The Fourth Estate (Italian: Il quarto stato) is an oil painting by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, originally titled The Path of Workers and made between 1898 and 1901.

After his death, The Fourth Estate became a popular Italian socialist image and was reproduced extensively despite its initial shunning by formal art circles.

[3]: 141 Pellizza began to work on a study for Ambasciatori della Fame (Ambassadors of Hunger) in 1891, after participating in a workers' protest in Turin.

This core composition remained in successive versions of the work, each of which presents the three figures in front of a mass of people in the background and a dark backdrop.

[7]: 356 In the passage above, the artist underlined his wish to follow a general theory: not only to represent the citizens of Volpedo, but also an entire part of society that has "suffered greatly" and that intends to claim its rights through a struggle "serene, calm, and reasoned.

Pellizza's goal was to restore the vitality of a people that were no longer "a natural death, but a living, palpable mass, full of humble hopes or dark menace.

"[9] Pellizza tried to give Fiumana a universal scope, exemplified in a poem he wrote on the margin of the canvas: It is heard ... the River of humanity runs gently and swells.

[10] Dissatisfied with the technical artistic effect of Fiumana but also in light of the brutal Bava Beccaris massacre in Milan, Pellizza decided in 1898 to make the work for a third time on "the greatest manifesto that the Italian proletariat could boast between the 19th and 20th century.

[3]: 150,152  The first row of workers are delineated with greater plasticity, "while embedding, like a river, the final part of the array, under a sky articulated with serene spaces and turbulent clouds.

"[7]: 409 This dynamism was also translated in work's palette, which returned to a cold range of colors that included rosy ochres, arranged with small brushstrokes of little lines and points.

[11] The technical picture is explained by Pellizza in a letter of May 18, 1898, sent to his friend Mucchi: The theory of contrasts helps me, that the complements and the division of color depend on the purpose that I set for myself in my works.

And for the result, its production will not be in all the points, nor all the lines, nor all the impasto, and not even all that is smooth or all that is rough; but as varied as are the various appearances of the objects in nature and the joining of forms with the colors in "a speaking harmony" (this being the supreme goal), an idea in the mind or a feeling in the heart.

[10]: 211 With Il Camino dei Lavoratori, Pellizza's social aim for the picture changed, as he adopted Italian socialist proletarian culture.

This decision is attributed to Pellizza's discussion with a friend, Arzano, about their reading of Storia della rivoluzione francese by Jean Jaurès, which stated the third estate comprised both the bourgeois and the proletariat.

It was Pellizza's intention to give life to "a mass of people, of laborers of the earth who, intelligent, strong, robust, and united, advance like a river that floods each obstacle in its way to reassume a place of equilibrium.

They all display natural gestures: some carry babies in their arms, others use their hands to block the sun from their eyes, and some simply look straight ahead.

"[19] Pellizza married the demonstration to images reminiscent of Renaissance artworks, which directly inspired him through the expressiveness of figures in masterpieces like The School of Athens by Raphael[17] and The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci.

The style, similar to the earlier pointillism, uses the juxtaposition of individual points of color to create new chromatic experiences, rather than mixing paints before they reach the canvas.

[22] Art critic de Puppo also believes that the use of unmixed colors to generate the entire painting's palette has affinity with its theme of "organized masses of people.

The woman in the forefront holding a baby is based on Teresa Bidone, the artist's wife[23]: For Pellizza, "Fourth Estate" referred to the exploited working class.

The work received no recognition (the jury, which included Pellizza's sculptor friend Leonardo Bistolfi, awarded Davide Calandra and his Monument to the Prince Amedeo), and it was not bought by a museum.

In 1906, the Vogherese journal L'Uomo che ride made a postcard of the painting on the direction of Ernesto Majocchi, a good friend of Pellizza, with the "most grateful" consent of the artist.

[3]: 154  In 1920, it was displayed in a retrospective show dedicated to Pellizza at the Galleria Pesaro [it] in Milan, thanks to the growth of leftist culture during the Biennio Rosso.

It was a decisive show for the physical future of the work; the painting impressed Guido Marangoni, a socialist councilor of Milan and art critic.

[3]: 154  The acclaim of art critic Corrado Maltese [it], who declared in 1960 that the painting was "the greatest monument that the workers' movement has ever been able to boast in Italy," also kept The Fourth Estate in the public eye.

Pelizza's compositional choices became a touchstone for leftist Italian artists in the 1940s and '50s:[1] Giuseppe De Santis used the image of workers walking forward in a line for his neorealist 1947 film, Tragic Hunt, and Renato Guttuso used The Fourth Estate to compose his (now destroyed) 1953 oil painting Occupazione di terre in Sicilia.

From that point on, the painting became a feature of numerous exhibitions and research projects, notably including monographs by Aurora Scotti and Gabriella Pelissero.

[26]: 11 [32] After undergoing a restoration by Giovanni Rossi in 1976,[8] The Fourth Estate remained at the Palazzo Marino until 1980, when it moved to the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Milan.