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Incidents and Accidents in Plein Air Painting: One Path Towards Post-impressionism



Author(s)

Lloyd Bennett

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2017.10.008

Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, Canada

A method for placing oil paint in metal tubes occurred in the early 1840s, which facilitated artists taking their materials out of doors to paint nature directly. In France in the 1860s, we know of painters like Claude Monet were working on beaches and port cities to capture the effect of scenes under natural light. By 1874 the Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc. (Impressionists) offered their first public exhibition to much criticism. A common complaint of the new work was that it lacked finish to be considered as a completed work for sale. It is the view of this paper that outdoor, or plein air painting, developed because of the circumstances this type of work developed in the artist naturally. I focus on two areas that outdoor painting forced the artist to consider: incidents and accidents. The incidents refer to the varied weather the painter had to deal with and the accidents identify the intuitive methods the plein air painters fell practice to when confronted by difficult passages or situations in nature. These experiences would shift the focus of the Impressionists from recording nature in a naturalistic way to self-expression, which would become a key idea in early modern painting. The finish the detractors of Impressionism called for would be replaced by an appreciation for the personal in painting as exacting images of landscape became predictable and lacked the vitality of the intuitive picture that could offer something new to art.

plein, air impressionists, painting, gestures, accidents