Featured Artist in Collection

Although much better remembered as a musician, Rafael Joseffy was also a talented artist, as this beautiful seascape would attest. Painted in 1882, it is inscribed with the word ‘Wien,’ which is the Austrian form of the city Vienna. Paintings by Rafael Joseffy are extremely rare and although it is unclear as to where he was trained as an artist, it is assumed that he just possessed an extraordinary natural talent for painting. Most of the paintings that survive are painted in oils, although a few drawings and watercolors also are known.

From the paintings that we can identify as his work, we see that he attempted a number of different subject matters. In the 1990s a painting by Joseffy appeared at a public sale in Austria. That work depicted an extensive mountain scene in the Austrian Alps and was painted with the same exactitude as this example. In the 1970s another work surfaced, that being a lake scene, probably also in the Alpine region. That painting was of the identical size as this example. This particular work by Joseffy is one of his extremely hard to come by works of art.