plein air

(noun)

A french term referring to the practice of painting outdoors, where a painter reproduces the actual visual conditions seen at the time of the painting. 

Related Terms

(noun)

En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and refers to the act of painting outdoors. In the mid-19th century, working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism.

Related Terms

Examples of plein air in the following topics:

  • Impressionism

    • The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air.
    • By painting en plein air, they used spontaneity, sunlight, and color to capture the shifting conditions of a vista exposed to the natural elements.
    • Sisley was dedicated to painting landscape en plein air and never deviated into figure painting, like some of his fellow impressionists.
    • Claude Monet is considered the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the Impressionist philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein air landscape painting.
    • In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air, both artists discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them, an effect today known as diffuse reflection.

  • Europe and America from 1850–1900

    • The Impressionists argued that people do not see objects but only the light which they reflect, and therefore painters should paint in natural light (en plein air) rather than in studios and should capture the effects of light in their work .

  • Post-Impressionism

    • Camille Pissarro briefly painted in a pointillist manner, and even Monet abandoned strict plein air painting.

  • Landscape Painting in the Romantic Period

    • Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille among others, practiced plein air painting and developed what would later be called Impressionism, an extremely influential movement.

  • Colonial Australian Art

    • They began an impressionistic plein air approach to the Australian landscape that remains embedded in Australia's popular consciousness, both in and outside the art world.

  • Art in Western Europe

    • Western Europe was particularly bountiful for archeological discoveries (especially southern France and northern Spain), with numerous caves and open-air sites containing spectacular parietal (cave art) and portable (small sculpture) artworks being found that are among the earliest undisputed examples of image making.
    • The Coa Valley (circa 15,000 BC), located in northeastern Portugal, along the Portuguese-Spanish border, is an open-air site home to numerous examples of Prehistoric rock carving.

  • Dover Castle in England

    • Indeed, the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 saw the tunnels converted first into an air-raid shelter and then later into a military command centre and underground hospital.

  • Steel-Frame Construction

    • Often in office buildings, the final floor surface is provided by some form of raised flooring system with the void between the walking surface and the structural floor being used for cables and air handling ducts.

  • Rock Art in the Sahara

    • Other important regions of rock art include: Tadrart Acacus, Libya; South Oran, Algeria; Tibesti, Chad; Mesak Settafet, Libya; Djelfa, Algeria; Ahaggar, Algeria; Draa River, Morocco; Figuig, Morocco; and the Aïr Mountains, Niger.

  • Paleolithic Architecture

    • Other types of houses existed; these were more frequently campsites in caves or in the open air with little in the way of formal structure.