WALS, Goffredo

Although modest in scale, this type of painting is of great importance as an early example of a work dominated by a landscape, which heralded a new interest in such subject matter. Wals was born in Cologne and travelled to Italy, where he initially settled in Naples, and found employment colouring engravings. He later emerged as a landscape specialist, working in oil and gouache, and painted in Rome, Genoa and nearby Savona. He studied with Agostino Tassi, but is chiefly remembered because he taught the greatest of all French landscape painters, Claude Lorrain, whose ability to create harmonious compositions, must in part be indebted to the precedent of Wals.

Wals is thought to have died in an earthquake in Calabria. Although his work was admired during his lifetime and is recorded in distinguished collections, it was neglected by art historians before being re-evaluated from the 1960s onwards. He favoured small circular landscapes (other examples are in the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums) and a subdued palette, often paring the composition down to a series of distinct horizontal planes. The figures in this painting may be intended as Christ and Saint Peter, although the identification is by no means certain. The building is possibly the Tor di Quinto, a structure Wals depicted in other works, which survives by the river Tiber, near Rome.

This painting depicts a landscape with a herdsman watering his animals on the shore of a lake, a farmhouse on the right.

Although once attributed to Breenbergh, this tondo is certainly the work of Goffredo Wals. A native of Cologne, Wals came to Rome via Naples. Once in the Eternal City, he seems to have immediately come into contact with Agostino Tassi; he is recorded in Tassi’s workshop by 1616. Some landscapes by the two artists are very similar, especially the rounded hills, silhouetted against each other, whose profiles are interrupted by only the scantiest vegetation. Whether Wals influenced Tassi or was instead indebted to him cannot be precisely assessed, since we know almost nothing about their relative chronologies.

According to the seventeenth-century writer Raffaello Soprani, Wals invented a kind of landscape structured on three planes, exactly like the one in this Pastoral Landscape. His interest in Adam Elsheimer’s way of composing a landscape is, however, clear. While the Bolognese painters were concerned about a gradual recession into depth, Elsheimer, and later Wals and Tassi, liked to juxtapose a few planes. Wals worked only on a small scale, often using the circular format typical of mirrors, probably because he intended his art to be a reflection of nature. At least this is how Soprani interpreted it. Only rarely did Wals’s pictures include a subject or even classical buildings. His shepherds here are probably contemporary ones, not inhabitants of a remote Arcadia. Like Filippo Napoletano, he is interested in the simple solid volumes of unassuming dwellings, on whose surfaces light and shade are strongly contrasted.