Giuseppe De Nittis

Italian

6 paintings in our database

De Nittis was an important figure at the intersection of Italian, French, and British art worlds in the 1870s and early 1880s.

Biography

Giuseppe De Nittis was born on February 25, 1846, in Barletta, in the Apulia region of southern Italy. He ran away from school to study art, entering the Naples Academy around 1860 before leaving to paint outdoors with the Macchiaioli-influenced Resìna School near Naples. He moved to Paris in 1867, where he quickly established himself in fashionable circles and became friends with Degas, Manet, and the Impressionist circle.

De Nittis became one of the few non-French artists to participate in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, showing five works. Yet he was uncomfortable with the Impressionist label and preferred to exhibit at the official Salon and the Royal Academy in London, where he was enormously popular. His paintings of modern Parisian and London street life — At the Bois de Boulogne, Paris (1873), How Cold It Is! (1874) — capture the elegance and energy of fashionable urban life with the freshness of plein-air observation.

His Italian subjects — The Road from Naples to Brindisi (1872), The Eruption of Mount Vesuvius (1872), In the Wheat Fields (1873) — show his roots in the southern Italian landscape tradition. He died of a stroke in Saint-Germain-en-Laye on August 21, 1884, aged only 38.

Artistic Style

De Nittis's style synthesizes the Impressionist plein-air freshness with a more narrative and anecdotal approach to subject matter. His Parisian and London subjects — fashionably dressed figures in streets, parks, and public spaces — have the compositional confidence and tonal sensitivity of his Impressionist friends but with greater emphasis on legible narrative. His palette is light and fresh, his brushwork fluent.

Historical Significance

De Nittis was an important figure at the intersection of Italian, French, and British art worlds in the 1870s and early 1880s. His participation in the first Impressionist exhibition introduced Italian artistic sensibility to the group, while his Salon and Royal Academy success showed the commercial possibilities of a modernist-inflected style. His early death curtailed a career that showed exceptional promise.

Things You Might Not Know

•De Nittis was the only Italian painter to exhibit with the Impressionists in their first group show in 1874, having been invited personally by Degas — a mark of genuine respect from the French avant-garde.
•He became enormously fashionable in Paris society during the 1870s–1880s, painting scenes of elegant Parisian life that rivalled those of Tissot and Boldini in their sophistication.
•He divided his career between Paris and London, and his paintings of Trafalgar Square, the Thames Embankment, and Piccadilly are among the most evocative records of Victorian London by a non-British painter.
•He died at 38 of a stroke, at the peak of his career — one of several Italian Impressionist-influenced painters of his generation who died prematurely.
•His wife, Léontine, was herself a writer and diarist who recorded their social world in Paris and left a vivid memoir that is now an important document of Belle Époque artistic life.

Influences & Legacy

Shaped By

Edgar Degas — De Nittis's friendship with Degas was transformative; Degas's interest in unusual viewpoints and modern Parisian life directly shaped De Nittis's mature approach
The Macchiaioli — De Nittis trained in Florence and absorbed the Italian proto-Impressionist method before encountering the French Impressionists
James Tissot — the two painters moved in overlapping Paris and London social circles and shared an interest in depicting fashionable women in modern urban settings

Went On to Influence

Italian Impressionism — De Nittis helped introduce French Impressionist ideas to Italian painters who saw his work at the Salon and in private collections
Giovanni Boldini — De Nittis's success in Paris society opened a path that Boldini and other Italian painters in Paris would follow