Vincenzo Cabianca

In the summer of 1860 three painters set up at La Spezia on the Ligurian coast with a technical problem in mind, what a dark shape does against a white wall in full sun. Vincenzo Cabianca, Telemaco Signorini and Cristiano Banti painted women carrying water jars and walls at noon, and Cabianca produced a black pig against white plaster that his friends treated as the most complete demonstration of the macchia, a patch of tone laid down whole, with the drawing left out.

He had come to that from Verona, where he was born in 1827 and studied at the academy before two years at the Venice one. He left in 1848, during the war with Austria, and reached Bologna. By 1853 he was in Florence, among the group at the Caffè Michelangiolo, and Signorini's company pushed him out of picturesque genre work towards something blunter.

He never entirely let the storytelling go. In the same year as La Spezia he painted Tuscan storytellers of the 14th century, figures in medieval dress against a wall, a subject any academician would have approved, lit in a way none of them would. In 1861 he went to Paris with Banti and Signorini. From late 1870 he lived in Rome, invited by the landscape painter Nino Costa, worked more and more in watercolour, and showed regularly in England. A stroke in 1893 did not stop him exhibiting, and he died in Rome in 1902.