Telemaco Signorini

The following year he exhibited for the first time, showing paintings inspired by the works of Walter Scott and Machiavelli at the Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti.

[1] In 1855, he began frequenting the Caffè Michelangiolo in Florence, where he met Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Saverio Altamura and several other Tuscan artists who would soon be dubbed the Macchiaioli.

The Macchiaioli, dissatisfied with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, started painting outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and color.

There he met Degas and a group of expatriate Italian artists in his orbit, including Giovanni Boldini, Giuseppe De Nittis, and Federico Zandomeneghi; unlike them, however, Signorini remained rooted in Italy.

Art historian Giuliano Matteucci has written: "If we acknowledge Fattori and Lega as the major creative figures of the macchiaioli, then Signorini must surely be recognized as their 'deus ex machina'", describing his role as "that of catalyst and energetic doctrinarian.

Among his most notable paintings are The Ward of the Madwomen at S. Bonifazio in Florence (1865, Venice, Gallery of Modern Art in the Cà Pesaro); Prison Bath in Portoferraio (ca.

The latter, a street scene observed on a trip to Scotland, is predominantly gray in tonality, but dominated by a brightly colored Rob Roy Whisky billboard on the side of a building.

Art historian Norma Broude has written of Leith: On the formal level, certainly, the Rob Roy sign arrests our attention and plays with our expectations here as audaciously as a collage element in an early twentieth-century cubist composition.