Alfred Wallis 1855-1942

Alfred Wallis was born of Penzance parents, Charles and Jane Wallis, in Devonport, Plymouth on 18 August 1855. The family had moved to Plymouth in search of employment but upon the death of Jane, returned to Penzance in 1871. After leaving school, Alfred was apprenticed to a basket maker before going to sea in the merchant service in 1876, sailing to Cadiz in April that year. Wallis went on to sail on schooners across the North Atlantic between Penzance and Newfoundland. He married the widowed mother of his friend George Ward thus becoming the stepfather of Ward and his four siblings. Susan Ward, his new wife, was 23 years his senior. Wallis was at sea for about a decade continuing as a deep-sea fisherman on the Newfoundland run in the early days of his marriage. But after the death of his two infant children Wallis switched to local fishing and labouring in Penzance.

In the mid-1880s he relocated his family to St Ives where he established "Wallis, Alfred, Marine Stores Dealer"; essentially a rag and bone business dealing in scrap iron, sails and rope but sufficient to keep the family in relative comfort and fund the purchase of their house in Back Road Street. In 1912 the stores were wound up, perhaps in response to the decline in the local fishing industry. Thereafter Wallis starting selling ice cream.

Susan died in 1922 and Wallis, feeling isolated and alone following the passing of his wife, took up painting ‘for company’ a few years later. He was 70 years old. It wasn’t however until 1928 that the ‘legend’ of Alfred Wallis was founded. Ben Nicolson recalled: “I went over for the day to St Ives with Kit Wood (Christopher Wood): this was an exciting date, for not only was it the first time I saw St Ives, but on the way back from Porthmeor Beach we passed an open door in Back Road West and through it saw some paintings of ships and houses on odd pieces of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall, with particularly large nails thorough the smallest ones. We knocked on the door and inside found Wallis, and the paintings we got from him then were the first he made.”

From about 1926 Nicholson and Wood had already embarked on a faux-naïve style with flattened landscapes and forms painted in a child-like manner. Nicholson was also intent upon making art that were objects in their own right, rather than just pictorial records or visual illusions of the world. In Wallis’s work they perceived an authentic expression of the naïve, native approach that they were seeking, unencumbered by artistic training and knowledge. Nicholson commented later that "to Wallis, his paintings were never 'paintings' but actual events". Wallis was largely ignorant of perspective, scale was a matter of what was important to the artist rather than the relative size of objects, and the materials used were what was to hand and what best, to the artist’s mind, executed that part of a painting. Wallis quite happily mixed graphite pencil for rigging and figures, with oil paints employed to capture the tumultuous seas and dark ship hulls. And consistent with Nicholson’s ambition to create work that was an entirely new object rather than a simple record of one; Wallis painted with a limited palette of household and marine paints but on a wide variety of found and scavenged objects and materials: transforming roughly torn pieces of cardboard from old grocery boxes, jugs, jars, table tops, bellows and the wood panels of his home into autonomous works of art that incorporated tears, nails, holes etc into their creation. One neighbour recalled; “nothing was safe from where paint could go.” Nicholson and his avant-garde circle were also drawn to Wallis’s work because, almost uniquely, it was the genuine experience and recollection of a man who had lived as a seaman and fisherman. It is not hard to perceive the excitement that the 2 young modernist artists must have felt when that day in 1928, they happened upon Alfred Wallis’s cottage, just around the corner from what is now the Tate St Ives and along from Porthmeor Studios. In 1929 Nicholson and Wood included work by Wallis in the Seven & Five Society's exhibition.

Following the encounter in 1928, Nicholson and Wood moved from Feock to St Ives and when the Nicholson’s returned to London, they took with them a cluster of Wallis’s paintings which they showed to friends and associates. Wallis continued to sell paintings to Nicholson and his close circle of friends. He would send a bundle to London, wrapped in an abundance of brown paper and string with a short covering letter. The Nicholsons would select those they wished to keep and send the remainder and payment back. The curator Jim Ede was one of the Nicholson’s circle and assembled an exceptional collection of Wallis’s work. Wallis famously painted from his memory of his seafaring years, with references to specific boats, harbours and light houses; most commonly, St Ives Harbour, Godrevy lighthouse and the Fal Estuary. Wallis expresses this in one of his many letters to Jim Ede: “What I do mosley is what use To Bee out of my own memery what we may never see again as Things are altered all To gether Ther is nothing what Ever do not look what is sence I Can rember.” Chris Stephens postulates that this nostalgia for the past may have been to Wallis’s mind a contrast to the holiday makers who were by the 1920s ‘invading’ St Ives via the branch line, which had been opened in the 1870s, and the charabancs converted after WW1 from army surplus vehicles into tourist buses.

Ede ultimately donated his house, Kettles Yard, along with his Wallis collection to Cambridge University.  Ben Nicholson donated examples of Wallis’s work to the Tate Gallery (both the St Ives Tate and the Tate Britain exhibit these) and to MOMA (Museum of Modern Art in New York). He also shared the works with younger St Ives artists including Denis Mitchell, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and John Wells.

Sadly Wallis’s final years were spent in a state of destitute poverty which Sven Berlin described as “a disgrace to human life” and an example of the “incalculable crime of modern life that people still starve, still live in abject poverty.”  There has since been a debate about whether Wallis was exploited by a few who bought his works cheaply, crystalising their own thoughts and artistic direction, but failing to protect him from poverty and his fate. That said, Nicholson and Adrian Stokes did gift materials to Wallis during this period and in the last year of his life, Wallis produced 3 remarkable sketchbooks, now in the Kettle’s Yard’s collection.

Wallis died on 29 August 1942 in the poor house at Madron near Penzance. After his death his house was cleared and the contents burned on Porthmeor Beach. His grave in Barnoon Cementary, overlooking the Tate St Ives, was designed by Bernard Leach with tiles rather poignantly depicting Wallis at the foot of a great lighthouse; a favourite motif of the artist and a symbol of his significance within the Modernist movement that flourished in St Ives in the decades following.