Attributed to Edward Angelo Goodall

Barnwell Manor, Northamptonshire, Windsor House Antiques

Sale: Dreweatts 1759, Newbury, 2 March 2023, lot 152

Purchased from the above sale by the present owner

Edward Angelo Goodall (also known as Edward Alfred Goodall) was the son of the engraver Edward Goodall who was best-known for reproducing J.M.W. Turner’s works. Edward’s siblings Eliza and Walter were also professional artists but it was their brother Frederick who found most fame, as a painter of Egyptian scenes. Edward Goodall was initially apprenticed to his father and at the age of only fourteen in 1837, he won a silver medal at the Society of Arts. Like his brother, he travelled extensively and accompanied the Schomburgh Guiana Boundary Expedition in 1841. Other painting excursions took him to Venice no less than fifteen times and he also visited the Crimea in 1854 and Morocco, Spain, Portugal and Egypt. The Goodall family’s artistic abilities were inherited by two of his sons, Frederick Trevelyan and Herbert Goodall who also became painters.

Although Goodall exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1841, in 1861 he ceased to exhibit there and concentrated on watercolours, exhibiting 328 at the Royal Watercolour Society. It was more than twenty years before he exhibited at the Academy again, for the last time. His exhibit of 1884 was tantalisingly titled Interior of the Mosque of Sultan Hassan, Cairo but as no review mentioning the picture has been found and Academy Notes does not illustrate it, we cannot know whether it is the present picture. Goodall tended to work in watercolour but it would make sense for him to paint a large-scale oil for the Academy, especially if he was seeking to re-establish his reputation there. However this must remain as conjecture. We do know that Goodall painted a watercolour which corresponds with the composition of the present painting (Bonhams, London, 25 January 2012, lot 52) and another similar scene of the Mosque of Sultan Hassan dated 1873 (Sotheby’s, London, 21 March 2002, lot 258). There is another watercolour, dated 1880 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) which also relates to the present picture, although the three prominent figures in the right foreground are positioned slightly differently.