Plein Air

Plein Air is an art movement. The gallery holds 135 works in this movement, including works by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Johan Jongkind. Browse Plein Air paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Plein air—from the French *en plein air*, "in the open air"—names the practice of painting outdoors, directly before the motif, rather than composing a landscape from sketches and memory in the studio. Although artists had long made drawings outdoors, the systematic theory of painting from nature is credited to Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819), whose treatise *Reflections and Advice to a Student on Painting* (1800) urged students to make rapid oil sketches on the spot to capture transient light and weather. His own studies, such as the catalogue's *Study of Clouds over the Roman Campagna*, exemplify this empirical, observational approach, and by the early nineteenth century such outdoor oil sketching had spread across Europe as a foundation of landscape study.

The practice matured into a movement with the Barbizon School of the 1830s, when painters including Théodore Rousseau, Jean-François Millet, and Charles-François Daubigny settled near the Forest of Fontainebleau to paint nature truthfully under shifting conditions. They were encouraged by the example of John Constable in England and the lyrical naturalism of Camille Corot. Two technological advances made full outdoor painting practical: John G. Rand's collapsible metal paint tube (1841) and lightweight portable easels, which freed artists from the studio's confines.

Visually, plein air work prizes the direct transcription of natural light. Because conditions change quickly, painters worked rapidly and *alla prima*, favoring loose, broken brushwork and unblended strokes of pure color placed side by side to be mixed optically by the eye. This method reached its height with the Impressionists, for whom Eugène Boudin and the Dutch painter Johan Jongkind were important precursors. Claude Monet—whose *Impression, Sunrise* (1872) gave the movement its name—together with Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley pursued the fleeting effects of sunlight, atmosphere, and reflection. Renoir's *A Road in Louveciennes* and *The Farm at Les Collettes, Cagnes* show the technique in two registers, from suburban Paris to the Mediterranean south.

The ethos spread beyond France. In the Netherlands the Hague School, led by figures such as Anton Mauve—represented here by *A Shepherdess and Her Flock* and *Cottage on the dirt road*—applied a tonal, atmospheric variant to polder landscapes. Plein air thus links Romantic naturalism to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and its insistence on painting from direct observation remains a living tradition among landscape painters today.