Dictionary

fumage en · NOUN

From Old French fumage, fumaige, from Latin fumus (“smoke”).

(historical, uncountable) Hearth tax.
- As early as the conquest mention is made in domesday book of fumage or fuage, vulgarly called smoke farthings; which were paid by custom to the king for every chimney in the house 1765–1769, William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, (please specify |book=I to IV), Oxford, Oxfordshire: […] Clarendon Press, →OCLC:
- A FUMAGE, or tax of smoke farthings, or hearth tax, a kind of tax usually to be found among the fiscal traditions of communities in remote times, ranges among those of the Anglo-Saxon period. Such a tax is mentioned subsequently in Domesday Book. 1888, Stephen Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes in England from the Earliest Times to the Year 1885, Volume 1, Longmans, Green and Co, page 10:
(uncountable) A surrealist art technique, devised by Wolfgang Paalen, in which impressions are made by the smoke of a candle or kerosene lamp on a piece of paper or canvas.
- 2013, Whitney Sherman, Playing with Sketches, The Quarto Group (Rockport Publishers), page 32, Fumage is not a frequently used drawing technique, but when used it can produce a subtle and mysterious effect. One notable twentieth-century fumage artist was banker Hugh Parker Guiler, spouse of diarist Anaïs Nin.

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