Antonino Leto Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Antonino Leto was born in Monreale on 14 June 1844. Thanks to a monthly allowance from his native municipality, in 1860 he moved to Palermo where he studied painting with Luigi Barba, author of historical paintings. Read the full biography

Antonino Leto was born in Monreale on 14 June 1844. Thanks to a monthly allowance from his native municipality, in 1860 he moved to Palermo where he studied painting with Luigi Barba, author of historical paintings. The following year Leto began frequenting the studio of the landscape painter Luigi Lojacono; here he met his son, Francesco, and thus approached the dictates of naturalist realism.
In 1864 he went to Naples to continue his studies; he experimented with the ways of Palizzi, an exponent of positivistic realism, but was particularly attracted by the painting of Giuseppe De Nittis and the innovative poetics of the painters of the Resina School. Following the Macchiaiola school, this movement supported the study of life and a freer rendering of reality. Having returned to Palermo for health reasons, he met Senator Ignazio Florio; he commissioned him to paint a view of the wine factory he founded in Marsala. In 1870 he won the silver medal at the Palermo Art Exhibition with the painting Return to the Pasture and the following year the gold medal at the Syracuse Regional Exhibition with the painting The Storm. In 1873, subsidized by Ignazio Florio, he stayed in Portici, where he carried out life studies on the Vesuvian landscape with the painters of the Resina School, and in Rome where he became friends with Francesco Paolo Michetti, whose rural themes he assimilated. The following year in Rome he won the competition for the Artistic Pensioner with the work The Olive Harvest, closely inspired by the ways of representing Palizzi and Lojacono.
Due to his poor health, he requested and obtained the transfer of the artistic pension from Rome to Florence, where he remained until 1878. In the Tuscan capital he deepened his knowledge of the Macchiaiola current and acquired a more essential pictorial technique. Between 1879 and 1880 he went to Paris at the invitation of the famous merchant Goupil, for whom De Nittis was already working. Precisely from this artist, Leto acquired the ways and themes of impressionist derivation, identifiable in urban scenarios. Having returned to Palermo due to the unhealthy Parisian climate which exhausted him in body and spirit, he was a guest of Senator Florio; he commissioned some decorations for the villa in Olivuzza and the villa in Colli and after a visit to Favignana - during which Leto probably witnessed a massacre - a painting depicting tuna fishing. The painting had a long and troubled gestation, in fact it began in 1881 and was completed and delivered only in 1887.
The Eighties were very profitable for Leto both for the quality and the richness of his artistic production; the favorite themes once again became those centered on nature and inspired by the simplicity of the life led by the people who work there. In 1882, before going to Capri, he participated in the Turin Exhibition with Bosco di Portici and One Hundred and Ten Years in Ischia; the following year he participated in the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Rome with I funari di Torre del Greco, a painting which achieved enormous success and which was praised by D'Annunzio in the weekly "Fanfulla della Domenica". Present at various national and international exhibitions in Nice, Paris and London, in 1889 the artist moved permanently to Capri, supported financially by purchases from French and German antique dealers and the collector Krupp.
At the Neapolitan Promoter exhibition of 1890, Leto presented A detail of tuna fishing in Sicily, created between 1881 and 1884, smaller in size and with a different compositional structure compared to the large canvas of 1887.
In the Capri years, Antonino Leto's style is now fully defined: the full balance between the precise drawing system and the application of color has been achieved; the attention to nature remains attentive and emotional. The men and landscape of the island of Capri were a continuous source of inspiration for the artist: fishermen, girls and women with fresh beauty immersed in sunlight and engaged in daily activities populate his canvases.
In 1910 he exhibited Marina di Catiello and Dietro la piccolo marina at the Venice Biennale. On 31 May 1913 he died in Capri, in poverty and now far from the commercial circuits of art.