Beautiful painting by a beautiful painter with a fantastic and special life. The painting is in very beautiful and original condition. It has not been restored. In short, a beautiful maritime work by a famous seascape painter. Alfred Gabali is a seascape painter. He carried the sea in his heart and mind - and especially in his hands. Born in May 1886, Germany, he left home at the age of 16 to become a sailor on board the four-masted barque Pamir, a German ship trading between Antwerp and England. His subsequent years were spent on ships and in a maritime school where he qualified as a ship's officer. During one of his passages he met artist Scharns Alquis, a well-known German seascape painter of the time, who later became his teacher. After returning to Germany at the start of WWI, he became captain of a small coastal patrol boat that was lost at sea during a storm. How he spent the remaining years of war is unknown. After the war, however, he returned to the sea until 1923 when he came home to Hamburg, Germany, with his first wife to earn a living as an artist. She died in 1935. His reputation as a skilled seascape painter grew and success was assured until Adolf Hitler entered the German national stage. As a prelude to WWII, Gabali opposed the Nazi movement and had to flee to the Netherlands with his second wife. He started again in the Netherlands from the beginning. A stranger without money, it took him two years to recover professionally and find a group of dedicated Dutch artist friends. After the Germans invaded the Netherlands, he was intensively sought. During the years between the fall of Holland and the end of Hitler's plans in 1945, he was hidden 'underground' by the Dutch. He continued to paint, never signed his own name, and the irony is that German soldiers most valued his talents and provided him with the purchase money for food and painting supplies. A German naval officer even went so far as to tell the Dutch art dealer that he once knew a German named Gabali who used the same technique in his seascape painting. In 1949, Gabali and his wife came to the United States to ​start a new life. He started his career again in New York City and then moved to Cape Cod. Gabali became an American citizen in 1955, the summer he came to the Cape. He painted day and night, week after week, since arriving in the United States to gain recognition for his craftsmanship and money to continue his work. He was a multi-year winner of Cape Cod Art Assoc. Galleries 'show in Hyannis. Always a sailor, he had a painting of the whaling ship Bowhead that he sailed in his studio from 1956. He passed away in 1963.