The Fourth Estate means the working class. The Italian painter Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo finished it in 1901 and showed a crowd of striking workers walking out of a village square toward the viewer. The title, il quarto stato in Italian, claims a new rank for them beside the three old ones of France before 1789: the clergy, the nobility and everyone else.
English speakers know the phrase as a nickname for the press, but Pellizza meant the workers. The picture has stood for the Italian left for more than a century, and it hangs today in Milan.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Pellizza worked on the canvas for about ten years, and it is almost 18 feet wide. In 1902 he sent it to an exhibition in Turin, in northern Italy, hoping for a prize or a public purchase. The jury gave it no prize, and no museum or public body made an offer.
The canvas stayed in the painter's hands. I find that failure more interesting than the painting's later fame: most people who know the crowd have never wondered whose faces they are, or who eventually paid for it.
The villagers who posed for the crowd
The crowd is made of Pellizza's neighbors in Volpedo, in Piedmont, the village in northwestern Italy where he was born in 1868. His first sketches were set in the village square, in front of the Malaspina palace, on a late spring morning, and villagers posed for the figures.
Three people lead. A barefoot woman with a baby on her arm gestures to the crowd behind her to follow. Pellizza modeled her on his wife, Teresa, who posed for the mother in 1895.
To her right a man walks with one hand in his belt and a jacket slung over his shoulder. Pellizza described him as proud, intelligent, a worker. Beside him a second man walks in silence, his jacket slipping from his left shoulder.
The front figures are life-size. The picture is painted in Divisionism, the Italian cousin of Pointillism, in which the painter lays small strokes of separate colors side by side and lets the eye blend them. Pellizza did not start there: his first version, painted ten years earlier, looked nothing like this.
What You'll Discover
What ten years of sketches changed.
Why the title came last.
What happened to Pellizza himself.
Who finally paid for it.