wiper-out

Updated: May 25, 2025

Thackeray and his characters are even blacker to-day than they might have been in his time. For the soot and grime become them, and London as well, for that matter. A great impressionist, this smoke-smudger and wiper-out of detail, this believer in masses and simple surfaces, this destroyer of gingerbread ornaments, petty mouldings, and cheap flutings!

Francis Hopkinson Smith - Outdoor Sketching: Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914