Painted on Cardboard

In August 1928, two painters were walking in St Ives and passed an open door in Back Road West. Inside, an old man was painting.

Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood went in.

Who he was

Alfred Wallis had been at sea. He had worked as a mariner, on the Newfoundland runs and around the British coast in the last decades of working sail, and then as a marine-stores dealer in St Ives, buying and selling rope, iron, sailcloth and scrap.

His wife Susan died in 1922. He was in his late sixties, alone, and he later said that he took up painting for company.

He had no training of any kind and no interest in acquiring any.

What he used

Whatever was to hand.

The paint was ship’s paint and household paint, in the few colours a chandler’s shop actually stocks: greys, greens, browns, white, a black, a blue. He mixed very little.

The support was cardboard — torn from packing cases, cut from boxes, in irregular shapes, and he did not trim them square. If a piece of card was a long thin triangle, he painted a long thin triangle of sea and put a ship in it. The shape of the rubbish determined the composition.

What he was doing

He was not painting what a scene looked like. He was painting what he knew about it.

So the ships are large because ships matter, and the houses along the shore are small because they do not, and both may appear from a different angle in the same picture. A vessel is shown in profile so that you can read her rig, while the harbour she is in is shown from above so that you can read its shape.

This is the logic of a chart and of a working memory, not of a viewpoint. Wallis had spent a life in which a boat was information — what she was, what she carried, how she handled — and he painted the information.

He said he painted what used to be, out of his memory, and that he did not care for things that had not happened.

What happened next

Nicholson took it extremely seriously and said so for the rest of his life. He and Wood were at that moment working their way out of representational painting, and here was a man who had never been in it — who had arrived at flatness, at simplified colour, at scale-by-importance, without any of the theory and without knowing there was a problem to solve.

Wallis became one of the pivots of what became the St Ives school, and his work is in the Tate.

He did not benefit much. He sold pictures for a few shillings when he sold them at all, was increasingly regarded in the town as a difficult old man, fell out with people, and died in the workhouse at Madron in 1942.

He is buried in the cemetery at Barnoon, on the slope above Porthmeor beach. Bernard Leach made the tiles that cover the grave. They show a small figure at the foot of a lighthouse, and they were paid for by the artists.