En plein air

Plein air painting or plein-air painting (French: en plein air: under the sky ) refers to a painting in which the artist directly the abzubildene object that represents in natural light and natural environment. This form of painting is therefore in contrast to the studio painting.

Importance

As early as the Renaissance, the artists engaged with the natural light. Leonardo da Vinci was concerned with the subject in his " Treatise on natural painting". Although the Dutch painters of the 16th and 17th centuries worked for trials outdoors, but resulted in further work on the painting in the studio from. The landscape representation was largely built regardless of the model of nature according to rules of composition.

Open-air painting was founded in the early 19th century in England by John Constable and Richard Parkes Bonington. The exhibition of Constable's work in 1824 in Paris prompted many French painters to work in the landscape and inspired especially the French Impressionists. Artists such as Jean -Baptiste Camille Corot, Jean -François Millet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre- Auguste Renoir, Giovanni Segantini, and not least Claude Monet contributed their works to the fact that this established the plein-air painting.

Among the artists of the Barbizon School and Impressionism this painting got a new, very important. Not unimportant for painting en plein air were also the development of artists' colors in tubes. Up to this point, every artist had his colors consuming mix itself, but now the colors were made " ready for paint " in resealable, portable tubes.

Skagen called himself a Danish artist group in the fishing village of Skagen - such as Peder Severin Krøyer and Anna Ancher, which reached the end of the 19th century of national importance and especially the open-air painting inspired by the Barbizon school prescribed, as the artists of the Newlyn School. Examples from Germany include the artists' colonies Dachau, Ahrenshoop and Worpswede and the Hamburg Artists Club. When Ernst Oppler 1904 dedicated returns to Germany in Berlin of plein air painting, this was dismissed as a curiosity.