Woman with fan

De Nittis's 'Woman with Fan' of 1882 engages with one of the most culturally loaded accessories of late nineteenth-century Parisian painting. The fan was simultaneously a practical object and a complex signifier: Japanese influence, fashionable femininity, social grace, and the coded communications of flirtation. After the opening of Japan to Western trade in the 1850s and 1860s, Japanese fans flooded the Paris market and became indispensable props in the fashionable studios of painters fascinated by japonisme. Manet, Monet, Tissot, and Whistler all painted women with fans; De Nittis, deeply embedded in this milieu, joined the tradition with his own characteristic emphasis on social elegance and light. By 1882, De Nittis was at the height of his Parisian career, exhibiting at the Salon and selling well to fashionable collectors. His intimate paintings of women in interior settings — feathered hats, silk gowns, fans and parasols as recurrent props — constitute a kind of visual chronicle of the haute bourgeois femininity he observed in his own social world. This work belongs to a period just before his untimely death in 1884 at age thirty-eight.

De Nittis handles the fan as both compositional element and surface texture challenge — its pleated structure, decorative painting, and the way it catches and reflects light demand careful observation. The surrounding figure and setting are rendered with his characteristic confident, economical brushwork.