Fourth Estate

Ellen Meeropol

I first saw the painting 30 years ago, when I walked into friends’ tenth floor apartment on Manhattan’s upper west side. My children immediately hurried to the large window, excited by the sight of the Clearwater sloop sailing down the Hudson River. I stood in front of a large painting hung on the white wall above a white sofa.

On the canvas, a crowd of strikers walk towards the viewer. Three figures lead the march: two men and a woman carrying an infant. The workers are rendered in grays and browns, beige and mud greens. Many of them gesture emphatically with their hands, as if we’ve interrupted their discussion about demands and tactics. The earth tones, and the similarity of their clothing and stance, pulled me into their close group, committed and steadfast.

“What is this painting?” I asked my friends. “Who is the artist?”

They didn’t know. They had bought the print in Italy many years earlier because they loved it, but they remembered nothing about the title or the artist.

I couldn’t get the image out of my mind, especially the woman and baby in the front row. I took a photograph of it and kept it in my wallet. Over the next two decades, whenever I was at a museum gift shop or store that sold art reproductions, I took out the photo and asked if they knew it. No one ever did.

I kept wondering about that painting, so I did what fiction writers do: I incorporated it into my work. I was working on a manuscript, Her Sister’s Tattoo, and I hung that painting in the hallway of the apartment where my character Esther grew up. I gave Esther my obsession with the marching Italians. In the novel, the painting is titled “The Strike.” Esther named the woman in the front row Hannah and had long conversations with her. They talked about balancing being activists and mothers of babies. I still didn’t know anything about the painting but that mattered less after I wrote about it.

About ten years ago, in Milan, I visited a deserted building that had been appropriated by homeless people and turned into a cooperative living and workplace. On the walls of the building, inside and out, a stylized version of “my” painting was stenciled on walls. I loved the stark rendering of the scene I knew so well. I imagined that Hannah and the unknown artist would be pleased at the use of their image.

I learned that the title of the work is “The Fourth Estate” and the Italian artist Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo painted it between 1899 and 1901, initially titling it “The Path of Workers.” Because of the progressive politics portrayed, it was hidden in storage during the fascist regime. It wasn’t until after the First World War that the painting was widely displayed and appreciated.

I didn’t initially understand the title. I have always thought that the term “fourth estate” referred to the press. But I learned that an alternative meaning refers to any sociopolitical force that is not part of the official governing institutions, but still wields influence. Pellizza used the term to describe political power held by striking workers.

I now have a print of “The Fourth Estate” in my writing room and as the screen saver on my computer. The image invites me every day into Pelliza’s intense world of Italian striking workers. I love it even more after learning that many of the figures in the painting are based on the comrades of the painter, who was himself an anti-fascist activist. The woman, my Hannah, in Her Sister’s Tattoo, is based on the painter’s wife Teresa. When I first saw the painting, there was no Google to help me identify it. Now, there’s an augmented reality app that lets visitors to the museum use a smartphone to identify the characters in the painting and learn about their real-life backgrounds.

In our current world, with its bizarre combination of isolation and renewed anti-racist activism, the painting takes on new depth and meaning. Seeds of inspiration and activism, like the woman marching with her infant, can take many decades to germinate. Looking through that woman’s eyes at the world of her dozen or so comrades, painted over a century ago, provided a mirror and a frame for my character and her story. It offers a powerful connection as well, from the resistance of over a century ago, to the activism alive and growing today.

One of my favorite parts of writing fiction is how history and imagination, the past and the present, then and now, grow and dance with each other. Both the real Teresa in “The Fourth Estate” and the fictional Hannah in “The Strike” are alive and well – in paintings, in text and in the streets.