Qualla: Alfred Wallis

Alfred Wallis: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. He started painting at seventy. His wife had died three years earlier, and Alfred Wallis began covering scraps of cardboard torn from packing boxes with the only paint he could easily get hold of in his St Ives marine stores shop, household ship's paint in a handful of colours. He had no training. He had never tried to be an artist before. What he had was sixty years of staring at the sea, a sailor's memory full of vessels that no longer existed, and a stubborn certainty that what he saw mattered. Then, one summer afternoon in August 1928, two young painters wandering down Back Road West glanced through his open door and saw something that would help change the direction of British art.

Read more: Alfred Wallis on Qualla

Image: Sarah Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0

Alfred Wallis: A Sailor's Long Apprenticeship

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit me, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wallis was born in Devonport in 1855, the son of a Cornish father from Penzance and a mother from the Isles of Scilly. He went to sea as a child. In August 1876 he sailed to Batteau Harbour on the wild coast of Labrador, working several months as a ship's cook on a deep-sea schoo...

Read more: Alfred Wallis on Qualla

Image: me | CC BY-SA 3.0

Alfred Wallis: The Discovery on Back Road West

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malcolm Reid, CC BY-SA 2.0. The two young painters were Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, in St Ives on a day trip in August 1928. They stopped at Wallis's door because they saw little painted boards nailed up inside. What they recognised was a kind of seeing that the avant-garde was struggling to reach b...

Read more: Alfred Wallis on Qualla

Image: Malcolm Reid | CC BY-SA 2.0

Alfred Wallis: Materials of Necessity, Choices of Conviction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MortimerCat, CC BY 2.5. Wallis had almost no money. Cardboard ripped from grocer's boxes was free, and he cut it to irregular shapes that became part of the composition - a triangular fragment for a sail, a long strip for a coastline. He insisted on Peacock and Buchan's ships' paint, bought from Burrell...

Read more: Alfred Wallis on Qualla

Image: MortimerCat | CC BY 2.5

Alfred Wallis: Influence in Only One Direction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Atkin, CC BY-SA 2.0. St Ives in the 1930s became one of the most consequential places in twentieth-century British art. Nicholson and his wife Barbara Hepworth would settle here. Naum Gabo would arrive as a wartime refugee. Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost and the post-war generation would bu...

Read more: Alfred Wallis on Qualla

Image: Tony Atkin | CC BY-SA 2.0

Alfred Wallis: The Tile Mosaic and the Long Afterlife

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fæ, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wallis is buried in Barnoon Cemetery on the hill above Porthmeor Beach. His grave, designed by the potter Bernard Leach, is covered with a tile mosaic showing a tiny figure climbing a lighthouse - half memorial, half final painting. From there you can look down on the Tate St Ive...

Read more: Alfred Wallis on Qualla

Image: Fæ | CC BY-SA 3.0