(Cologne 1590/95–1638/40 Calabria)
Coastal Landscape with Figures
oil on copper, tondo, diameter 18 cm, framed

We are grateful to Marcel Roethlisberger for confirming the attribution of the present painting on the basis of a photograph.

This previously unknown painting is a characteristic work by the artist, who was mainly active in Italy. During his short life, Goffredo Wals became widely known. Filippo Baldinucci, Claude Lorrain’s 17th century biographer, reports that Lorrain felt attracted to ‘Goffredo’s fame as a painter of landscapes, distant views, and architecture’, having studied with the latter in Naples for a period of two years; and Raffaello Soprani, another biographer of the 17th century, praised Goffredo’s small-scale paintings, which according to him ‘pleased the eye to such an extent that while looking at the painted view one completely forgot the real one’. Wals’ most important patron was Gaspare Roomer, a Flemish merchant and shipowner in Naples, who in 1634 owned as many as sixty paintings and forty gouaches by the artist’s hand. In subsequent years, Wals largely fell into obscurity and only re-entered the focus of art historical interest in the 1960s, when Roethlisberger was the first to carefully reconstruct his oeuvre, followed by a number of further scholars.