(Cologne 1590/95–1638/40 Calabria)
Ships landing in a port,
oil on panel, diameter 21 cm, framed

We are very grateful to Marcel Roethlisberger for having confirmed the present painting as a work by Wals following first hand inspection (written communication).

This previously unrecorded painting is a significant addition to the small corpus of works by Goffredo Wals.

Goffredo Wals was well-known during his relatively short life. Writing in the seventeenth century, Claude Lorrain’s biographer Filippo Baldinucci reported that Claude attracted by “the fame of Goffredo, painter of landscapes, distant views, and architecture” studied with him for two years in Naples, while the seventeenth-century biographer Raffaello Soprani praised his small paintings, which he claimed “brought such delight to the eye that in looking at the painted view the real one is quite forgotten.” Wals’s most important patron was the Flemish merchant and ship-owner in Naples, Gaspare Roomer, who by 1634 owned no less than sixty of his paintings and forty gouaches. In the centuries that followed, however, his art was largely forgotten and only came to the attention of art historians in the 1960s, when first Roethlisberger, and then other scholars, began the careful reconstruction of his oeuvre. Even today, his known corpus of works comprises no more than three dozen small rectangular or circular works on copper or panel, a handful of drawings and an etching. Given the importance of seascapes and coastal landscapes in Claude´s, his most famous pupil, early oeuvre, and taken into account that his patron Gaspare Roomer was a shipowner, it is astonishing that this small circular panel is the first marine painting to have been rediscovered.

Wals worked only on a small scale, often using a circular format. His luminous landscapes are profoundly indebted to the German painter Adam Elsheimer, who was active in Rome from 1600 to 1610. Some of Wals´s paintings are very similar to those of Filippo Napoletano, but the precise relationship between the two artists is unclear, since none of Wals’s paintings are signed or dated. Wals favoured simple, naturalistic motifs, such as a cluster of trees beside water, a group of farm buildings, or overgrown ruins in the Roman Campagna. His scenes are populated by small figures and animals that seem very much at one with their environment. His style is distinguished by his sensitivity to the effects of light and his interest in perspective and the devices that contribute to the impression of depth in pictorial space. Examples of Wals’s work can be seen at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the National Gallery, London, the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth and the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Wals was born in Cologne around 1595-1600, he travelled while still very young to Naples, before moving to Rome, where he worked in the studio of Agostino Tassi from 1616 to 1619. There followed a period in Naples, during which he taught Claude Lorrain and then in Genoa he lived with Bernardo Strozzi and instructed Antonio Travi. Subsequently, he stayed briefly in nearby Savona, before returning to Naples. He died in an earthquake in Calabria, sometime between 1638 and 1640.