Plein-air painting, once a central genre of modern art, has experienced such a precipitous decline in recent decades as to have practically disappeared. In what often seems an openhanded acknowledgment of the accomplishments of his art-historical predecessors, Ben Whitehouse revisits the challenge of constructing images that emerge from a close observation of the natural world. His work seems to offer some muted mirror of benign nature, providing a selection of sylvan and soothing snippets of landscape that evoke the same peace and calm that earlier artists sought and in many ways imposed onto