En plein air is French for "in the open air." In painting, it means working outside, in front of the subject, instead of in the studio.
The painter sets up an easel in a field, on a beach or at a window, and paints the light, the weather and the colors as they are at that hour, before they change.
In French the phrase simply describes anything done outdoors. English speakers kept it unchanged for painting, and today it is often shortened to plein air, a name used both for the practice and for the pictures it produces.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
For a long time, painters did not work this way. Before 1800, a landscape was an arranged view, not the record of one spot. The artist drew and took notes in the countryside, then went home and built the picture from memory, placing trees, ruins and clouds wherever the composition needed them.
The habit lasted for decades. A generation after 1800, the French painter Camille Corot still built his View at Narni, the picture just above, indoors from a sketch done on the spot. Such a study was a private guide for the finished picture, never something to exhibit.
What changed first was the sketch itself. Around 1800, painters from France, Germany, Britain and Scandinavia traveled to Italy and worked out of doors with small sheets of paper and oil paint, fast enough to catch a sky before it moved.
In 1800 a Frenchman who had made that trip, the landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, turned their habit into a method. In a book of advice for young artists, he told them to paint quick oil sketches in nature to record how the sky and the weather changed, and to keep those sketches as material for later work.
A wall in Naples and a sky over Hampstead
Some travelers had worked this way long before that book…
What You'll Discover
Why the paint tube mattered less than legend claims.
How Monet painted a canvas taller than himself outdoors.
What the Provence wind did to Van Gogh's canvas.
Where Monet really finished his famous Rouen cathedrals.