Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris

Avenue du Bois de Boulogne (1874) depicts the fashionable thoroughfare Haussmann created as an approach to the redesigned Bois de Boulogne — now the Avenue Foch — one of the grandest of the new Parisian boulevards, lined with mansions of the wealthy and used daily for carriage promenades and equestrian display. De Nittis painted this and related subjects repeatedly, contributing to an Impressionist mapping of bourgeois Parisian leisure geography across the 1870s and early 1880s. The small panel format suggests this was an outdoor study made directly in front of the subject. The work is now in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires, reflecting the active international trade in French Impressionist works that saw De Nittis's paintings circulate widely from the late nineteenth century onward through the European and transatlantic dealer network.

The small panel allows rapid, precise strokes capturing the shimmer of figures and foliage along the avenue. The composition uses a diagonal recession following the avenue's course through the Bois, with plane trees framing the scene and fashionable promenaders providing visual incident.