Alfred Wallis 1855-1942
Boats off the Harbour
oil on card laid on board
6½ x 10¼ ins


Provenance
Waddington Galleries, London
Private collection



The 'discovery' of Alfred Wallis’s work by artists of the St.Ives School in the late 1920’s was one of the most remarkable moments in the history of Modern British painting. Self-taught and only beginning to paint in his 70’s (c.1925) after his wife’s death - 'for company' as he put it - Wallis painted, entirely from memory, his experiences as a fisherman working off the Grand Banks in Newfoundland and in the North Sea in the 1870’s and 1880’s. Using any old piece of card or board to hand (hence their often irregular shapes) and enamel ship-paints, paintings like Boats off the Harbour reveal his quite astonishing sense of compositional order and rhythm, possessing an intensity of vision that makes him as vital to British painters as Douanier Rousseau had been to Picasso and his generation in France. As Ben Nicholson, one of those artists most decisively influenced by him at the time observed so accurately 'his imagination is surely a lovely thing -it is something which has grown out of the Cornish earth and which will endure'.