Telemaco Signorini

The painters who gathered at the Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence in the 1850s were nicknamed the Macchiaioli, from macchia, the patch or blot of colour they built pictures from instead of smooth academic finish. Telemaco Signorini, born in Florence in 1835, was one of their leaders and, by common account, their sharpest tongue, the group's chief polemicist.

He had started out drawn to literature before his father, a court painter to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, steered him toward the brush, and by 1854 he was painting landscapes outdoors. His nerve showed in his subjects. In 1865 he painted the ward for agitated women at the San Bonifazio asylum in Florence, a bare, harshly lit room that few painters would have touched. When Edgar Degas visited Florence a decade later, it was one of the works he sought out.

Another of his best-known canvases, L'alzaia, shows labourers hauling a barge upstream along the Arno by rope, and it won a prize at the Vienna exposition of 1874.