En Plein Air is the title of the exhibition, featuring landscape paintings and drawings made in the open air. It’s a rigorous form of art done on the spot, often in the face of heavy weather. Somehow the sense of being there in the moment makes for a very different experience to working in the studio.
According to the Tate it was Constable who pioneered this way of working, operating at speed to capture changes in light. It was key to the way the Impressionists made statements that were freer and more responsive to nature than much landscape art of the time. I think en plein air is an intrinsically modernist mode of creating – essential and in the present. Baudelaire might have agreed.