Alberto Pisa was an Italian painter, often painting genre scenes, landscapes, and garden views in bright watercolour.
Pisa was born in 1864 in Ferrara a city in Northern Italy and initially studied the works of Gaetano Domenichini, the then recently deceased Italian artist. He later moved to Florence where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts; he also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
He joined the Macchiaioli movement, which was then gaining popularity in Florence, a group that eschewed the academic principals of painting and concentrated on working from nature in natural light, finding inspiration in the contrast of light and shadow. The term Macchiaioli, was given to the movement as a derogatory name created by an Italian critic.
Pisa had a rather more successful career than some of his contemporaries, who died in poverty. His work gained in popularity around the turn of the century when it was well reviewed in The Times following an exhibition of paintings and drawings of London life at the Fine Art Society, London, in April 1899. Some of his watercolours of Rome and Tuscany were exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rome in 1905.
His paintings also began to appear as book illustrations. He illustrated books on Rome (1905), Pompeii (1910) and Sicily (1911) for London publisher A. & C. Black and The Cities of Umbria (London, Methuen & Co., 1905) and Peeps at Many Lands: Italy by John Finnemore (London, A. & C. Black, 1916). Pisa continued to exhibit until 1927 and died in Florence on 15 July 1930.
