Review: A forgotten Impressionist is rediscovered at the Phillips Collection
,” was born to a prosperous family in Apulia, in the south of Italy. But he also worked in Paris and London, was friends with Manet, Degas and Gustave Caillebotte, and exhibited in the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874 in Paris. He had built a substantial career as a painter before his sudden death from a stroke at age 38 in 1884.He was enormously talented and highly skilled, with a unique eye and sensibility, yet remains relatively unknown.
An exhibition of De Nittis’s work in Paris more than a decade ago used the subtitle “elegant modernity” to describe his work, and it is his relation to elegance that may have limited his posthumous reputation. When he painted nightlife, he didn’t turn to the demimonde of raucous cafes or circus spectacles, but to the soft and flattering light of a sumptuous salon.
There’s no seamy underside to these works, which are both elegant and modern, as if there is no contradiction between the two ideas. For De Nittis, there probably wasn’t. But that doesn’t make him a complacent or bland artist, especially if you view his salon elegance in the larger context of his early landscapes, including that painting of a train passing.The elusive train and the blasted trees both suggest unseen forces.
The grittiness of urban life is present in De Nittis’s work not through social markers like poverty or exploitation, but architecturally. The street scene captured in his 1875 “The Place des Pyramides” is as cold and damp as the glistening cobblestones of Caillebotte’s 1877 “.
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