Artist Profile

Antonio Pietro Martino

• Lived:
• 1902-1988
• Worked:
• Pennsylvania, California
• Style:
• Landscape, Cityscape, Still Life

• In 1925 Antonio Martino's painting instructor wrote a note of congratulations to his talented student who, at the age of twenty-three, had two paintings accepted in the Pennsylvania Academy for the Fine Arts Annual Exhibition. The teacher was pleased that his student's work was being shown with the nation's outstanding painters. Besides, Martino's landscapes bore sold signs. . . he was urged to continue painting, which he did for the next fifty years. Antonio Martino's work is a prominent example of the long tradition of realistic painting and instruction in Philadelphia.

  The instructor who wrote the congratulatory letter was Albert Jean Adolphe, a student of Jean Leon Gerome in Paris, as was Thomas Eakins. In addition to this strong background, Martino also absorbed the light, colour and atmosphere of Impressionism and the solid form of Cubism.

  Early in his career he decided to concentrate on landscapes, and painted along the Darby Creek and on the Delaware River above New Hope. He first exhibited at age seventeen, and while still in his early twenties was winning prizes in Philadelphia at the Art Club, the Sketch Club, and at the Sesquicentennial, and in New York at the National Academy of Design. These landscapes were painted out of doors with the direct impressionistic brushwork of Redfield and Schofield. Later he did countless views of Manayunk and East coast subjects, gradually developing his personal style of solid, simplified compositions in rich tone and colour. Bill Campbell, Antonio Martino a Retrospective, Woodmere Art Gallery, Philadelphia, 1982.

  Source:
  Turak Gallery

  Martino was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 13, 1902, and died in Thousand Oaks, California on September 3, 1988.

  Source:
  Peterson and Gerdts, Pennsylvania Impressionism