The goose keeper

The Goose Keeper (1884), held by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris (Petit Palais), represents De Nittis's engagement with peasant and rural labour themes that co-existed in his practice alongside his celebrated urban subjects. Goose-keeping was an ancient rural occupation widely depicted in European genre painting, from seventeenth-century Dutch peasant scenes to the naturalist paintings of Jules Bastien-Lepage who sought authentic working-class rural subjects. This was painted in the final year of De Nittis's life — he died in August 1884 — making it one of his very last works and a document of his continuing stylistic range and technical confidence up to the end of his short but enormously productive career, which had taken him from Barletta through Naples, Florence, and finally to the centre of the Paris art world.

The composition of a figure with geese required handling animated bird movement alongside the more static keeper. The geese's white plumage creates bright chromatic accents in the landscape, while the keeper's earth-toned clothing blends with the natural surrounds.