Landscape with a Farm and Trees beside a River
London, Sotheby’s, 23 June 1982, lot 47
Acquired from the above sale by Richard L. Feigen
New York, Sotheby’s, 18 October 2021, lot 27
with Nicholas Hall, New York; sold to
Private Collection, Montreal, Canada
EXHIBITIONS
New York, Richard L. Feigen & Co., Landscape Paintings in Rome, 1595-1675, 30 January – 23 March 1985
Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum, Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Master Paintings on Copper, 1575-1775, 12 December 1998 – 28 February 1999; travelled to Kansas City,The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, 28 March – 13 June 1999; and The Hague, The Mauritshuis, 26 June – 22 August 1999
Anke Repp-Eckert, ‘Zum Einfluss von Goffredo Wals auf die Kunstlerische Entwicklung Claude Lorrain’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch, 1985, XLVI, p. 393, reproduced.
Ann Sutherland Harris, Landscape Painting in Rome 1595-1675, New York, 1985, exh. cat., no. 50, reproduced.
Anke Repp-Eckert, Goffredo Wals: Zur Landschaftsmalerei zwischen Adam Elsheimer und Claude Lorrain, Cologne, 1985, p. 61, no. 5, reproduced.
Edgar Peters Bowron in Michael Komanecky (ed.), Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Master Paintings on Copper, 1575-1775, Phoenix Art Museum, New York and Oxford, 1998, exh. cat., pp. 311-312, no. 63, reproduced.
essay
The German painter Goffredo Wals was well-known during and after his short lifetime as a painter of exquisite, naturalistic, and fastidiously detailed small landscape paintings, often executed on copper in a circular format, as in the present example. 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.
Landscape paintings were popular in Rome, and later Naples, from the earliest years of the seventeenth century. Wals’s works were owned by important collectors, most notably in Naples, where the Flemish merchant and ship-owner, Gaspar Roomer, possessed no fewer than sixty landscapes and forty gouaches by the artist. During the seventeenth century, such intimately scaled works could be displayed on tabletops, but were also purchased and displayed in groups. Furthermore, Roomer’s collection suggests that Wals’s artistic output was a great deal larger than the corpus of works assigned to him by modern scholars suggests. An artist so prolific must have sold at least some of his works on the open market, in shops or through dealers.❖
Nicholas H. J. Hall