Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo

Around 1900, strikes were spreading through the towns of northern Italy, and in the Piedmont village of Volpedo a local painter spent nearly a decade trying to fix one of them on canvas. Giuseppe Pellizza worked the theme over and over: a first version in 1891 he called Ambassadors of Hunger, a darker one around 1895 titled Fiumana, and finally, between 1898 and 1901, the huge painting most people now know as Il Quarto Stato, The Fourth Estate. It is almost 5.5 metres wide, and it shows a crowd of striking workers walking straight toward the viewer, led by three figures who step calmly out in front to negotiate.

Pellizza painted in a Divisionist technique, laying down separate strokes of pure colour so the light seems to vibrate, and he hired his own neighbours, the working poor of Volpedo, to pose for the photographs he worked from. The picture was shown in Turin in 1902 and slowly became one of the emblems of the Italian labour movement.

He did not live to see that. In 1907, after his wife and newborn child died, Pellizza took his own life in his studio in Volpedo, at 38.