Although he exhibited often, his work achieved popularity in death through their reproduction in socialist magazines and the acclaim they received from 20th-century art critics.

Thanks to the knowledge gained with the commercialization of their products, the Pellizzas contacted the brothers Grubicy, who promoted the enrollment of Giuseppe in the Brera Academy.

Disappointed by Rome, Pellizza abandoned the city before expecting to go to Florence, where he attended its Accademia di Belle Arti as a student of Giovani Fattori.

His pictures in these years progressively abandoned impastoed painting to adopt Divisionism, an artistic technique based on the division of colours through the use of small points and lines.

Pellizza was confronted with other paintings that used this technique, above all those of Giovanni Segantini, Angelo Morbelli, Vittore Grubicy de Dragon, Plinio Nomellini, Emilio Longoni and Gaetano Previati.

In 1900, he exhibited his Lo specchio della vita in Paris, and finished The Fourth Estate, to which he had dedicated ten years of study and work.

The Fourth Estate, exhibited the next year in the Quadriennale di Torino, did not achieve the recognition he hoped for, and sparked confusion and criticism from even his friends.