ewsba.se
Boats at Quayside by Alfred Wallis and Christopher Wood (undated) Courtesy Hamilton Kerr Institute
Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, southern England, does not own any paintings by the self-taught Cornish artist Alfred Wallis (1855-1942). But it does own many works by the early 20th-century artists who were heavily influenced by the former fisherman and rag-and-bone merchant, who first took up painting with pots of house paint and sheets of cardboard as a lonely widower aged 70.
Alfred Wallis: an Artists’ Artist gathers together works by Wallis and by artists who visited, lived in or worked in St Ives, including Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Margaret Mellis, Adrian Stokes, John Wells, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christopher Wood. It was Ben Nicholson and Wood who first befriended Wallis in 1928 when they peered in astonishment into his tiny dark cottage stuffed with paintings.
Many of the Wallis paintings—of tilted houses and harbours, ships and stormy seas, under lowering grey skies—originally acquired as gifts or bought for a few shillings, are now being borrowed from private collections and museums including the Tate, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and Aberdeen Art Gallery. A private collector is loaning a unique collaborative work: a half-finished view of a Brittany quayside by Christopher Wood, which Wood gave to Wallis who then completed it.
A record price of £184,000 was set at a Christie’s auction last year for a work by Wallis, who once said to a buyer: “gimme what you like for ’em”. Ben Nicholson, barely earning himself and with a young family, bought his first Wallis painting for half a crown; Wallis once sent a bundle of paintings to the collector and curator Jim Ede for ten shillings. When the artist died in 1942, a roll of uncashed postal orders was found on his mantelpiece. He was only saved from a pauper’s grave by the St Ives artists.
Winifred Nicholson’s Seascape with Two Boats (1932) Photo: © Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge; © Trustees of Winifred Nicholson
The exhibition is curated by James Scott, an orthopaedic surgeon, who first discovered Wallis when, as a bored medical student, he spent days in Sotheby’s auction rooms, watching sales and afterwards tracing the buyers out of curiosity.
Scott insists there was neither condescension nor exploitation in the relationship between Wallis and Nicholson and the other art school educated artists. Hepworth wrote that Wallis never knew “how much we all learnt from him”.
The St Ives artists “discovered him when they were looking for a new direction, experimenting with a restricted palette and flattened picture plane,” Scott says, “and they found he was already doing it and doing it better.” Wallis learned nothing from them, continuing his own unmistakable style until weeks before his death.
Scott treasures two works by Wallis. “I’ve often thought maybe the time has come to sell them, and then I come downstairs and see them on the wall and think no, I can’t, I love them more and more.”
• Alfred Wallis: an Artists’ Artist, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 21 November-2 May 2027; Penlee House, Penzance, 15 May 2027-9 October 2027