De Nittis exhibition in Milan: guided tour at Palazzo Reale

Painter of modern life: the De Nittis exhibition in Milan

Like the great Impressionist painters who were his contemporaries-Manet, Degas , and many others-Italian painter Giuseppe De Nittis loved to paint depictions of the mundane life of the time, portraits and landscapes, luminous scenes en plein air in his canvases. The airy and refined language, in many ways different from that of the Impressionists, however, conveyed the same revolutionary idea of a painting devoted to modernity and new representative genres. Originally from Barletta and educated at the Academy in Naples, De Nittis from 1867 chose Paris and London, bustling metropolises and innovative artistic hubs in late 19th-century Europe, as his places of choice as a painter. The De Nittis exhibition in Milan therefore aims to reconstruct the biographical and artistic journey of the painter and the relationships woven with his contemporaries, focusing on the two decades from 1864 to 1884, the year of the untimely death of the Barletta-born artist.
The exhibition in the rooms of the Palazzo Reale is a unique opportunity to get to know, thanks to a guided tour with our art historical guides, the world of De Nittis. In fact, about ninety works, including oils and pastels, are collected, loans from prestigious public and private collections, such as the Musée d’Orsay and the Petit Palais in Paris, the Uffizi in Florence, the GAM in Milan and the Pinacoteca di Barletta, which preserves the legacy of the widow Leontine De Nittis.