Pointillist paintings are built from small dots of unmixed color set side by side instead of blended. The most famous were made between 1884 and about 1910.
Its painters, the Neo-Impressionists, hoped the dots would mix in the eye and outshine paint mixed on the palette.
It doesn't quite work. From afar, blue and yellow dots drift toward gray. The real gain is that each unmixed touch keeps its strength. A color also looks stronger next to its complementary.
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How These Were Chosen
Only canvases built from separate touches of color, round or not, that also did something for the method belong here. It fixed a rule, bent one into a new touch, or carried the dot to a new country or subject. The order follows that, not the painter's fame.
12. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, The Fourth Estate (1898 to 1901)
Three people walk straight toward us at the head of a crowd. Two men of different ages lead the march, with a woman carrying a small child at their side.
All three are life-size. Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo began this canvas in 1898, after two earlier versions of the march.
He set it in his home village of Volpedo, in northern Italy. Farmers and craftsmen from the village posed for the crowd.
Pellizza painted it as a Divisionist. Seurat himself had preferred that word to pointillism.
Italian painters kept the name. They laid their color in streaks and threads instead of dots.
Italian Divisionism had made its official debut at the Milan Triennale of 1891. Pellizza turned to it the following year, pushed by the painter Plinio Nomellini.
Up close, the paint breaks into three kinds of marks: short touches, little lines and long filaments. They lie over a ground of earth colors in several different tints. In the sky, the marks thin out into fine threads.
In that sky, threads do the work of dots.
At arm's length the threads stay separate lines. From a distance they still read as a sunset.
Even after this canvas, his touch kept changing. Around 1905, in a landscape, he tried dots, drips of paint and lines scratched into the layers.
The Fourth Estate itself did not stay finished either. After a cool reception in Turin in 1902, he went back into its paint and retouched it.
At a Glance
Artist: Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo (1868 to 1907)
Painted: 1898 to 1901
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 283 × 550 cm (111.4 × 216.5 in)
Where to see it: Galleria d'Arte Moderna (GAM), Milan
About This Painting
What does The Fourth Estate painting mean?
The title The Fourth Estate names the working class. In Italian, quarto stato means the proletariat, counted fourth after the clergy, the nobility and the bourgeoisie since the French Revolution. Pellizza took it from Jean Jaurès's writings on that revolution.
Where is Il Quarto Stato?
Il Quarto Stato hangs in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan. It returned there on July 7, 2022, after more than ten years at the Museo del Novecento. It is now displayed without protective glass.
What is Pellizza da Volpedo's Fiumana?
Fiumana (Human Flood) is an earlier version, painted in 1895 and 1896. It measures 277 × 450 cm (109.1 × 177.2 in) and belongs to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.
11. Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat (1887 to 1888)
A face under a gray felt hat looks straight out at us. Face, beard and background are laid in short stripes of color.
Vincent van Gogh painted himself this way in the winter of 1887 to 1888. By then he had lived in Paris for almost two years.