IF I WERE TO WRITE a History of Plein Air Painting for Dummies, it would go something like this. At the dawn, we can assume a caveman, somewhere, had given outdoor painting a try with his red mud pigments. Even then, painting from life was a no-brainer.
We truly start, however, with the late 1700s in France, an age of Romanticism’s worship of Nature. An academic named Valenciennes stunned his Neo-classical academy by saying it was good to go outdoors and do two-hour, even half-hour, oil sketches. The goal was the overall “effect,” not the details or polish.
Galvanized, the Europeans all went to paint Italy’s ancient ruins, but having seen the English outdoor painter John Constable’s bucolic landscapes at the Paris Salon, they all decided to paint in the wild back home.
In that spirit, the Brabizon group in France (1830-1870) took to the forest of Fontainebleau outside Paris. Eventually, the Impressionists caught on and, as shrewd marketers, claimed to have invented outdoor painting. In time, tube paint and traveling paint-box-easels were invented, and shade umbrellas became de rigueur (required by fashion).
American painters noticed the excitement. Some learned the Impressionist style in Europe and, as seen in the Hudson River School (the 1820s), others were self-starters, drawn to paint ebullient nature on site. It was Romanticism and Nature in American terms.
Americans, up to the First World War, still traveled to Europe to become “authentic” painters. There, they continued to catch the Impressionist, or Modernist, bug. While Europe had guilds, America had the marketplace. Outdoor painting followed suit. Outdoor painters sprang up in New England, New York City, and Philadelphia, home to the oldest art schools. They also appeared in sunny California, especially southern, so fine was the weather.
So-called “colonies” of painters were born—New Hope, Del., Cape Cod, Mass., Taos, New Mexico, Catalina Island and Laguna Beach, Calif. One lineage of painters, stemming from both the Philadelphia academy of Robert Henri and New York academy of William Merit Chase, sought to pioneer a new outdoor Impressionism. This became the Cape Cod School, which taught painting objects and people (mud heads, they were called) in blazing coastal sunlight to discover true color.
The leaders were Charles Hawthorne and his student Henry Hensche, the latter of whom declared that their “spots of color” approach was “the only way to paint,” a notch above even the French Impressionists. The Cape Cod vision spread up and down the Mid-Atlantic, while the weather in the Southwest—Colorado to Southern California—increasingly recommended outdoor landscape painting.
This alla prima, or “all at once” approach blossomed in the peacetime after the Second World War. Students of the Hawthorne-Hensche persuasion began to organize, as did the California painters. They battled the rising tide of modern art, such as Abstract Expressionism, but rallied the tribe and sought an audience. They also adopted the French term plein air (outdoor light) to highlight their French pedigree.
In 1986, with balmy weather to their advantage, the Catalina Island-based Plein Air Painters of America was first to organize on the guild model (a discriminating membership by jury). It now claims to be “the original society of outdoor painters.” On Catalina, the society had annual “paint outs” and exhibits. In tandem, outdoor painters in adjacent Laguna Beach, Calif.,—with a tradition dating back before the First World War—organized and in 1998 launched what it claims to be the nation’s first multi-day plein air contest.
The Hawthorne-Hensche acolytes on the East Coast were not far behind. Since the mid-1970s, painters from the Annapolis, Md., area were going to Cape Cod to learn its Impressionist style. They called themselves the “Annapolis Impressionists,” and similar to California, organized. In 2002 they gave birth to the Mid-Atlantic Pein Air Painters Association. “Paint Annapolis” became the annual contest. The queen of contests, however, would be a bit south in Easton, Md., where today “Plein Air Easton,” founded in 2005, boasts being the “largest” outdoor competition in the world.
In many small ways, too, the big idea caught on. Little by little, nearly every art association, gallery, and chamber of commerce in America began to hold plein air contests. Plein air had reached “fly over” country. It was colorful, like a fair, and it brought the public downtown. In tandem, a professional group of plein air circuit riders found their vocation, and their livelihood, traveling from one competition to the next for cash awards and sales.
At some point, outdoor painting became so popular that it was called “the new golf.” And painters, as in the two-tiered golfer world, began to struggle with the distinction between professionals and Sunday painters (i.e. amateurs), both of whom nevertheless claimed to be heirs of the Impressionists. Plein air became a cottage industry, then a big business. Plein air was taught, its magazines sold. Its stars regaled on YouTube and Instagram. And, with such over-exposure, the public began to yawn. Still, painting outdoors will never die.
In sum, the centuries-old commonsense idea of painting from life, and the European romanticism about Nature that spawned it, had now become a middle-class movement and pastime. The first caveman to do it, and the Neo-classical academics of the late 1700s who formalized it, would surely be surprised at what they had wrought.