In the 1780s, French painter Pierre Henri de Valenciennes produced a landscape of the Channel coast. To do so, he painted not from memory or from a sketch, but directly from the source—by stepping outside onto the actual bank of the river Rance in Brittany. His canvas, which detailed the river’s still waters and sunlight dappling the trees, would become one of the earliest known plein air excursions.
At that time, painting outdoors, or en plein air, was far from customary for artists. For one, painters who sought to capture the natural world were stymied by the necessity of mixing oil with pigment, a difficult outdoor endeavor. Instead, they sketched outside and returned to their studios to make oil paintings (as Valenciennes did with The Banks of the Rance, Brittany).
Landscape artists, too, were also long side-eyed in the European art world throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The Dutch and the French, in particular, developed hierarchies for the medium that placed landscapes (and still lifes) beneath history painting, portraiture, and genre painting, or scenes of everyday life. Dutch painter and theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten even called landscape artists “the common footmen in the Army of Art.” They were perceived to be less creative, with smaller visions: they merely rendered what they saw, their works lacking in ambition. Landscapes that featured mythological or biblical elements were more highly prized.
Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, The Banks of the Rance, Brittany (ca. 1785). Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
These perceptions shifted in the 18th century. Enlightenment values of observation and investigation extended to painters who scrutinized the environment and fixed it to the canvas or page. In his 1800 treatise Advice to a Student on Painting, Particularly on Landscape, Valenciennes raved about the landscape artist, who “raising nature to a plane beyond itself, conveys profound and delightful sensations to our souls.”
He praised painters who achieved technical feats in color, tint, harmony, and a lightness of touch. Yet a truly great landscape, he suggested, will “speak to the heart and mind” and “inspire feeling.”
John Constable, Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath (1828) (Photo by Art Images via Getty Images)
Across the channel, British painter John Constable united Valenciennes’s emphasis on observation and feeling with new Romantic ideals. In the early 19th century, he returned again and again to the Suffolk countryside where he’d grown up, sketching plein air vistas around his father’s mill, then translating these sites to canvas. Hampstead Heath, his home outside of London, became another favored subject. As industrialism swept his country, Constable made atmospheric landscapes that conveyed emotion via calm or turbulent skies, and a keen approach to light and shadow.
Constable’s paintings in turn inspired a group of French painters who’d become known as the Barbizon school. They included Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, who immersed themselves in the forest of Fontainebleau. The setting gave them a subject and a sense of well-being. Rousseau’s adoration of the forest extended to activism, and he successfully petitioned Napoleon III to save the trees.
It was an industrious American painter, however, who revolutionized plein air painting with the development of the paint tube. John G. Rand patented the invention in 1841. Artists no longer had to mix pigments with oil each time they wanted to make a painting outdoors. The tin tube replaced the animal bladder as the primary method of storage.
Claude Monet, Haystacks (End of Summer) (1891). Photo: Leemage / Corbis via Getty Images.
The invention allowed landscape painters to become more ambitious. In the mid-1800s, painters like Pierre Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet used the paint tube to capture light with new accuracy. Renoir painted outdoor social gatherings and the French landscape. Monet worked in series, making famous paintings of lily pads, haystacks, and Cathedrals in shifting light conditions. Renoir said: “Without paint in tubes there would have been… nothing of what the journalists were later to call Impressionists.”
John Singer Sargent, who became one of the day’s premier portraitists, also took inspiration from this radical new movement. His famous canvas Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–86) required the artist to work in brief minutes of twilight, night after night. The painting, which features two girls holding lanterns amid a twilit floral field, took the artist two summers to complete.
In the U.S., before the days of the paint tube, Thomas Cole made plein air sketches of the Hudson Valley. The forerunner of the Hudson River School valued dramatic scenes of his young country. His forebears, including Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt, contributed their own paintings to the burgeoning national mythologies. Another new tool aided these painters’ endeavors as well: photography. The German-American Bierstadt used the medium to supplement his sketches and aid his painted depictions of the American West.
Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton) (1836). Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Today, further painting hierarchies have eroded, with the primacy of oil subsiding. Fast drying acrylic is available to painters, and watercolor is valued not just for sketching but for final artworks. While trends come and go, the experience of painting outdoors, exposed to the elements, retains its frisson.
As Monet once said about his lack of a studio: “I never had one and personally I don’t understand why would want to shut themselves up in some room. Maybe for drawing, sure, but not for painting.”
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