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Alfred Wallis was born at Devonport near Plymouth but moved to St. Ives in 1887 when his occupation was given as marine stores dealer. He seems to have started painting in 1925, at the age of 70, using brushes and household paint on scrap pieces of card. When he painted on canvas it was usually over other artist’s discarded work, sometimes incorporating elements of the original work into his own image.
Probably the major event in bringing Wallis’ work to public notice was his meeting with the artists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood in 1928 when they settled in St. Ives and formed an artist’s colony. They were captivated and inspired by Wallis’ naïve art of seascapes and harbour scenes which ignored perspective and enlarged objects according to their relative significance to the picture. The following year Nicholson was the prime mover in having some of Wallis’ work shown in the Seven and Five exhibition. The latter were a select group of avant-garde artists dedicated to showing modern art.
Wallis spent the last two years of his life in poverty in the Penwith District Workhouse but since the Second World War his posthumous reputation has steadily risen with several monographs being devoted to him. He has had several important retrospective exhibitions including those at the Waddington Gallery (1965), the Tate Gallery (1968) and works in the St. Ives 1939-1964 show at the Tate Gallery (1985).
Nicholson, writing in Horizon (1943) about Wallis stated, Certainly his vision is a remarkable thing with an intensity and depth of experience which makes it much more than merely childlike. In a painting of a fishing boat entering a harbour there is a formidable organisation, a rhythm in which the movement of the whole landscape (in which every form and space has been experienced and perfected) and of the small boats leads up to the decisive purpose with which the fishing boat moves … his imagination is surely a lovely thing - it is something which has grown out of the Cornish earth and sea, and which will endure
The Derwent Scrapbook
On hearing that Alfred Wallis was living in the Penwith District Workhouse near Penzanze Ben Nicholson visited him several times during 1941-42. He gave Wallis the blank Derwent Scrapbook so that he could continue working, when he felt able. The double sided pencil drawings presented here are taken from the scrapbook. The drawings depict a sailing ship on one side and a steamship on the reverse side.
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