In the Wheat Fields

Giuseppe De Nittis painted this work at a pivotal moment in his career. Born in Barletta in 1846, he had moved to Paris by 1867 and by the early 1870s was moving freely between the French capital and the Italian countryside, absorbing the lessons of the emerging Impressionist circle while maintaining the compositional discipline of his Italian training. He exhibited with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, the year after this painting was made, the only Italian artist to do so at Edgar Degas's personal invitation. In the Wheat Fields belongs to a series of outdoor figure works set in the Apulian and Neapolitan countryside, paintings in which De Nittis explored how the intensity of Mediterranean light could be captured through the same broken brushwork his French contemporaries were applying to the softer light of the Ile-de-France. The composition, two figures seen from behind against a wall of grain and an active sky, anticipates Monet's figure-in-landscape experiments of the mid-1870s while retaining De Nittis's characteristic elegance of silhouette. The work has been held in private and museum collections in Italy and was shown as part of retrospective surveys of Italian Impressionism that have reassessed De Nittis's place in the broader European movement.