James Abbott McNeill Whistler nod in recognition—though Deakins probably wasn’t thinking about “Nocturne in Blue and Gold” when he lit those scenes. The orange-and-teal color grading that’s become ubiquitous in modern cinema is essentially a digital version of the limited palette approach Tonalists championed, where you restrict your colors to create harmony and mood rather than trying to reproduce the full spectrum of visible light. It’s a way of simplifying visual information to amplify emotional impact, which is exactly what Inness was doing when he painted the same meadow seventeen different times in different atmospheric conditions. The subject didn’t matter—the light, the air, the feeling mattered. Directors of photography today will talk about “shaping light” and “controlling atmosphere” with the same reverence Tonalist painters brought to capturing the specific quality of dusk in a New Jersey salt marsh, give or take.
The weird part is how little cross-pollination there seems to be between art history and contemporary visual design education. I’ve talked to concept artists who intuitively understand atmospheric perspective but have never heard of Tonalism, who recieve all their training from digital painting tutorials and film stills rather than studying the historical precedents. Which maybe doesn’t matter—good design is good design regardless of whether you can trace its lineage—but there’s something useful in understanding that the techniques we think of as modern solutions to visual storytelling problems have been refined over centuries. The Tonalists figured out that you could use atmosphere as a compositional tool, as a way to direct attention and create visual hierarchy without relying on hard edges or dramatic contrasts. Every time a game designer uses distance fog to guide players toward an objective, or a cinematographer diffuses background elements to keep focus on the actors, they’re applying principles that George Inness spent forty years perfecting in oil paint.
Anyway, I guess it makes sense that we keep returning to these ideas. The human eye responds to atmospheric depth cues in predictable ways, and artists have been exploiting those responses since we started making marks on cave walls. Tonalism just codified a particular approach to it, stripped away the unnecessary details, and made the air itself the subject. Which turns out to be exactly what you need when you’re trying to build immersive digital worlds or create emotionally resonant cinematography—not more detail, but better atmosphere, more convincing air.
