Alfred Wallis
Tate Gallery, St Ives
Folk art – the term used, historically, to describe artefacts produced by untrained artists – usually falls outside the interests of galleries such as the Tate, which are dedicated to collecting fine art, that is work by artists who have had a conventional training in art. Such clear demarcation – which also embraces issues of class – became blurred when, between the wars, the Tate Gallery started purchasing paintings by the St Ives-based naive artist Alfred Wallis. Like Grandma Moses in the United States, Wallis painted the world as he experienced it, unbothered by conventional concerns for formal perspective or composition. A room devoted to some 40 painting by Wallis, which forms part of the Summer Exhibition at Tate St Ives, testifies to his highly individual and engaging eye.
Wallis’s romantic history is shrouded in mystery. He was born in Devonport of Cornish parents in 1855 and claimed to have worked as a sailor, travelling the high seas – a subject that often appears in his paintings. In St Ives, he worked as a rag and bone man, rearing a family in a tiny cottage. Following the death of his wife in 1922, he started to paint “for company”. For materials, Wallis improvised, making use of scraps of wood, old trays, cardboard torn from boxes or paper that he could fine. Remnants of household paint or bought from ships chandlers were called into service to produce his characteristic work.
His chosen subject was autobiographical, usually featuring seascapes with sailing and steamships, described by Wallis as “what use To Bee out of my memery what we may never see again”. Many, based on the town of St Ives, showed the harbour and the lighthouse, but rendered as topographical compositions that involved several different viewpoints. The result is a direct, recognisable style suggesting a powerful personal vision that is entirely persuasive. His work, however, was ridiculed in the town and although he exchanged the paintings for goods, it was seen as having little worth and was often thrown away.
Professional artists, however, found Wallis’s work fascinating, appreciating its genuine and authentic voice, a refreshing honesty in comparison to the stilled and self-conscious work of artists seeking to be “original”. Little wonder that when Wallis was “discovered” working in his cottage by Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson, they were in awe of what they saw as a rare talent. They acquired his work and persuaded Jim Ede, a curator at the Tate Gallery, of its importance and it became part of the national collection. For Wood, in particular, Wallis’ work appeared honest and uncomplicated, and it had a profound effect on his own painting.
Having been introduced to the fine art world, Wallis saw the possibilities for his own career and wrote semi-illiterate letters to Ede asking him to promote his work. If professional artists could command what Wallis saw as dizzyingly high prices, why could not he? Despite the admiration, Wallis was unaffected by the work of other artists; sales, however, remained poor. He continued to live in poverty, died in a workhouse in 1942 and was buried in Barnoon Cemetery next to the Tate in St Ives. Today Wallis’s work sells for tens of thousands of pounds – a fact that would have amazed him but, no doubt, in his view, a true recognition of its worth.
Emmanuel Cooper
