Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes

Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (December 6, 1750 – February 16, 1819) was a French painter who was influential in elevating the status of En plein air (open-air painting).

Valenciennes worked in Rome from 1778 to 1782, where he made a number of landscape studies directly from nature, sometimes painting the same set of trees or house at different times of day.

[1] He in particular urged artists to capture the distinctive details of a scene's architecture, dress, agriculture, and so on, in order to give the landscape a sense of belonging to a specific place; in this he probably influenced other French artists active in Italy who took an anthropological approach to painting rural areas and customs, such as Hubert Robert, Pierre-Athanase Chauvin and Achille-Etna Michallon.

[3] Among his students were Jean-Victor Bertin, Achille Etna Michallon, Louis Étienne Watelet, Louis-François Lejeune and the first French panorama painter Pierre Prévost.

Born in the city of Toulouse, he died in Paris and is buried there in the Père Lachaise Cemetery.