Madame de Nittis

Around 1872 Degas painted the wife of a friend. Leontine de Nittis had married Giuseppe De Nittis, a young Italian painter who had settled in Paris and moved in the same circle. Two years later Degas would talk De Nittis into joining the first Impressionist exhibition, the group's 1874 show, even though the Italian was also doing well at the official Salon. This is a private portrait, the kind Degas made of people close to him rather than for a public wall. Late in that same year of 1872 he boarded a ship for New Orleans to visit his mother's American family, and this canvas sits among the portraits of Paris friends he painted just before that long crossing.