“In his views of London, [Giuseppe De Nittis] has achieved what appeared to be an impossible dream: to capture the fog of England, the mists rising from the Thames. He has also caught the odd character of the streets, where beings so silent that they could be taken for fleeting shadows walk, brush past and jostle one another.”¹ These words, written on the artist’s sudden death in 1884, recall the works of his London period, which so fascinated Parisians by their observation and rendering of the atmospheres, characteristics and way of life across the Channel. Born in Puglia of humble stock, Peppino De Nittis moved to Paris in 1868 after falling in love with the city during a brief stay the year before. In just a few years, he established himself as the best-known and most successful Italian painter in the French capital, not least due to his contract with the dealer Goupil, which required him to produce anecdotal, genre paintings. Unwilling to go on producing these “shams”, De Nittis ended this relationship in the mid- 1870s and began looking for a new market. To this end, he took part in the Impressionists’ first exhibition in 1874 but left the group immediately afterwards and made his first trip to London. There he produced numerous views of the city for the dealer Marsdens and returned frequently between 1875 and 1878, the year of his triumph at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The small canvas in the Cerruti Collection was painted during one of these visits but then remained in the artist’s studio, as attested by the stamp on the back, and first appeared as an illustration chosen by Léonce Bénédite, director of the Musée du Luxembourg, for the sole French book on the painter, published in 1926.² Angelo Sommaruga, a Roman publisher and journalist who was now also the owner of a gallery in Paris, bought it in this period directly from the painter’s widow Léontine Lucile Gruvelle together with the works not included in the posthumous donation to the museum in Barletta. The work was in Milan in May 1938, as attested by the autograph authentication on the back by Sommaruga, most probably in connection with its purchase by the Turinese collector Sebastiano Sandri.³ The Sandri Collection was the subject in 1941 of an important article by Enrico Somaré, who praised the shrewd selection and high quality of the works as well as the particular criterion applied: “Disregarding style and focusing instead on expression, ignoring effect in favour of intonation, in other words, surprising the painter in the very moment when the power and freshness of a new inspiration make him an artist once again”.⁴ These remarks hold for the rapid execution of the canvas, where the effect of the crowded street takes up the stenographic approach of Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines, a work included in the above-mentioned exhibition of 1974. Closely acquainted with Marziano Bernardi, Sandri also collected works by Fattori, Zandomeneghi and Signorini, which were shown as well as Strada a Londra in the Mostra del Centenario della Promotrice torinese in 1952 together with many works from the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna. The work and others from the Sandri Collection by Delleani, Fontanesi and Ranzoni were bought by a Roman collector and then sold to Cerruti. 

Filippo Bosco 

¹ Montrosier 1884, p. 139 (my translation).

² “Léonce Bénédite insisted on choosing the photographs used to illustrate the text written with such delight. Some may be surprised not to see the most important works of De Nittis. […] As it was impossible to show all of the artist’s oeuvre, the author endeavoured to give an idea of his talent in works not yet made popular through publication, selecting the most characteristic and the most significant” (R. B., in Bénédite 1926, p. 4, my translation).

³ This constitutes a correction of an error in the general catalogue of Dini and Marini that dates back to the list compiled by Enrico Piceni in 1963. The panel, no longer examined first-hand, was mistaken for a similar view of London in a private collection in Monza. It should also be noted that the wrong measurements (16 x 23 cm) are given in the monograph of 1963 for the photographic reproduction of the work and repeated in 1990. See Piceni, Pittaluga 1963, no. 426, and Dini, Marini 1990, vol. II, p. 404, no. 697.

⁴ Somaré 1941, p. 23.