Painting for company | St Ives primitivist Alfred Wallis

Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) Lugger In Harbour. House paint on thick card, 17 X 28 cm. Courtesy of Alan Wheatley

The ‘discovery’ of the naïve Cornish painter Alfred Wallis is a well-known tale, but the story of his sad demise, in 1942, is less commonly related. 

Wallis didn’t start painting until he was 70, ‘for company’ after the death of his wife. He had lived a life on or beside the ocean, as a deep-sea trawlerman, as a local fisherman off St Ives, and latterly, as a rag-and-bone man for maritime businesses.

He worked – largely from memory – at the kitchen table of his rudimentary fisherman’s cottage, using household paint on recycled cardboard. Boats, harbours, lighthouses, seabirds. He was completely untrained, and developed a style all of his own, ignoring perspective, and distorting scale.

In 1928 Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson, on a daytrip to St Ives, noticed him at work, and were amazed by his art. His fame spread, as members of the artists’ colony which sprang up in and around the fishing village bought up his paintings. So did the dealer Jim Ede: one painting, within his lifetime, ended up in the New York Museum of Modern Art. He never, however, made more than a pittance for his work, accepting a few coppers or at best shillings on the end of his table when visitors came to buy.

In his last years, he suffered what would now be understood as an acute persecution complex, and became difficult company, only calm in the presence of one of his near neighbours, a certain Mrs Peters. He ended his days, aged 87, in the Madron poorhouse near Penzance. His biggest fear was being given a pauper’s burial: the artists’ community arranged for a proper funeral and his grave, in Barnoon cemetery in St Ives, was adorned with ceramics made by Bernard Leach, in the style of his paintings.

In 1949 the St Ives-based sculptor Sven Berlin wrote a book about Wallis’ life, titled Primitive. In the aftermath of its publication there was a spat in the newspapers – particularly The Cornishman – after a review by the Cornish novelist George Manning Sanders accused the local artists’ community of having exploited and then neglected Wallis. Bernard Leach was quick to publish a defence, but his claim that paying Wallis more than a few shillings for his work would have impacted on his old age pension provision rings rather hollow, to say the least.

Today Wallis’ works reach five and even six-figure sums at auction: just last June his painting Mount’s Bay with St Michael’s mount, 1855 went under the hammer at Bonham’s for £120,000. Lugger in Harbour (above) was painted in 1938, and is (provisionally) among the works to be shown by Alan Wheatley Art at British Art Fair 2023.