Goffredo Wals

Well-known during and after his short lifetime, Wals specialized in landscapes featuring simple motifs such as a cluster of trees beside water, farm buildings, and overgrown ruins in the Roman Campagna inhabited, if at all, by small, inconspicuous figures and animals that blend seamlessly into their settings. His sensitivity to the effects of light, interest in perspective, and ability to create an impression of depth on a pictorial plane, especially on such a small scale, are remarkable, synthesizing both Northern and Italian approaches to the genre. One contemporary, Raphaelle Soprani, noted that Wals’s works ‘brought such delight to the eye that in looking at the painted view the real one is quite forgotten’.

Born in Cologne, Wals spent most of his career in Italy. As a young painter, Wals travelled to Naples and then to Rome, where he served in the workshop of Agostino Tassi between 1616 and 1619 and drew inspiration from the works of his fellow countryman Adam Elsheimer, active in Rome between 1600 and 1610. Wals returned to Naples, and there gave instruction to Claude Lorrain. He then travelled to Genoa, where he lived with Bernardo Strozzi, and later returned to Naples, subsequently dying in an earthquake in Calabria between 1638 and 1640. In subsequent centuries Wals’s art was forgotten. His oeuvre was only reconstructed in the second half of the twentieth century and now includes around three dozen paintings on copper or panel, some drawings, and an etching.