Plein air. From Corot to Monet

Exhibition 2020 in Giverny France, Museum of Impressionisms

From March 27th to June 28th, 2020

 
Plein air painting was the hobby horse of the Impressionists. However, they didn't invent it. As early as the beginning of the 18th Century, artists started venturing to paint outdoors and take the landscape as a model. Thus, in 1708, in his treatise Du Paysage, Roger de Piles encouraged artists to go and paint on the motif. Gradually, landscape went from a background in a story painting to a genre in itself.

Painters tempted by capturing the changing effects of natural light had to face numerous technical issues. Their material was heavy to carry around, paint couldn't easily be taken out of the studio... The invention of the metallic tube of paint in 1843 would ease the work of pre-impressionists willing to practice open air painting.

Through over 100 oil paintings or water colors by Turner, Corot, Boudin, artists of the Barbizon school up to works by the young Monet, the exhibition organised by  Musée des Impressionnismes Giverny details the evolution of plein air painting from the 18th Century to 1873, just before the first impressionist exhibition in 1874, when the name 'impressionism' was coined.