Among the screens

Among the Screens was painted in 1879 and is held by the Pinacoteca Giuseppe De Nittis in Barletta. Japanese folding screens — byōbu — were among the most avidly collected Japanese objects in Paris during the 1870s and 1880s, and Manet, Monet, and Tissot had all used them as compositional elements, placing European women against them to create contrasts between Western and Eastern aesthetics. De Nittis's use of screens in 1879 participates in this well-established Japonist practice while adding his characteristic social observation of contemporary Parisian women. The screens' decorative surfaces — typically featuring painted nature motifs — provided richly patterned backdrops encouraging play between flat decorative pattern and illusionist figure painting, a productive formal tension in late-nineteenth-century European painting.

The composition balances flat, patterned screen surfaces against the three-dimensional presence of the figure in front, creating the aesthetic tension at the heart of Japoniste painting. The screen's painted or gold-leaf ground provides a warm, enveloping backdrop that isolates the figure.