In 1800, the French painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes published a treatise on landscape painting, specifically painting en plein air (in the open air), that was both an artifact of its time and a precursor of things to come. Artists had always been conscious of the landscape, of course, but largely as a staged setting or element of a larger theme. Valenciennes made a more ambitious argument: Landscape itself, he believed, was not only an object worthy of close study but also a challenge and spur to artists. The shapes of trees, varying shades of light, the textures of stones, the violent action of the weather — all were tests of skill, observation, and the inductive power of the artist’s imagination.
That was Valenciennes’s theme, and it coincided nicely with the nascent Romantic Movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At a time when artists were turning away from religious art, allegorical themes, and domestic portraiture and looking beyond (or behind) their subjects, Valenciennes distilled the Romantic notion of the power and value of emotion, which might be found in innumerable sources, including the natural world.
That is also the theme of True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780-1870, a splendid, timely, and welcome exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. (The exhibition was scheduled to run through May 3; however, as a public health measure, the National Gallery is currently closed, with a tentative reopening date of April 4.) It is neither a blockbuster show nor an individual showcase but rather a pleasing recognition of a largely neglected transitional phase in European painting, which remains plainly visible in art.
Most of the paintings are small in scale and, for the most part, the work of lesser-known artists. This is partly because those who traveled from, say, northern France to southern Italy or the Greek islands did so for educational purposes: With the exception of a handful of painters who sought to capture the “Baltic light” of Denmark and northern Germany, most plein air migrants were students flocking toward the Mediterranean in search of rough-hewn landscapes, crashing waves, cloudless skies, bright sunlight, and, in Italy, active volcanoes.
There was also a practical element to their technique: Painting in nature meant capturing ephemeral scenes and objects in motion. The passing of time meant that shades of light would evolve as artists sketched — that skies would darken, that the movement of air, water, clouds, and even trees would require the artists to set down their impressions with speed. That oil was their medium of choice made haste doubly imperative.
Open-air painting was at once a test of one’s powers of perception and an expression of the Romantic impulse: The artist was not just mechanically recording a scene but conveying a mood and rendering the sublime.
As it happens, the largest canvas in the exhibition is Georges Michel’s undated View of Paris seen from Meudon, at 29 inches by 36 inches in dimension. Its ostensible subject is nearly invisible beyond a tower in the middle distance, the whole scene obscured by thunderous clouds in three-quarters of the panel and translucent fields rendered in a kind of pointillist style. Michel was a contemporary of J.M.W. Turner, but while Turner’s exuberance often approached abstraction, Michel anticipated the impressionists by decades. So did Jean-Honore Fragonard in his Mountain Landscape at Sunset (1765). Rendered a generation or so before Michel, the painting is a riot of swirling clouds, trees, and hillsides. By contrast, in Francois Gerard’s undated Study of Waves breaking against Rocks at Sunset, with its gray, bold-stroked surf against a swirling pink sky, we see abstract expressionism in the future.
However, most of the works are neither so ambitious nor precocious, and the curators have helpfully divided them by theme and chronology. In Fleury Francois Richard’s Artist in Renaissance Costume Sketching in the Arena of Nimes (1822), a painter sits in the shadow of decaying classical architecture while a pair of distant tourists pause in sunlight along the arches. Trees, as symbols of time and vitality, seem to inspire varying moods. In Andre Giroux’s Forest Interior with a Painter, Civita Castellana (ca. 1825-30), an artist and his easel (and patient dog, facing the viewer) seem enveloped by a sheltering canopy of darkened boughs. In Simon Denis’s undated Trees in Front of a Valley, two sharp, sunlit specimens stand in a bare, autumnal landscape against the wall of a gray, abstract valley.
With its changeable movements, water was an especially welcome subject, whether meandering peacefully downstream or crashing disruptively, as in Christian Ernst Bernhard Morgenstern’s Waterfall in the River Traun, Bavaria (1826). Coastlines are similarly evocative: The stillness of Johann Carl Neumann’s sun-drenched Sand Dunes at Skagen Beach (undated) contrasts with the cold rigidity of Alexandre Calame’s formidable Boulders by a Lake (1857-61). In Louise-Josephine Sarazin de Belmont’s Rocky Coast with Bathers (1835), the flesh of frolicking humans is barely visible against a giant cliffside.
Above all, the play of light seems especially metaphorical. Jagged streams of red lava seem about to envelop the painter in Anicet-Charles-Gabriel Lemmonier’s Vesuvius in Eruption (1779), while the explosive fire of Jean-Charles Remond’s Eruption of the Stromboli, 30 August 1842 (1842) flies like artillery shells into the sea. In Theodore Rousseau’s Panoramic Landscape near the River Moselle (circa 1830), the afternoon light seems to hover, curtain-like; in Camille Corot’s The Island and Bridge of San Bartolomeo, Rome (1825-28), the bright Mediterranean sunlight bathes a somnolent river, cityscape, and sky in a nearly photorealist tone.
In time, of course, Corot became a master. Here, along with some lesser-known lights, we see how it was done.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
