Wallis grew up in poverty and experienced great misfortune and emotional and physical deprivation. yet with only the technical equipment of a child and no knowledge of art except the most superficial he produced a masterly group of work.
'I am self taught' he wrote to H.S. Ede 'so you cannot like me to those that have been taught both in school and paint. I have to learn myself, I never go out to paint, was never show them'. The paintings of Wallis have the directness and simplicity of a child but deepened by bitter experience and personal hardship.
Wallis painted from memory. drawing on his knowledge of St. Ives and its harbour, or of his earlier life at sea. His paintings are of specific events, vividly laid out in a clear design with all their
incidental detail, scenes remembered from his youth. His technique as a painter was invented to deal with his struggle to captUre the mood of the sea far from land and menaced by icebergs, or packed in harbour. He had no knowledge of perspective or proportion, but a great feeling for the motion, isolation and danger of the sea.
Alfred Wallis was born on 18th August 1855 in Devonport, son of a Master Paver. At the age of 9 he made his first trip across the Bay of Biscay in a schooner. At 18 he was making trips to and from St. John's, Newfoundland on schooners of about I SO tons, the cargo being cod caught on the 'Grand Banks' off the Newfoundland coast.
Alfred and his brother Charles came to live in Penzance, probably with their father until the old man died and Charles married. Alfred married at the age of 20 to Susan Ward, a widow twenty-one years older than himself, through making the acquaintance of one of her sons, George Ward. She had already had 17 children by this time, many of whom died in infancy. He remained deeply attached to Susan during their long life together, and to her memory after her death. Susan bore him two children, but both died in infancy.
In 1890 Alfred and Susan moved to St. Ives from Penzance to open a Marine rag and bone store and he became a familiar figure in the streets collecting marine scrap as well as rags and bones. He became known as 'Old Iron'. His little store was in Quay Street with 'A. Wallis, Dealer in Marine Stores' crudely painted on its door in white.
In 1912 when he was 57, and Susan, the 'business manager', 78, they closed the store and moved to No. 3 Back Road West. Wallis had bought the cottage with his savings and Susan had an old age pension. During the Great War, Alfred worked on The Island building Government huts. After the war he did odd jobs, mostly for Mr. Armour who at that time had an antique shop in Fore Street, a world that fascinated Wallis with its memories of foreign places.
It was soon after the death of his wife, on 7th June 1922 aged 88, that he began to paint, as he said 'for company'. Wallis had very distinctive skills as a painter, all of them natUral gifts developed by practice rather than by training or by instruction. His strong and well-developed sense of design shows in every work, from his most important paintings to the painted decorations he added to every surface - the walls of his room, the table upon which he painted, jugs, bellows, even cups in his own house.
Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood first saw Wallis' work in 1928 when he had been painting for about three years. Ben Nicholson admired the quality of the work itself, and of the imagination that produced it. Speaking of Wallis in 1943 he said "using the materials nearest to hand is the motive and method of the first creative artist. Certainly his vision is a remarkable thing with an intensity and depth of experience which makes it much more than merely child-like '.
Wallis' colours were few, he would often be given the last part of a used tin of boat paint. The sea was his preferred subject, and he translated its motions and moods into liquid transparencies of thickly scum bled paint, on a tinted base-colour of blue or green. In the paintings of ships there is a strong geometry of design with great attention given to the correct set of the sails and the details of ropes and rigging. His other main subject was the town of St. Ives. The plan of the town clearly laid out with its principal areas, harbour, streets, open sea beyond. The parish church of St. Eia, the lighthouse, the individual houses in and around Porthmeor Square and the terrace of cottages displayed from the centre towards the edge of the painting. The importance of objects was indicated by their size. Boats would be shown as much larger than neighbouring house, not because they were nearer, but because they were the principal subject of the picture.
In 1941, then aged 86 and unable to look after himself, Wallis was taken to the workhouse in Madron. In the last fourteen months of his life he was treated as a celebrity, able to draw and paint, and was visited by his artist friends who had arranged for the work to be exhibited in London and elsewhere. Wallis died on 29th August 1942, his grave overlooking Porthmeor Beach has a decoration in tiles by Bernard Leach depicting a little man walking heavily with the aid of a stick who climbs up to a lighthouse surrounded by heavy seas. The inscription 'Alfred Wallis, Artist and Mariner'.
