Giuseppe De Nittis was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 painter whose work merges the styles of Salon

Paris Salon

The Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world...

 art and Impressionism

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...

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De Nittis was born in Barletta

Barletta

Barletta is a city and comune located in the north of Apulia in south eastern Italy. Its current population is 94,140.It is famous for the Colossus of Barletta, a bronze statue, representing a Roman Emperor...

, where he first studied under Giovanni Battista Calò. After being expelled in 1863 from the Instituto di Belle Arti in Naples

Naples

Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...

 for insubordination, he launched his career with the exhibition of two paintings at the 1864 Neapolitan Promotrice. De Nittis came into contact with some of the artists known as the Macchiaioli

Macchiaioli

The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters active in Tuscany in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, did much of their painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour...

, becoming friends with Telemaco Signorini

Telemaco Signorini

Telemaco Signorini was an Italian artist who belonged to the group known as the Macchiaioli.He was born in the Santa Croce quarter of Florence, and showed an early inclination toward the study of literature, but with the encouragement of his father, Giovanni Signorini, a court painter for the...

, and exhibiting in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

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In 1867 he moved to Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 and entered into a contract with the art dealer Goupil which called for him to produce saleable genre works. After gaining some visibility by exhibiting at the Salon he returned to Italy where, now free to paint from nature, he produced several views of Vesuvius.

In 1872 De Nittis returned to Paris and, no longer under contract to Goupil, achieved a success at the Salon with his painting Che freddo! (Freezing!) of 1874. In that same year he was invited to exhibit at the first Impressionist exhibition, held at Nadar's. The invitation came from Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...

, who was a friend of several Italian artists residing in Paris, including Signorini, Giovanni Boldini

Giovanni Boldini

Giovanni Boldini was an Italian genre and portrait painter. According to , he was known as the "Master of Swish" because of his flowing style of painting.-Early life:...

 and Federico Zandomeneghi

Federico Zandomeneghi

Federico Zandomeneghi was an Italian Impressionist painter.Zandomeneghi, whose father and grandfather were sculptors, was born in Venice and enrolled in the Venice Academy in 1856. A supporter of Garibaldi, his political beliefs necessitated a move to Florence in 1860...

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A trip to London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

 resulted in a number of Impressionistic paintings. On a subsequent trip to Italy De Nittis took up pastels, which were to be an important medium for him in his remaining years. Back in Paris, where his home was a favorite gathering place for Parisian writers and artists, as well as expatriate Italians, he executed pastel portraits of sitters including De Goncourt, Zola

Émile Zola

Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...

, Manet

Manet

-MANET as an abbreviation:*MANET is a mobile ad hoc network, a self-configuring mobile wireless network.*MANET database or Molecular Ancestry Network, bioinformatics database-People with the surname Manet:*Édouard Manet, a 19th-century French painter....

 and Duranty.

In 1884, at the age of 38, De Nittis died suddenly of a stroke at Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Saint-Germain-en-Laye is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France in north-central France. It is located in the western suburbs of Paris from the centre.Inhabitants are called Saint-Germanois...

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