"What is Plein Air Painting?

The words Plein Air are French for "Out In the Open Air" coined by the original French Impressionists. A true Plein Air painting is done on location, capturing the atmosphere of the moment. Most artists agree that this is the true test for an artist as it requires complete confidence in placement of color and brushwork upon the canvas in a short amount of time. For example, a fleeting sunset my only last for about 30 to 45 minutes. This is all the time the artist will have to capture the scene. Unfortunately photography will not capture most of what is observed because of the distortion of both depth and color. Plein Air paintings are not highly rendered. The brushwork usually has a loose and flowing look. When you are close up to a Plein Air painting you will see only a mosaic of color and brushwork. However, at a distance they will seem like a window to another place and time." (Website of San Diego Plein Air Artist Robert Ferguson)
 

Often, the budding soon-to-be Impressionists painters would take their chairs, easels & palettes out into the plein air, sit in some proximity to each other, paint the same scene, compare & contrast each other's work & learn from each other. This was a new way of looking at the creative experience of the process of painting.

---

The French Academie des Beaux-arts

The "war" reached such a fever pitch in 1863 that the Emperor Napoleon III had to step in and make peace by suggesting that those having their work rejected by the Salon should have their own alternative show called the "Salon des Refuses" (pronounced REF-u-SAY). But the show became a laughing stock. The problem was that many of the works "refused" by the Academy Salon were quite bad and had been justifiably excluded.

Manet, who never "officially" joined the ranks of the impressionists, is less today ~ in our minds ~ associated with them & has been somewhat eclipsed in recognition by Monet, who is almost a household name, along with his Waterlilies paintings.

A third category of painting ~~ that of Realism ~~ emerges at this time as well. And so we are introduced to Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Rather than the grandiose theme of deifiying Homer or the grand unconcern of Sardanapalus, we find ourselves in homey, everyday scenes or scenes taken from reality.

The Academie held the first SALON-type exhibition in 1673. Here is an etching & engraving of The Exhibition at the Royal Academy, 1787. by Pietro Antonio Martini (1737-1797)

Before the period of industrialization during the nineteenth century, artists had a very limited palette consisting largely of earth colors.  The primary colors made of reds like Dragon’s Blood, yellows like orpiment, and blues like blue verditer were relatively impermanent.  One exception was the blue of lapis lazuli, which is permanent, but cost more than gold by weight.  The invention modern of chemistry, during the early 1800’s, led to a great many by-products.  One of them was the modern palette, a spectrum of new pigments the likes of which no one had seen before.  It made Impressionism and the Luminist schools possible. Pigments such as cobalt blue, chromium oxide green, cadmium yellow, chrome yellow, barium yellow, zinc yellow, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue (synthetic), zinc white, viridian, and cobalt violet were stable and relatively affordable. 

It was the time of invention and along with photography, the bicycle, the revolver pistol came the collapsible tin tube, patented in England by the American artist, John Goffe Rand, in 1841.  This was followed in 1859 with the screw cap by the French manufacturer Lefranc (which later became the art materials company know today as Lefranc & Bourgeois).  This was no small achievement when you consider that before this time oil painting was considered a studio art, because it was too expensive and difficult to take paints on location to work outdoors.  What was available were pig bladders or syringes to contain the paint.  The bladders, though cheaper, dried out quickly, and the syringes were very expensive and often clogged.  Now artist could paint what they saw or felt in the moment they experienced it in the native surroundings instead of in a studio from watercolor sketches or memory.

En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting in the outside environment rather than indoors (such as in a studio). In English alfresco has the same meaning, however in Italian the term al fresco has a rather different one, either in jail or simply cool air.

Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-1800s working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism. The popularity of painting en plein air increased with introduction in the 1870s of paints in tubes (resembling modern toothpaste tubes). Previously, each painter made their own paints by grinding and mixing dry pigment powders with linseed oil. The Newlyn School in England is considered another major location of such painting in the latter 19th century.

French impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir advocated en plein air painting, and much of their work was done outdoors. American Impressionists, too, such as of the Old Lyme school, were avid painters en plein air.

In the second half of 19th century and beginning of the 20th century in Russia, painters such as Vasily Polenov, Isaac Levitan, Valentin Serov, K.A. Korovin and I.E. Grabar were known for painting en plein air.

The popularity of outdoor painting has remained constant throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century.

San Diego venture capitalist Kevin Kinsella (of Avalon Ventures) has acquired one of the largest collections of California inspired Plein Air art.

Definition: En Plein Air

Pronounced As: en-plan-âr, Fr. en-plen-er [Fr.,=in-open-air], term used for paintings or drawings made directly from nature and infused with a feeling of the open air. Painting outdoors is a relatively recent practice; the impressionists and the painters of the Barbizon school made plein-air painting an important dimension of their landscape work.


About En Plein Air
 

Painting from life is a pursuit unlike any other painting technique. It challenges artists to concentrate every sensory nerve on the information in front them. They absorb it all, from sight to sound, from temperature to atmosphere, and then channel those feelings from head to hand, re-creating the vision in paints on paper or canvas.

The roots of painting from life are found in 19th-century Europe. Englishman John Constable believed the artist should forget about formulas and trust his own vision in finding truth in nature. To find that truth, he made sketches outdoors, then elaborated on them in the studio.

Around the same time in France, in a small village outside Paris called Barbizon, a group of artists focused their attentions on peasant life and the natural world surrounding it. Like Constable, Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet challenged conventions of the day, choosing everyday subjects rather than the traditional cliches and presenting them in natural settings, the information for which came from sketches made in the field.

These realists, as they came to be called, laid the groundwork for the mid-19th century revolution in France that took painting from life to its logical conclusion. Lead by Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edouard Degas, Auguste Renoir, et. al. the impressionists espoused the belief that you should trust your eyes. Using newly developed theories of how the eye physically registers color, they maintained that what you saw in nature was not form, but rather light on form. And light could be conveyed by color. To prove their theories, they took their paint tubes and easels outdoors, where they re-created the world as colors which suggested light. Rebuffed at first for what appeared to be unfinished paintings, the impressionist vision soon became a standard for truthfully conveying the outdoor experience.

Painting en plein air (in the open air) would forever change how we see the world. Artists in the United States were attracted to the concept, and many, like Californian Guy Rose, traveled to France to study with Monet. Suddenly, places with remarkable light were of particular interest to painters, including the both the East and West Coasts, and the American Southwest, where painting colonies formed. The goal of teachers and students alike was to capture the light and colors peculiar to the place.
 

Today, painting from life is a pursuit that continues to challenge the finest artists in the world.