Say “painting en plein air”—in the open air—and we envision the Impressionists, working away at easels set up outdoors, hastening to capture momentary effects of light. (Never mind that their canvases were often worked on in the studio as well.) The historically minded will cite the Barbizon painters, the Impressionists’ predecessors, who even earlier worked directly from the motif, in the picturesque landscape near the Forest of Fontainebleau. But almost everyone associates plein airpainting with the advent of modernism, since for academically trained artists of the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, the figure, not the world of nature, was paramount. There were, of course, landscape and even still life artists during this period, but the most ambitious aimed at becoming history painters. They wished to present stories from antiquity, the Bible, mythology, or even the not-too-distant past, enacted by large-scale figures, filtered through a study of Greece and Rome and perhaps Raphael. Students at the Academies honed their skills by drawing from casts of classical sculptures and, when possible, actual classical sculptures, eventually moving up to living models, posed to look like classical sculptures, idealizing them in their drawings to approximate the canonically proportioned suavity of those statues. History painting ranked highest in the Academy’s hierarchy; landscape was second from the bottom—only still life was rated lower—since telling stories with figures was believed to involve intellect and invention, while working from the landscape was seen as merely imitating nature. Moreover, nature was irregular and mutable.