   Study of Clouds with a Sunset near Rome / Denis Study of
Clouds with a Sunset near Rome, Simon Alexandre-Clément Denis,
1786–1801 audio Audio: Why did Denis make this painting?  This
exhibition focuses on the practice of painting sur le motif—in
nature—as it developed in Europe during the late 1700s and early
1800s.  In the decades around 1800, a golden age of painting en
plein air (outdoors) emerged in Italy. Artists from France,
Germany, Great Britain, and Scandinavia came south to work in
the Italian landscape, where the effects of changing light and
weather were ideal for experimenting in oil sketches—small,
rapidly executed paintings usually made as preparatory studies
for more ambitious compositions completed in the studio. Soon
the oil sketch came to be considered an autonomous work of art
in its own right. In 1816 the French Academy established the
Prix de Rome du paysage historique (Rome Prize for Historic
Landscape) specifically for landscape, officially signifying the
new prestige of landscape p