Prison in Portoferraio

In 1888 Signorini was on Elba and got inside the convict prison at Portoferraio, the bagno penale, where men were held at hard labour. He worked on the picture that came out of that visit for about six years. It shows the interior, the prisoners emaciated and pressed back along the wall while the inspectors look them over, and he built the room out of blocks of light and shade rather than drawing, letting the bricks of the floor carry the space. Very few Italian painters had taken a subject like it. The state of the prisons and of the poor was argued over in the press and in parliament through those years, and the naturalist novelists were writing about the same people, though a gallery picture of convicts under inspection was another matter. He put it before the public in 1895 at the Florentine fine arts society, and it went to the Venice Biennale in 1901, the year he died. It hangs in Room 18, 56 by 80 centimetres, signed at the lower left.