Alfred Wallis: the fisherman who stunned the art world

To his neighbours in St Ives, Alfred Wallis was a harmless eccentric. 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.

Scoot 300 miles east, and those same paintings had the 1930s art set abuzz. 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. To have a Wallis on your mantelpiece marked you out as one of an elite club.

Ede was particularly smitten: between 1929 and 1939, he acquired 120 of Wallis’s paintings. 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. Many still hang there today. 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.

Wallis was already in his 70s when he was “discovered” by Nicholson and the artist Christopher Wood in the summer of 1928. 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. 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. Nicholson bought some pictures on the spot, and exhibited them back in London. Wood was so taken with Wallis that he stayed on in St Ives, to learn all he could from this new “master”. Wallis, meanwhile, was entirely oblivious to the stir.

Born 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. He had taken up painting “for company”, he told Ede, after the death of his wife, Susan. She was older than him (41 to his 20 when they married in 1876), and the mother of a friend. 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.

Wallis was modestly educated; the letters to Ede require considerable deciphering. According to Nicholson, Wallis “only read two books, an enormous black Bible and an equally enormous black life of Christ”. He was, said Nicholson, “a very fierce and lonely little man”, prone to fits of pique. 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. The card on which he painted often came from the local grocer (where he’d also cash any cheques from London), though he’d happily use scraps of wood, the back of a train schedule, his fireside bellows, even the doors of his kitchen cupboards.

Wallis sent Ede thousands of paintings in those 10 years – as many as 60 at a time, wrapped in old brown paper and tied up with string. Ede chose those that he liked best and returned the rest, expressing concern in some of his letters that Wallis was not keeping his earnings for himself, but giving all his money away to the threadbare children of St Ives.

In 1937, Wallis was hit by a car, and never fully recovered. In 1941, he went into a workhouse near Penzance. Nicholson tried to have him moved and looked after privately, “but under wartime conditions the difficulties proved too great. He was well cared for… and it was not long before […] the inmates, nurses, matron, master and even the cooks were admirers of the ships he drew and painted.”

When he died in 1942, Stokes arranged for his body to be transported from Penzance back to St Ives, and paid the extra four pounds and 10 shillings to save Wallis from a pauper’s grave. He was laid to rest in a tomb “with a sea view”, as Hepworth put it. The potter Bernard Leach decorated it with tiles depicting a tiny mariner at the foot of a huge lighthouse. Many other artists of the St Ives colony attended Wallis’s funeral, or sent gifts, “in homage,” as the Russian sculptor Naum Gabo put it, “to the artist on whom Nature has bestowed the rarest gift, not to know that he is one”.

Alfred Wallis Rediscovered opens at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Oct 24-Jan 3