Alberto Pisa

(Ferrara 1864 – Florence 1930)

Charing Cross Bridge, London, 1901

Oil on canvas, 87 x 122.5 cm
Museum of the Nineteenth Century, inv. 590

Alberto Pisa, a Ferrara painter of the same generation as Previati and Mentessi, studied in Florence in contact with the milieu of the Macchiaioli, then moved to London where he remained for almost thirty years. In the early twentieth century the environs of Charing Cross, the heart of the industrial metropolis, were represented by many artists including Monet, Sisley and Pissarro who, after being exiled to the English capital in the early de the 1870s to escape the Franco-Prussian War, returned there on several occasions at the turn of the century making themselves interpreters of the everyday life of the time. In 1901 Alberto Pisa portrayed the same places, recalling in the compositional cut the Impressionist urban scenes he had been able to appreciate during a brief stay in Paris in 1886. In this canvas, the artist defines the city environment through a few essential elements: the street and sidewalk glistening with rain, the diagonal of the bridge, and the row of carriages. He would seem to have been inspired by the paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw, a late Victorian painter who had given the traditional romantic moonlit landscape an innovative urban interpretation. In this case, however, the light filtering through the blanket of steam and fog does not come from the sky, but from the headlight of an invisible locomotive and the lights of street lamps and cars. Spaced-out figures move through the scene walking their way indifferently: a mother shields her baby from the cold while the father, a worker, looks away with his hands sunk in his coat pockets. This is one of Alberto Pisa’s most significant works and aroused some interest when it was exhibited at the 1901 Venice Biennale, so much so that some citizens of Ferrara bought it and then donated it to the civic collections.