“[...] In its urgent need for density to convey the ‘thickness’ of the atmosphere, his brushwork is neither detailed nor descriptive. The elements emerge from a vision that is low, uniform and almost modulated but constantly enlivened by active elements of deftly handled colour.”

Telemaco Signorini followed in the footsteps of his father, a well-known painter of views of grand ducal Florence, and established himself in the early 1860s with scenes of contemporary life. By that time, he and the other young artists who frequented the Caffè Michelangiolo had already developed the innovative method of painting the natural world, often in the open air, through the precise synthesis of colour and light for which they were known as Macchiaioli (from the word “macchie”, literally patches or areas of light and shadow). 

A polemicist as well as an artistic innovator, Signorini stated his views on the autonomy of art and the superiority of painting scenes of modern life and landscape in newspapers and magazines including Il Gazzettino delle Arti del Disegno, founded by Diego Martelli in 1867, to which he was a regular contributor. His restless spirit and marked intellectual curiosity led him in constant pursuit of new ways to express and interpret the aspirations and anxieties of contemporary society. He began to travel with increasing frequency in 1873, above all to France and Britain, which brought him into contact with the latest developments in European art. The desire to experiment with new visual possibilities led in the 1880s to almost constant movement, alternating visits to Paris, London and Edinburgh with trips in Italy to Settignano, Pietramala, Elba, Riomaggiore and Mt Amiata in a sort of continual comparison of the crowded bustle of the modern city and the slow but vibrant life of places untouched by progress. His attention as a painter focused primarily on urban views of greater or lesser vivacity characterised by the compositional mastery and chromatic power with which he depicted buildings, objects and human figures with markedly accentuated features. 

Intent on the discovery of new figurative methods, Signorini approached his urban scenes from an unusual angle capable of giving the impression of a direct vision of reality, constantly addressing new aspects of urban and social life. His pursuit also led him to visit Scotland in 1880 and 1881, attracted by the atmosphere of Edinburgh, whose reality he captured with extraordinary fidelity, from the bustling streets of the Old Town to the chaos and confusion of Leith harbour, the elegance of Princess Street and the Gothic Revival monument to Walter Scott. 

It was on the morning of Sunday, 10 July 1881, having been in Edinburgh for over a week, that Signorini made a “little drawing at Bruntsfield Links”,¹ which he may then have used for the view of that pleasant spot with its vast lawns continuing right up to the buildings. The two versions he painted are practically identical in terms of size and similar in terms of visual field, including a large area of sky and limpid air, captured in a palette of pale greens and nuanced greys. In the one now in the Cerruti Collection, however, the presence in the foreground of what looks like an old iron gate, left wide open to invite contemplation of the view, frames the vision in a commensurable perspective space and establishes its expressive completeness. As Raffaele Monti points out: “The resulting image is of a calibre never repeated in the whole of the painter’s career. In its urgent need for density to convey the ‘thickness’ of the atmosphere, his brushwork is neither detailed nor descriptive. The elements emerge from a vision that is low, uniform and almost modulated but constantly enlivened by active elements of deftly handled colour.”² 

The painting, which remained in the artist’s studio and was inherited by his brother, was then sold by his nephew Enrico. It entered the Cerruti Collection after being auctioned by Finarte in Milan in the late 1980s. 

Silvestra Bietoletti 

¹ A. M. Fortuna, “Notes dei viaggi a Londra e a Parigi”, in Bacci 1969, p. 185. 

² Monti 1985, p. 147.