painting al Fresco

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile, his treatise on education, “Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.” For young painters living in the wake of Rousseau, learning the visual truth of nature was of vital importance. The transforming patterns of weather, season, and hour; the changing temperaments of a clouded sky; the growth of endemic flora and fauna in a given region could not be better learned from a master, no matter how accomplished, than from the natural environment. Nor could even the most sensitive artist truly perceive these details within the walls of the studio. For painters in late 18th- and early 19th-century Europe, learning in the field literally meant learning in the field. Painting oil sketches en plein air was an essential part of an artist’s education, and fell in line with Enlightenment thinking, which encouraged observing reality first-hand.

The tradition of the outdoor oil sketch thrived particularly in Rome, where budding artists from elsewhere came to be immersed in the environs where ruins stood and the aura of the antique still hung in the air. They ventured outside of the city center armed with portable paint kits. The informality of their materials—paper supports, small pieces of canvas or board, an edited number of brushes and pigments—encouraged experimentation