A Man in the Middle: Giuseppe de Nittis in Paris in the 1870s

This essay charts de Nittis’ meteoric rise to commercial success via the commercial gallery of Adolphe Goupil as well as his public successes at the Paris Salon. De Nittis carefully negotiated his position between the Salon work and what best sold through Goupil while retaining close contacts with some of the key Impressionist artists. A fascinating connection, in particular, exists between Edgar Degas’ famous Place de la Concorde: Count Lepic and his daughters and de Nittis’ own Place de la Concorde, which was painted at nearly the same moment and was directly engaged with Degas’s picture. The central claim of the essay is that instead of regarding de Nittis as a marginal figure in the important events surrounding the Impressionists, he was actually a central actor in the aesthetic and institutional transformations experienced by the Parisian art world during the 1870s