The Olive Harvest

The painting was made for a competition and won the artist a scholarship in Florence.
It depicts a dull autumn day, when several peasant girls linger on harvesting the olives that have fallen from the snarly and twisted trees that grow on the rocky hillside. In the upper part of the painting, Antonino Leto spreads the colour with great care to define the leaves of the trees, while in the lower part he employs a ‘scratchy’ and nervous brushwork hinting at the work of the Neapolitan artist Filippo Palizzi. The artist suggests the atmosphere of a sunless day with a pale light filtering through a layer of clouds.