A forgotten Italian Impressionist reemerges

Giuseppe De Nittis was enormously talented and highly skilled and yet remains relatively unknown, writes Philip Kennicott. The artist’s early death may have something to do with that

‘Breakfast in the Garden’ by Giuseppe De Nittis’s, 1884 (Pinacoteca Giuseppe De Nittis)

The train in Giuseppe De Nittis’s 1869 painting The Train Passes is there mostly by implication. A thick plume of white smoke or steam suggests the presence of an engine, and a small, dark form on the horizon seems to be its origin. But the bleak landscape of a few, spindly, leafless trees underscores the real subject: a world transformed by trains, coal and industry, and cities and countries brought into new intimacy by extensive networks of rail, roads and waterways.

De Nittis, whose work is surveyed in a new and engaging exhibition in the US called “Giuseppe De Nittis: An Italian Impressionist in Paris”, 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. De Nittis’s early death may have something to do with that. But more likely, his facility as a painter, and his ability to produce both polished salon work and ambitious visual experiments, have made him a difficult artist to define. As one of the catalogue essays for this exhibition observes, he was a “man in the middle.” And art history isn’t kind to anything that smacks of compromise or indecision.