Alberto Pisa was an Italian watercolourist and landscape artist best known as a painter of architectural and genre scenes of Italian towns. His association with the Macchiaioli movement influenced his commitment throughout his career to capturing beauty in nature and urban scenes through subtleties of light and shade.
Alberto Pisa was born on 19 March 1864 in Ferrara, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. As a young man, he studied in his hometown under Gaetano Domenichini (1786-1864) before moving to Florence to study at the Academy of Fine Arts. Whilst in Florence, he became part of what was known as the Macchiaioli movement, a group of Florentine and Tuscan artists who moved away from the rigid, rule-bound practices of the Italian academicians and instead looked to nature for instruction in order to capture natural light, shade and colour.
Alberto Pisa spent the early years of his career exhibiting across Italy to growing critical and commercial success. Two of the first pictures he exhibited, Chiesa de Santa Maria Novella and Donne e Madonne, in Venice in 1887, received much critical praise.
In 1888, he exhibited two paintings in Bologna, Fra e Polli and Tempo Ladro. The latter was purchased by the Ministry of Education to be displayed at the National Gallery of Rome. The following year, he exhibited a further two artworks in Florence. Later in his career, he returned to Ferrara and began to take portrait commissions from the lords and ladies of the town.
In 1901, a review in The Times of an Italian exhibition featuring Pisa’s work referred to his watercolours of Italian towns as ‘charming; both in the details of architecture and in general town views he is far beyond the average of the men who paint picturesque Italy’. It is possible that this review brought Pisa to the attention of the publishers, A & C Black, and in 1904 they commissioned him to produce a series of paintings of Rome. The collection was published as Rome. Painted by Alberto Pisa and the artworks, along with some of Umbria, were exhibited at the Fine Art Society in London in 1905.
A review of the exhibition in The Times described how, ‘Mr Pisa shows us Rome full of lights and air, and aglow with beautiful colours in stone and trees and flowers’. The publication on Rome was followed by Pompeii. Painted by Alberto Pisa (1910) and Sicily. Painted by Alberto Pisa (1911). Many of his illustrations were also reproduced in subsequent mixed volumes by A & C Black, as well as in newspapers.
In the latter years of his career, Alberto Pisa continued to paint architectural and genre scenes, largely in the Tuscan region. He died in Florence on 15 July 1930. His work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, the Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara, and the Bristol City Museum.
