En plein air: painting outdoors

En plein air, French for “in the open air”, means painting outdoors directly in front of the subject instead of in the studio. The method produced lighter colours, quicker brushstrokes and a new feeling for weather, light and time of day. It became easier once oil paint began to be sold in tubes in the 1840s, and the Impressionists made it their hallmark. In Swedish it is called friluftsmåleri.

Facts

From sketch to method

Landscape painters have always drawn outdoors, but for a long time the large canvases were painted in the studio. Sketches were made outside, and indoors the picture was built up according to rules of composition and light. Around 1800 it became more common to paint small oil sketches directly from nature, especially in Italy, where young artists from all over Europe studied the light. In England John Constable painted a great many cloud studies outdoors and noted the weather and time on the back.

Camille Corot learned from his teachers to paint sketches outdoors. From 1825 to 1828 he lived in Italy and painted small oil sketches in the clear light, with distinct forms and fine nuances, such as the sketch of the bridge at Narni from 1826 in the Louvre. The large paintings he sent to the Salon were nevertheless composed in the studio. The sketches, which he did not show himself, are seen today as some of his best work.

The tube and the field easel

Painting outdoors on a larger scale required new equipment. Previously, oil paint had been kept in small bladders of animal gut that dried quickly once opened. In 1841 the American portrait painter John Goffe Rand was granted a patent in London for a squeezable metal paint tube. Now the painter could take a whole palette outdoors. Lightweight folding field easels, parasols against the sun and canvases in standard sizes did the rest.

The railway also played a part. From Paris, painters could reach the forest at Fontainebleau, the banks of the Seine or the Normandy coast in a few hours and be home the same evening. Open-air painting belonged to a new age in which leisure, travel and nature became subjects in themselves.

Barbizon and the forest of Fontainebleau

From the 1830s a group of painters gathered in the village of Barbizon by the forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris. They are called the Barbizon School, and they included Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, who lived in the village from 1849 until his death. Corot often painted in the same forest. They wanted to show French nature as it was, with oaks, marshes and peasants at work, not as an idealised backdrop for myths.

The Barbizon painters often made studies outdoors and finished them in the studio, but they made the landscape a serious subject and laid the foundation for Realism. The young Impressionists visited the same places in the 1860s and took the work a step further: they wanted the finished picture to be painted outdoors.

The Impressionists: the light of the moment

For Claude Monet painting outdoors was a principle. He painted large canvases outside in the garden and, according to a well-known story, had a trench dug so that he could lower the canvas and reach its upper part. Later he fitted out a small boat as a floating studio on the Seine. Impression, Sunrise of 1872, the harbour at Le Havre in morning haze, gave its name to the whole movement; read more in the guide to Impressionism.

The light outdoors changes constantly, and this forced a new technique. The painters worked quickly, with short strokes of pure colour side by side instead of mixed tones, and they saw that shadows are not grey but blue and violet. Monet eventually learned to work on several canvases at once and to switch canvas when the light changed, as in the series of haystacks and Rouen Cathedral. Many of those pictures were nevertheless finished in the studio. En plein air was as much an ideal as an exact method.

The Swedes at Grez and the Nordic summer night

In the 1870s and 1880s Swedish artists learned open-air painting in France. The village of Grez-sur-Loing, south of Paris, became a centre for Scandinavians, and those who painted there included Carl Larsson, Karl Nordström and Nils Kreuger. The light by the river was often grey and damp, and the Swedes’ pictures from there are muted, far from the Impressionists’ strong sun.

Hanna Pauli’s Breakfast Time of 1887 shows a laid table in the garden, where the sunlight is filtered through the foliage and glitters on glass and china. The picture received mixed reviews and was thought carelessly painted, but today it counts among the best loved in Swedish open-air painting. When the artists came home to Sweden, the bright summer night became a new subject. Read more about their generation in the app’s period The Opponents and the 1890s.

Try it yourself

Open-air painting lives on. Many painters and amateurs still go out with an easel, and in the 2000s David Hockney painted large landscapes of Yorkshire partly outdoors, on several canvases that were joined together. Try it yourself: choose a view and paint or draw it in half an hour, once in the morning and once in the evening. Then compare the shadows, the colour of the sky and how much you managed to do. The changing light is what the open-air painters tried to capture.

How pure colour beside pure colour blends in the eye is shown in the picture below. The colours of the landscape at a distance are covered in the guide to atmospheric perspective, and the app’s theme landscape shows the subject through history.

How to recognise it

Exercise

What made it easier to paint outdoors from the 1840s?