Plein Air

This gallery celebrates painting in the outdoors, en plein air, a practice honed by 19th-century French landscape painters like Boudin and championed by the Impressionists. Featuring paintings including Sisley’s Waterworks at Marly (about 1876) and Pissarro’s Morning Sunlight on the Snow, Éragny-sur-Epte (1895), this display demonstrates how these artists used pure color coupled with loose, expressive brushwork to capture particular conditions of light and atmosphere. These techniques would be regularized in the systematic methods of Neo-Impressionist artists like Signac, as in his Port of Saint-Cast (1890), also on view in this gallery.