Place des Pyramides

Giuseppe de Nittis · 1875 · oil on canvas

The painting

De Nittis painted the Place des Pyramides in 1875, the year of his greatest success at the Salon. The view looks north up the rue de Rivoli toward the gilded statue of Joan of Arc by Emmanuel Frémiet, then newly installed at the centre of the small square at the corner of the Tuileries garden. Carriages and pedestrians animate the foreground; the cream stone of Napoleon III's renovated city catches the cool, level light of an overcast Paris morning.

The picture is one of the touchstones of the Italian Impressionist generation in Paris. De Nittis, working alongside Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and his close friend Giuseppe Boldini, found in this kind of immediate urban subject — wet pavements, modern boulevards, the unhurried bustle of a normal day — a Parisian equivalent to the Macchiaioli realism of his Florence years.

The square and the statue

The Place des Pyramides, opened in 1802 and named for Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, sits where the rue des Pyramides meets the rue de Rivoli. Frémiet's equestrian Joan of Arc, commissioned by the Third Republic and unveiled in February 1874, stands at the spot where tradition placed her wounding during the 1429 siege of Paris. De Nittis painted the square less than two years after the statue's installation, when it was still a fresh civic landmark; the painting is one of the earliest views of the Joan of Arc as a recognised feature of the Parisian streetscape.

The square remained — and remains — a focal point of Parisian Catholic and royalist devotion, and the statue has been the site of an annual procession on the second Sunday in May since 1894.

De Nittis in Paris

Born in Barletta in southern Italy in 1846, Giuseppe de Nittis trained in Naples under the Posillipo School and moved to Paris in 1867. He married Léontine Gruvelle in 1869, secured exhibition at the Salon, and through the 1870s built a reputation that briefly rivalled his French contemporaries'. Degas invited him to exhibit at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, where he showed five works — the only Italian to participate. He died of a stroke in 1884 at thirty-eight, with much of his most ambitious work still in his Paris studio.

The 1870s pictures — boulevard scenes, racetracks, society interiors — are de Nittis at his most observant. Where the French Impressionists prized the apparent quickness of the touch, de Nittis preferred a tighter, almost photographic finish, with crisp drawing under loose painting. The Place des Pyramides is the clearest example of this method.

Composition and technique

The composition is built on a deep diagonal recession into the rue de Rivoli, with the statue offset slightly left of centre to break the symmetry of the buildings. The foreground is sharp and densely worked — pavement stones individuated, carriage wheels picked out — while the middle distance softens into atmospheric perspective, the further buildings dissolving into the cool grey of the sky.

The light is the picture's most accomplished passage. De Nittis was particularly admired for his rendering of Parisian weather: the diffused, almost colourless brightness of a high-overcast day, with reflections in damp paving and the soft modelling of stone facades. The palette is dominated by warm and cool greys with sparing accents of black (carriages, harness, top hats), a touch of vermilion in a woman's shawl, and the muted gold of the statue.

Provenance

The painting entered the French national collections in the late nineteenth century and now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where it is one of the most reproduced works in the museum's Italian Impressionist holdings. A larger version of the same composition (1876) is in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome.

Further reading

• Emanuela Angiuli & Renato Miracco (eds.), Giuseppe De Nittis: La modernità elegante (Milan: Skira, 2013)
• Piero Dini, Giuseppe De Nittis: la vita, i documenti, le opere (Turin: Allemandi, 1990)
• Musée d'Orsay catalogue entry, Place des Pyramides