Year: Day to Day Men: February 25
Falling Water
The twenty-fifth of February in 1846 marks the birthdate of Italian painter Giuseppe De Nittis, a central figure in Paris during the aesthetic and institutional upheavals of 1870s. His work integrated the style of the Academic salons with the newly emerged Impressionists.
Giuseppe De Nittis was born into a wealthy family who resided in the coastal city of Barletta in Italy’s region of Apulia. Barletta, particularly during the reign of Ferdinand II, was an extremely class-oriented city. Those who could afford it gathered regularly at the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher which was located near the De Nittis residence. The city’s port was a point of embarkation for the privileged class’s travels to and from the East.
In 1860 at the age of fourteen, De Nittis relocated to Naples where he gained admittance to the Reale Instituto de Belle Arti, a university-level fine arts school founded in 1752 by King Charles VII of Naples. Outspoken in his criticism, he was was expelled from the institute in 1863 for insubordination. De Nittis began his career with the 1864 entry of two paintings at the Neapolitan Promotrice, an exhibition space similar to the salons of Paris. He became acquainted with a group of artists, known as the Macchiaioli, and became friends with one of its most prominent members, Telemaco Signorini. The Macchiaioli were a group of Neapolitan and Florentine painters who reacted against the rule-oriented Italian art academies and painted plein-air to capture both the light and color of nature.
In 1867, Giuseppe De Nittis began exhibiting his works in Florence. During this time in Italy, De Nittis met and renewed his acquaintance with painter, Geremia Discanno, also born in Barletta but seven years earlier. Together, they exhibited and sold work in the city of Turin during 1867. De Nittis traveled to Paris later in the year and became represented by Jean-Baptiste Adolphe Goupil, one of the city’s leading art dealers. After exhibiting at the Salon, he returned to Italy where he produced several views of Mount Vesuvius.
In 1868 at the age of twenty-two, De Nittis returned to Paris and became a permanent resident of the city. His affection for Paris was expressed through images of the French capital’s urban renovation overseen by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Haussmann had been chosen by Emperor Napoleon III to carry out a massive renewal program of the boulevards, parks and public works in Paris. Through his close association with members of the Impressionist movement, De Nittis often visited the horse races at Auteuil with Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. The love of the French for horse racing as well as the well-groomed crowds promenading on the wide boulevards became recurring themes for his work.
Giuseppe De Nittis was invited by Edgar Degas in 1873 to exhibit in the First Impressionist Exhibition held at photographer Nader’s studio in 1874. De Nittis, who submitted five works despite protests by Adolphe Goupil, was the only Italian artist at that exhibition; it was also the only one of the group’s exhibitions he attended. In 1875, De Nittis broke his contract with Goupil and started working in pastels. He executed a series of portraits of sitters which included the authors Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, playwright Émile Édouard Zola, Édouard Manet, and novelist Louis Edmond Duranty. Pastels became an important medium for De Nittis’s later work; he preferred patels as the medium for his largest works such as the 1881 triptych “Races at Auteuil”.
De Nittis exhibited twelve works at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. He was, in the same year, also awarded the Légion d’Honneur, the highest French order of merit, both military and civil. In 1884, Giuseppe De Nittis died suddenly at the age of thirty-eight of a stroke at the commune of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the western suburbs of Paris. His wife, Léontine Lucile Gruvelle, donated the studio’s paintings to his hometown of Barletta where they are housed in the Palace of the Marra.
Giuseppe De Nittis’ works are in many public collections, including the Musée d’Orsay, London’s British Museum and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses his 1875 “Return from the Races” and 1869 “The Connoisseurs”. In September of 2022, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. held the first exhibition devoted to the work of Giuseppe De Nittis in the United States.