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It’s French for plain air, which is what you enjoy when painting outdoors like the Impressionists. Applied to landscape artists working directly from nature, it seems so natural these days, yet there was a time when the landscape was viewed as a hostile and dangerous place to be avoided. Leonardo urging artists to study nature with direct observation was revolutionary at the time, and all artists working outdoors owe him a debt of gratitude.
It wasn’t until the 19th century that outdoor painting became the preferred method for entire art movements. Turner was said to have lashed himself to the mast of a ship in a storm just to experience the fury of nature so to paint it better. The Barbizon school took this plein air ethos as central to their philosophy. Theodore Rousseau, Millet, and Corot laid the groundwork for the later Impressionists and Post-Impressionists
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