Antonino Leto Giclée Fine Art Prints

High above the Conca d'Oro, the mosaics of Monreale have glittered since the twelfth century. Antonio Leto was born beneath them on 14 June 1844, and spent his working life looking the other way - towards the shoreline, the fishing boats, the peasants and rope-makers who laboured along the Italian coast. Known also as Antonino Leto, he became one of the most persuasive Italian painters of light in the second half of the nineteenth century, a landscape and genre specialist whose handling grew steadily freer until his death on 31 May 1913.

His training began in 1861, when an uncle paid for him to move to Palermo. There he studied with L. Barba and with Luigi Lojacono, absorbing the workmanlike naturalism that Sicilian studios then favoured. More decisive was the example of Filippo Palizzi, whose unsentimental animals and stony fields showed a young painter that the everyday would bear serious attention. Leto took the lesson at once.

Naples followed in 1864, and with it the circle that would shape his eye. The Scuola di Resina - fostered by Giuseppe De Nittis and named for the town beneath Vesuvius where its members worked - had set itself against studio convention, painting small, quickly and directly from the motif. Leto joined them. He also took lessons from the sculptor and critic Adriano Cecioni, a man whose arguments were as sharp as his modelling. Oil, tempera and watercolour all served him; he moved between them without hierarchy, which was itself a mark of the new thinking.

Recognition came before he was thirty. By 1870 he had taken a silver medal at the Mostra Artistica in Palermo for Il Ritorno dal Pascolo and a gold at the Regional Exposition of Siracusa for La Bufera, a storm subject that let him test weather as a pictorial argument rather than a backdrop. Two years later he sent A Winter's Day in Sicily to the Brera Exposition in Milan, planting a Sicilian claim in the north.

1873 found him at Portici with his Resina colleagues, and then on the road to Rome, where he met Francesco Paolo Michetti. The Abruzzese painter's appetite for peasant subject matter and brilliant surface confirmed a direction already taken. In 1874 Leto painted Alla Villa Borghese and Un contadino Romano, both shown at the tenth Promotrice in Naples. A Sicilian stipend followed in 1874-75, awarded on the strength of La Raccolta delle Olive, and it kept him in Rome.

Florence held him from 1876 to 1878, again on a stipend, and the city loosened his brush. Case a Viareggio, Ponte di Santa Trinita and Passeggiata alle Cascine belong to these years: cityscapes and promenades handled with a lightness his Neapolitan work had not quite reached. In the Cascine pictures we see a painter enjoying himself, letting figures dissolve into dappled shade. The Galleria Pisani sold a good many of them.

Paris was the logical next step, and in 1879 A. Goupil invited him there. The Goupil Gallery was the most efficient art business in Europe, and Leto now worked within reach of extraordinary company: De Nittis again, Domenico Morelli, Antonio Mancini, Vincenzo Gemito, Alphonse de Neuville, Édouard Manet, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier. Vecchia Parigi and Le Bois de Boulogne, both of 1880, show what he made of the city. Between Meissonier's jewelled finish at one pole and Manet's brusque modernity at the other, a visiting Sicilian had to decide what he wanted. Leto chose neither wholesale.

By 1880 he was back in Palermo. There he decorated a room at the Villa ai Colli, now the Opera Pia Istituto Pignatelli, with vedute and genre scenes that carry the ease of a painter working for pleasure as much as for a fee.

Health then narrowed his world. Travel became difficult after the 1880s, though the flow of pictures to exhibitions never slackened. In 1882 he settled on Capri, and the island gave him what illness had taken: a single, inexhaustible subject within walking distance. Perhaps the enforced stillness concentrated him, because the work of the following decade is his most assured.

I funari di Torre del Greco, painted in 1883, is the picture by which he is best known. Rope-makers draw out their lines along the shore under a wide, salt-bleached light; the labour is monotonous, the painting anything but. Shown at the National Exposition of Fine Arts in Rome, it was received with real enthusiasm and now hangs in the Chamber of Deputies. Seascapes and shore work occupied him for much of the next ten years - nets, boats, fishermen, the flat glare coming off water.

Antonio Leto died on 31 May 1913, and posterity has settled him beside Francesco Lojacono and Michele Catti as the third member of the canonical triad of Sicilian landscape painting of the Belle Époque. The grouping is fair, though it flattens him slightly; of the three, he travelled furthest and looked hardest at what other schools were doing. What survives is a body of work in which Sicilian and Neapolitan light is neither romanticised nor merely recorded. His shore scenes continue to reward slow looking - the tonal control, the unhurried impasto, the refusal to make labour picturesque. In an age that consumes images at speed, that patience is worth something.