Collection: An Italian Impressionist in Paris: Giuseppe De Nittis

The Phillips Collection

November 12, 2022–February 12, 2023

The Phillips Collection, in collaboration with the Pinacoteca Giuseppe De Nittis, the City of Barletta, Italy, and the Puglia Region (Italy), presents the first exhibition in the US devoted to the work of Giuseppe De Nittis (1846-1884), an Italian painter whose career flourished in Impressionist Paris in the 1870s and 1880s. The exhibition is only shown at the Phillips and features approximately 70 artworks.

Although not well known outside of Italy, De Nittis is a central figure to the aesthetic and institutional upheavals of 1870s Paris. His urban scenes of Paris feature innovative arrangements and plein air subjects painted with a detailed realism that depicts a sophisticated and economically booming city—a choice unique to De Nittis’s work. New research is presented in the exhibition about De Nittis’s friendships with Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet, and his early collaborations in Naples with a young Gustave Caillebotte. Work from all periods of De Nittis’s career is featured along with select works by his most important artist friends in Paris.