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Lot Essay
Alfred Wallis took up painting only in his seventies, after a lifetime spent at sea. Born in Devon in 1855, he went to sea as a boy, later working as a marine scrap merchant in St Ives, the Cornish fishing town that would remain his home and his subject for the rest of his life. He began painting in 1922, following the death of his wife, largely, by his own account, to keep loneliness at bay. Entirely self-taught, he worked on whatever supports came to hand—cardboard, old boards, ships’ fittings, often irregularly shaped—and painted directly onto them with leftover boat paint, giving his pictures a rough, weathered physicality quite unlike anything in the conventional English landscape tradition.
Wallis was ‘discovered’, by chance, in August 1928, when the painters Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood—two of the leading figures of British Modernism, visiting St Ives together that summer—passed his cottage and noticed paintings visible through the open door. Nicholson in particular became a devoted champion, drawn to the intuitive, unschooled quality of Wallis’s vision: his instinctive handling of perspective; willingness to distort scale and space according to memory rather than observation; and his evident compulsion to paint regardless of material or training. Wallis went on to become a formative influence on the emerging St Ives School, a validating example, for a generation of modernists, of art made from instinct rather than convention.
The works in the Peter Simon Collection display many of the defining characteristics of Wallis’s practice. Steamers, sailing boats, harbours and the Cornish coastline all appear here, subjects rooted in the artist’s lifelong relationship with the sea. The quiet rhythm of Three Steamers and Three Houses and Boats Entering Harbour reflects the working harbours and coastal communities of Cornwall, while The Yacht Race captures Wallis’s enduring fascination with the movement of sails across the water. In Steamer in Rough Sea, that maritime world becomes more dramatic, as a vessel navigates the turbulent waters around Land’s End. Together, these four works exemplify the qualities that have made Wallis one of the most distinctive and widely admired figures in Modern British art, rooted in the harbours, vessels and coastline he knew so intimately.
Wallis continued to paint prolifically until his death in 1942. His reputation has continued to grow in the decades since: his work sits in many major institutional collections, including Tate and Kettle’s Yard, and has been the subject of major surveys, including the Arts Council’s touring retrospective of 1968, in which Steamer in Rough Sea was included. Drawn from a lifetime lived in close relationship with the sea, Wallis’s paintings represent a body of work unlike anything else in twentieth-century British art. According to Nicholson, Wallis spoke of them ‘not as paintings but as events and experiences’ (‘Alfred Wallis’, Horizon, vol. VII, no. 37, 1943, p. 52).
Wallis was ‘discovered’, by chance, in August 1928, when the painters Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood—two of the leading figures of British Modernism, visiting St Ives together that summer—passed his cottage and noticed paintings visible through the open door. Nicholson in particular became a devoted champion, drawn to the intuitive, unschooled quality of Wallis’s vision: his instinctive handling of perspective; willingness to distort scale and space according to memory rather than observation; and his evident compulsion to paint regardless of material or training. Wallis went on to become a formative influence on the emerging St Ives School, a validating example, for a generation of modernists, of art made from instinct rather than convention.
The works in the Peter Simon Collection display many of the defining characteristics of Wallis’s practice. Steamers, sailing boats, harbours and the Cornish coastline all appear here, subjects rooted in the artist’s lifelong relationship with the sea. The quiet rhythm of Three Steamers and Three Houses and Boats Entering Harbour reflects the working harbours and coastal communities of Cornwall, while The Yacht Race captures Wallis’s enduring fascination with the movement of sails across the water. In Steamer in Rough Sea, that maritime world becomes more dramatic, as a vessel navigates the turbulent waters around Land’s End. Together, these four works exemplify the qualities that have made Wallis one of the most distinctive and widely admired figures in Modern British art, rooted in the harbours, vessels and coastline he knew so intimately.
Wallis continued to paint prolifically until his death in 1942. His reputation has continued to grow in the decades since: his work sits in many major institutional collections, including Tate and Kettle’s Yard, and has been the subject of major surveys, including the Arts Council’s touring retrospective of 1968, in which Steamer in Rough Sea was included. Drawn from a lifetime lived in close relationship with the sea, Wallis’s paintings represent a body of work unlike anything else in twentieth-century British art. According to Nicholson, Wallis spoke of them ‘not as paintings but as events and experiences’ (‘Alfred Wallis’, Horizon, vol. VII, no. 37, 1943, p. 52).