El cuarto estado

Around 1900, northern Italy was a country of strikes and hungry farm workers, and Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo lived among them in the small town of Volpedo. He spent roughly ten years working toward this single picture, painting his own neighbours, the local labourers, and reworking the scene through three earlier versions before he settled it. A crowd of working people advances straight toward you out of shadow into daylight, unhurried, with three figures leading at the front, one of them a woman holding a child. He first called it simply The Path of Workers, then borrowed the phrase the fourth estate, an old name for the common people beneath clergy, nobility and townsmen. Pellizza finished it in 1901 and died just a few years later, in 1907.