Paintings by Alfred Wallis:

Top Image: “Ships with Flowering Trees”, 1938, Oil, Household Paint and Pencil on Paper, 24 x 33 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Image: “Saint Ives Harbour, Cornwall”, 1928-1942, Oil with Graphite on Card Mounted on Plywood Board, 38 x 44 cm, Royal Museum, Greenwich, London

Born in Devon in 1855, Alfred Wallis was a Cornish fisherman and mariner who took up painting in his old age. When he left school he joined the merchant navy, sailing schooners across the north Atlantic between Penzance and Newfoundland. After his marriage and the death of his two infant children, Wallis moved his family to Saint Ives, Cornwall, where he worked for twenty years as a marine scrap dealer, buying and selling iron, sails and rope for use on sailing boats.

After his wife died in 1922, Wallis started painting, finding his inspiration in his memories. Being very poor, he used whatever materials were at hand for his artwork. His 1928 painting “Two Masted Ship”, now in the Tate Colletion, was painted on the back of an inexpensive Great Western Railway fare schedule.

In 1928, Alfred Wallis was discovered by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, both established artists, when they came to Saint Ives to found an artist’s colony. Wallis was propelled into a circle of some of the most progressive artists working in Britain in the 1930s. Not influenced by others, Wallis continued to paint with the same manner, immediacy, and directness as before.

In 1942, Alfred Wallis died penniless in the Penzance Union Workhouse, a public assistance institution near Madron, Cornwall. A man who influenced a generation of painters, Alfred Wallis is buried in the Barnoon graveyard at Saint Ives, Cornwall, which overlooks the Tate Saint Ives Museum holding many of his paintings,now considered fine examples of art brut.