THE ARTIST: Alfred
Gabali, born May, 1886 in Germany, left home at age 16 to become a seaman aboard the four masted bark Pamier. His formative
years were spent on ships and in maritime school where he qualified as a ship’s officer. During one of his passages,
he was introduced to artist Scharns Alquis who later became his teacher.
After returning to Germany at the start of WW I, he
became captain of a small coastal patrol boat which was lost at sea in a storm. How he spent the remaining war years is unknown.
However, after the war he returned to sea until 1923 when he came home to Hamburg, Germany with his first wife
to earn his living as an artist. She died in 1935. As a prelude to WW II, Gabali resisted the Nazi Movement and
was forced to flee to Holland with his second wife where he lived in hiding until the end of WW II.
In 1949, Gabali and his wife came to the United States
to begin a new life.He started his career again, in New York City, and then moved to Cape Cod. Gabali became a U.S.
citizen in 1955, the summer he came to the Cape.
He called his West Dennis studio the ‘Grand Cove Art Studio’.
He was a multiple year winner of Cape Cod Art Assoc. Galleries’ show in Hyannis. Always a seaman, he had a painting of the whaling
ship Bowhead he sailed in hanging in his studio as of 1956. He died in 1963.
