Goffredo Wals
German, 1590 - 1638
German painter, draughtsman and printmaker, active in Italy. According to early sources, when very young he travelled to Naples and then worked in Rome with Agostino Tassi from 1616–17 to the end of 1618. There followed periods in Naples, in Genoa (c. 1630), where he taught Antonio Travi, and in Savona (1631–2). He returned to Naples, where Gaspar Roomer in 1634 owned 60 of his landscapes, and perished in an earthquake in Calabria.
Wals was well known in the 17th century, and Claude Lorrain, attracted by ‘the fame of Goffredo, painter of landscapes, distant views, and architecture’ (Baldinucci), is said to have studied with him for two years in Naples. Yet his art was subsequently forgotten until the 1960s, when scholars, on the basis of a signed circular etching of River and Trees (e.g. London, BM) and of works bearing old attributions, reconstructed his oeuvre, although its chronology remains shadowy. He favoured small circular landscapes with simple, naturalistic motifs, such as farm buildings on a riverbank, overgrown ruins in the Roman Campagna and quiet country roads. The distinction of his style, most beautifully revealed in A Country Road by a House (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam), lies in his sensitivity to effects of light, in his subdued palette of blues, greys and greens and in his highly sophisticated compositions, which depend on the abstract beauty of simplified shapes and patterns of light and dark. The drawing Landscape with Ruins (Paris, Louvre) reveals the delicacy of his penmanship. His style was influenced by Adam Elsheimer and is close to that of Filippo Napoletano.
"Wals, Goffredo." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T090561 (accessed April 27, 2012).
Person TypeIndividual
Italian, c. 1610 - 1665
