Italian artist Paolo Sala was best known as a painter of marines and portraits. A student of Camillo Boito at the school of architecture at the Brera Academy, his initial focus was on historical and romantic subjects. Although he studied and occasionally would use watercolor, he excelled at and became best known for his oil paintings.

Sala's paintings are strongly impressionistic and blend both soft and brilliant coloration into vivid compositions that usually feature architectural detail of towns he visited on his travels throughout Europe and America. These works were quite popular on the national market in Italy which emphasized interest by collectors in this fashionable genre.