En plein air, or plein-air painting, is the act of painting outdoors.
Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.
Australian art is any art made in or about Australia, or by Australians overseas, from prehistoric times to the present. This includes Aboriginal, Colonial, Landscape, Atelier, early-twentieth-century painters, print makers, photographers, and sculptors influenced by European modernism, Contemporary art. The visual arts have a long history in Australia, with evidence of Aboriginal art dating back at least 30,000 years. Australia has produced many notable artists of both Western and Indigenous Australian schools, including the late-19th-century Heidelberg School plein air painters, the Antipodeans, the Central Australian Hermannsburg School watercolourists, the Western Desert Art Movement and coeval examples of well-known High modernism and Postmodern art.
Thomas Hill was an English-born American artist of the 19th century. He produced many fine paintings of the California landscape, in particular of the Yosemite Valley, as well as the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Jules Tavernier was a French painter, illustrator, and an important member of Hawaii’s Volcano School.
Theodore Nikolai Lukits was a Romanian American portrait and landscape painter. His initial fame came from his portraits of glamorous actresses of the silent film era, but since his death, his Asian-inspired works, figures drawn from Hispanic California and pastel landscapes have received greater attention.
Ransome Gillet Holdredge was an early San Francisco school painter, specializing in Northern California landscapes.
Robert Clunie was a Scottish-American plein air painter, specializing in California landscape art with a particular focus on the rugged mountain scenery of the High Sierra.
Arny Karl was one of the key artists in the early stages of the California Plein-Air Revival, which started in the 1980s and continues to this day. Along with Tim Solliday and Peter Seitz Adams, Karl helped revitalize the use of pastels to paint outdoors or en plein air, as the French described regarding the practice of working directly from nature. Karl was a student of Theodore Lukits (1897–1992), who was a prominent California Impressionist and the best known Early California painter to have worked in pastel. His work has been included in a number of museum exhibitions, is represented in a number of prominent public and private collections and has been the subject of a number of curatorial essays.
Peter Seitz Adams is an American artist. His body of work focuses on landscapes and seascapes created en plein air in oil or pastel as well as enigmatic figure and still-life paintings. He is noted for his colorful, high-key palette and broad brushwork. Adams has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums, including throughout California, the Western United States, and on the East Coast in Philadelphia, Vermont, and New York. Adams is the longest serving President of the California Art Club and has served on its board of directors in Pasadena, California from 1993 to 2018. He is also a writer on subjects relating to historic artists for the California Art Club Newsletter, as well as for a number of the organization's exhibition catalogs.
The terms California Impressionism and California Plein-Air Painting describe the large movement of 20th century California artists who worked out of doors, directly from nature in California, United States. Their work became popular in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California in the first three decades after the turn of the 20th century. Considered to be a regional variation on American Impressionism, the California Impressionists are a subset of the California Plein-Air School.
Victor Stanley Matson (1895–1972) was one of the California Plein-Air Painters and he was active from the 1920s until his death. He was an active organizer for a number of Southern California arts organizations and served as President of the historic California Art Club from 1961 to 1962. His work was widely exhibited with the Southland art clubs in an era when few galleries were interested in Plein-Air landscapes and he had a solo exhibition at Los Angeles City Hall in 1964.
Christian von Schneidau (1893–1976) was a well known California portrait painter who was recognized for his paintings of Hollywood stars and the Los Angeles elite. During the Roaring Twenties he painted Mary Pickford and other figures from the film industry as well as a number of outdoor figures done in the classic American Impressionist manner. Von Schneideau was born in Ljungby, Kalmar County, Sweden 1893, with the name Bror Christian Valdemar Von Schneidau, but went by the shortened Christian von Schneidau. In addition to his portraiture, von Schneidau was also a landscape painter and a private teacher who passed on the French principles of instruction, which he learned at the Art Institute of Chicago to his students. Von Schneidau was also the founder of the Scandinavian-American Art Society in 1938 and served as its president for many years. He was also an active member of the California Art Club.
California Tonalism was art movement that existed in California from circa 1890 to 1920. Tonalist are usually intimate works, painted with a limited palette. Tonalist paintings are softly expressive, suggestive rather than detailed, often depicting the landscape at twilight or evening, when there is an absence of contrast. Tonalist paintings could also be figurative, but in them, the figure was usually out of doors or in an interior in a low-key setting with little detail.
Richard E. Miller was an American Impressionist painter and a member of the Giverny Colony of American Impressionists. Miller was primarily a figurative painter, known for his paintings of women posing languidly in interiors or outdoor settings. Miller grew up in St. Louis, studied in Paris, and then settled in Giverny. Upon his return to America, he settled briefly in Pasadena, California and then in the art colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he remained for the rest of his life. Miller was a member of the National Academy of Design in New York and an award-winning painter in his era, honored in both France and Italy, and a winner of France's Legion of Honor. Over the past several decades, he has been the subject of a retrospective exhibition and his work has been reproduced extensively in exhibition catalogs and featured in a number of books on American Impressionism.
Richard D. (Dick) Keyes was an American painter associated with abstract expressionism, impressionist landscapes and the California Plein-Air Painting revival. Keyes was a Professor Emeritus at Long Beach City College, where he taught life drawing and painting for 30 years, between 1961 and 1991. He continued to teach, lecture and demonstrate throughout his retirement, with groups such as the Huntington Beach Art League.
Charles Dorman Robinson was an American panorama, cyclorama, landscape, and marine painter. He is known for his seascapes and landscapes of Northern California, including over a hundred paintings of Yosemite Valley. He was known as "the dean of Pacific Coast artists".
Raymond Dabb Yelland was an American landscape painter and art instructor. Born Raymond Dabb in London, he came to the United States in 1850 as a young child, and was raised in Union, New Jersey, and later lived in neighboring Elizabeth, New Jersey. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Tilden Daken was an American landscape painter known primarily for his oil paintings of the California redwoods, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the countryside scenery of Northern California and Southern California. He also painted in Alaska, Mexico, Baja, the Hawaiian Islands, the South Seas, and parts of the East Coast of the United States.
Gregory Kondos (1923-2021) was an American painter known for his landscapes, particularly those of California's Sacramento Valley and coastlines. Kondos’ close friend and frequent collaborator, artist Wayne Thiebaud, called Kondos’s intuitive, unfettered technique “a kind of brush dancing." Throughout his career, Kondos frequently painted Yosemite, serving as artist-in-residence at the national park in 1990. His large-scale paintings, River’s Edge (1988) and Sutter’s Gold (2015) decorate the Sacramento International Airport.
