Meeting at the forest of Portici

Meeting at the Forest of Portici was painted in 1864, among the earliest surviving works of De Nittis, made at sixteen while working in the tradition of the Scuola di Resina. Portici, a town on the slopes of Vesuvius south of Naples, was the base of the Scuola di Resina — Italian landscape painters who gathered there in the 1860s to paint directly from nature in the countryside around the Bay of Naples, paralleling the Barbizon School in France. De Nittis was associated with this group in his formative years, and the forest of Portici — dense subtropical vegetation on volcanic slopes — was among their favoured subjects. The Centro Matteucci in Viareggio, a foundation specialising in nineteenth-century Italian art, holds this early canvas documenting De Nittis's origins in the Italian plein-air tradition.

The canvas shows De Nittis working within Scuola di Resina plein-air conventions: rapid, direct paint application capturing outdoor light filtered through dense Mediterranean vegetation. The composition positions figures where light breaks through the forest canopy.