When the critic Adrian Stokes (who, along with his artist wife Margaret Mellis, helped turn St Ives into an art colony) gave him a set of artists’ paints, he hurled them across the floor, preferring to stick to the tins of colour he found at the chandlery, among the sail cloth and pitch. He was, said Nicholson, “a very fierce and lonely little man”, prone to fits of pique. According to Nicholson, Wallis “only read two books, an enormous black Bible and an equally enormous black life of Christ”. Wallis was modestly educated the letters to Ede require considerable deciphering. When their two daughters both died in infancy, Wallis abandoned deep-sea fishing to be closer to home, and scraped a living by running a marine salvage business. She was older than him (41 to his 20 when they married in 1876), and the mother of a friend. He had taken up painting “for company”, he told Ede, after the death of his wife, Susan. Wallis, meanwhile, was entirely oblivious to the stir.īorn near Plymouth in 1855, Wallis painted largely from memory, drawing on his knowledge of the coves, rocky firths and windblown headlands of the Penwith peninsula, together with the years he had spent sailing schooners from Penzance to Newfoundland, or on a fishing fleet in the North Sea. Wood was so taken with Wallis that he stayed on in St Ives, to learn all he could from this new “master”. Nicholson bought some pictures on the spot, and exhibited them back in London. Entirely self-taught, he was unencumbered by the academic rules of perspective and such like – rules which they, too, were determined to resist in their art. On their way back from the beach, they spied him painting through his open door and were struck by the spontaneity with which he worked. Wallis was already in his 70s when he was “discovered” by Nicholson and the artist Christopher Wood in the summer of 1928. Next week, they will be joined by 60 other Wallis paintings from the gallery’s collection for a new exhibition, along with three of his sketchbooks and some of the letters he sent to Ede, with whom he developed a deep friendship – even though the two men never met. One hung in his office at Tate Gallery and when, in the 1950s, he and his wife Helen moved into Kettle’s Yard – a cluster of Cambridge cottages that they turned into a gallery – there was a Wallis in almost every room. To have a Wallis on your mantelpiece marked you out as one of an elite club.Įde was particularly smitten: between 19, he acquired 120 of Wallis’s paintings. For Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, the critic Herbert Read and the curator Jim Ede, Wallis’s untrained, naive style embodied the authentic spirit of modernism. Scoot 300 miles east, and those same paintings had the 1930s art set abuzz. The pictures of boats and the coast that the retired fisherman would paint on scraps of cardboard or wood and pinned to his walls were, they thought, little more than a curious way for an old man to fill his time. To his neighbours in St Ives, Alfred Wallis was a harmless eccentric.
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