Lady walking with her dog

Lady Walking with Her Dog (1878), held by the Revoltella Museum in Trieste, depicts a fashionable woman with a companion dog — a staple of bourgeois Parisian genre painting combining social elegance with the signifier of domestic leisure. For De Nittis, who had made the fashionable woman in an outdoor setting the central motif of his mature practice, this subject allowed simultaneous attention to costume, movement, and the animated presence of the accompanying animal. Smaller companion breeds were widely associated with female bourgeois leisure in the period. The Revoltella Museum, Trieste's civic gallery of modern art, holds a significant collection of Italian late-nineteenth-century painting, and De Nittis's presence there reflects his wide Italian reputation despite his many years of Paris residence.

The composition deploys De Nittis's characteristic treatment of a figure in motion: the woman's forward movement captured through posture and the dynamic of the leash, while the dog's lively presence provides a secondary compositional focus.