Giuseppe De Nittis

Giuseppe De Nittis was born in Barletta in 1846, but having lost his parents at an early age, he moved with his brother to Naples in 1861. In the Neapolitan city he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, becoming a pupil of Gabriele Smargiassi. Unfortunately, he was expelled shortly afterwards for inappropriate behaviour.

The light and stain painting of the School of Resina

His pictorial beginnings are inscribed within the poetics of the Resina School, together with his colleagues Marco De Gregorio, Federico Rossano and Adriano Cecioni. During these years, the painter painted Neapolitan landscapes and the surrounding area from life, concentrating above all on the study and rendering of light through spot painting, which he got to know through Cecioni.

At the Promotrice in Naples in 1864, he exhibited a work influenced by this luministic research from life entitled L’avanzarsi della tempesta; while at the 1866 edition, he presented Un Casale nei dintorni di Napoli and Una fattoria sul lago Salpi.

In 1867, he stayed with Cecioni in Florence, frequenting the painters of the Caffè Michelangelo and gaining appreciation from the Macchiaioli critic Diego Martelli, especially for his work Una traversata negli Appennini – Ricordo di un realismo sorprendente, exhibited at the Promotrice in Naples that same year together with Impressione nelle pianure di Puglia.

First Contact with Paris and Costume Painting

Also in 1867, he left for Paris, where he stayed for a few years. Here, he met and married Léontine Gruvelle and began working for the merchant Adolphe Goupil, who asked him for anecdotal and genre subjects, so popular with the French market. His wife would acquire a fundamental role in the painter’s artistic life, as it was she who transformed their home into a cultural salon that would welcome the likes of Zola, Degas and Manet. In the Parisian environment, he moved away from Macchiaioli realist painting and towards more mundane subjects and modern life.

His first stay in Paris was short-lived, however, when the Franco-Prussian war broke out and he returned to Italy with his wife, settling in Naples. During this period he focused his research on the observation of Vesuvius and the luministic and chromatic documentation of the landscape, while continuing to execute less committed subjects for the Parisian market.

A Painter of Modern Life and Urban Vedutism

At the end of the war, the artist and his family returned to Paris, encountering various criticisms from Cecioni and Diego Martelli, who dismissed his painting as fashionable. The artist did indeed produce genre works for the merchant Goupil, but he also executed views of Paris, a city that obviously shows a totally different aspect to the Neapolitan, Apulian or Tuscan landscapes. The artist portrays the magical atmospheres of the French capital, achieving a completely new and personal urban vedutism. An emblematic work of this theme is Place des Pyramides, where we find the large scaffolding for the construction of the Pavillon Marsan and the advertising posters symbolising these years of renewal, among which an indistinct crowd is quickly lost.

In 1874, he exhibited at the Parisian Salon Che freddo! a snapshot of modern life that immortalised three women and a little girl caught in the cold in a Parisian park. La parisienne is another of the painter’s much-loved subjects. In the same year, Giuseppe De Nittis participated in the First Impressionist Exhibition at the invitation of Edgar Degas. However, the painter was never part of the group, he remained in a transitional phase, never completely abandoning the full-bodied Italian Macchia painting. He will be closer to Manet’s research than to the Impressionist artists.

Trips to London

1874 was also the year of his break with Goupil and the search for new dealers drove him to London. Here he produced some wonderful views of the English city for the banker Knowles, including Westminister, a view of the English Parliament standing out like an apparition in a misty landscape, also documenting the comings and goings of the Londoners overlooking the Thames.

London, unlike Paris, is a city in which the artist is much more aware of social decay, and he will depict this state of poverty that animates the metropolis in some of his works, such as Winter Day in London. The painter will increasingly use a photographic cut that will give a sense of immediacy and spontaneity to his works.

The Mobility of Pastel

In these years, the artist began to experiment with pastel, as did Degas and Boldini, as through this technique De Nittis succeeded in representing the mutability of coloured powders that became a metaphor for the mobility of modern life.

In doing so, he produced one of the largest pastels ever made, Corse al Bois-de-Boulogne, a triptych homage to modern Parisian life and a document of the social classes of the Belle Époque. In fact, the protagonists of the immense work are the spectators of the event, not the races, which on the contrary are invisible, far from our field of vision.

Saint-German-en-Laye

In 1883, the painter left the hectic life of the capital and moved to Saint-German-en-Laye with his family. In this last year, his subjects became more intimate and private, such as Breakfast in the Garden, a work depicting his wife and small son in the garden of their home, while a napkin on the edge of the table is a trace of the painter’s presence as he has just got up. Unfortunately, he would not rejoice in this newfound intimacy and calm, as he disappeared a few months later, in 1884, aged just thirty-eight.

Emanuela Di Vivona