‘So I must close…’
Alfred Wallis: Cornish primitive painting 1855-1942
For many years, I’ve been researching a member of my family whose works are now found in galleries in Australia, Japan, New York and across Europe. The story of the life of Alfred Wallis and his increasing posthumous acclaim have in many ways become part of Cornish and artistic folklore.
Wallis’s life and art has been subject to a full spectrum of interpretations, scrutiny and deliberation brought about over 60 years through exhibitions, stage dramatisations, oral history, jokes, publications and even stretching as far as fridge magnets, paper hats and children’s clothes. From each of these instances it is possible to gauge a perception of what Alfred has come to embody within contemporary society and it would seem that as much as he is a figure credited with drawing and painting part of Britain’s artistic heritage, he has also come to symbolise a period in British social history now lamented as ‘what used to be’.
Indeed, those words, used by Wallis himself to describe his own interpretation of his art in a letter to H.S ‘Jim’ Ede, a benefactor and early acquirer of Wallis’s work qualify this further:
Jim Ede at Kettle’s Yard,
University of Cambridge
‘What I do mosley is what used to bee out of my own memory what we may never see again as Thing are altered all to gether Ther is nothin what ever do not look like what it was sence I can Rember’
These words, written with a distinct lack of punctuation, capture enough about Wallis’ motivation to express himself on the roughen scraps of cardboard to rule out his prior associations as merely a ‘naive’ or ‘primitive’ artist. Wallis’ skill lies in transforming the simple ingredients of pencil and boat paint into a window on a time and place lavished with scenes from one mariners life. The passion and excitement of the young cabin boy recalled through the hands of a worldly-wise man is as potent a reminder of life in and around the coast of Cornwall as any history book, photograph, museum piece or Friese-Green silent film.
Wallis’s works capture the smells and flavours of the sea; his colours replicating the candy coated light synonymous with the Penwith coastline and exposing us to the fragility of little men in flat caps hauling their catch to harbour against the turbulence of ferocious and unpredictable waters. And all this with a beauty so simplistic as to match the unspeakable effect of St Ives on those who have been there.
The TATE Gallery, London
My great great great uncle whose portrait hung on the wall of my childhood home, Alfred died in a poorhouse in Madron, Cornwall — destitute and allegedly flea ridden.
3 Back Road West
St Ives, Cornwall
take by Christopher Wood circa 1934
Wallis truly was a jack of all trades; a fisherman, a merchant, a father-figure and homemaker, an ice cream man, a Salvationist, an artist, but above all — through the uncompromising truth displayed in his work, a master story teller capable of delivering a kind of social commentary on his world only recognised in his lifetime by a small handful of ‘them proper artists’ who saw fit to preserve his vision and legacy for future generations.
