Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Antonio Martino studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, Pennsylvania. He was a member of the National Academy of Design (elected member 1938), the American Watercolor Society, the Philadelphia Watercolor Society, the Philadelphia Sketch Club, and the DaVinci Art Alliance. Martino first exhibited at age seventeen, and while still in his early twenties was winning prizes in Philadelphia. He exhibited and won many prizes at the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art Alumni Association, the Sesqui-Centennial Expo in Philadelphia of 1926, and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as the National Academy of Design, New York City. His work has also been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Reading Museum and the Philadelphia Art Club, both in Pennsylvania, among many other venues. In his lifetime Martino amassed more than eighty awards for his oils and watercolors, and had ten solo exhibitions.
Martino’s work is a prominent example of the long tradition of realistic painting and instruction in Philadelphia. He also absorbed the light, color, and atmosphere of impressionism and the solid form of cubism. Early in his career he concentrated on landscapes, and painted with his brother Giovanni along the Darby Creek and on the Delaware River above New Hope. These landscapes were painted out of doors with the direct impressionistic brushwork of Edward W. Redfield and Walter Elmer Schofield. By the 1930s, he was painting richly colored, darkly atmospheric views of Manayunk, a neighborhood in the northwestern section of the city of Philadelphia, for which he is best known. Manayunk, with its hillside houses, would remain his favorite subject for almost forty years.
Martino lived in Newtown Square, a picturesque township west of Philadelphia, until 1971, when he moved to Thousand Oaks, California. There he painted west coast landscapes and seascapes in the Santa Barbara and Westlake Village areas. Much lighter and brighter than his Manayunk canvases, these too won many awards.
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