Martin Gayford

One of the greatest of all outsider artists: Alfred Wallis at Kettle’s Yard reviewed

The Cornish painter escaped the prison of artistic conventions by the simple expedient of not knowing about them

‘Two ships and steamer sailing past a port — Falmouth and St. Anthony lighthouse’, c. 1931, by Alfred Wallis. Courtesy of Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge

Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) should be an inspiration to all late starters. It was not until he had passed the age of 70 that, after his wife of many years had died and having previously worked as a sailor, fisherman and rag and bone merchant, he decided to take up art. ‘Aw! I dono how to pass away time,’ he explained to a shopkeeper in his native town of St Ives. ‘I think I’ll do a bit a paintin’ — think I’ll draw a bit.’

Three years later, his work was spotted by the leading British modernists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. By and by, Wallis’s pictures were being exhibited in London, and Nicholson presented one to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.How much this acclaim meant to the artist, beyond bringing in some useful cash, is not clear. Once, shown a reproduction of one of his own works in a book, he was unimpressed, remarking: ‘I’ve got one like that at home.’

A new exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Alfred Wallis Rediscovered, is devoted to this remarkable painter. As you go around it you can see what Nicholson and Wood must have seen on the day in August 1928 when they glanced through an open door on a backstreet in St Ives, and discovered Wallis and his work.

‘I do not put collers what Do not Belong i Think i spoils the pictures’

Nicholson later wrote that he associated the old seaman with ‘lovely dark browns, shiny blacks, fierce greys, strange whites and a particularly pungent Cornish green’. And all those dense colours are on show at Kettle’s Yard, applied to odd-shaped bits of paper and cardboard cut from the sides and bottoms of boxes. What you see is not the blue sea and sunshine of tourist posters, but what Wilhelmina Barns-Graham — a St Ives painter of a later era — once told me were the true hues of the place: ‘grey seas, black rocks.’

It was not surprising Wallis had an intense feeling for ships, having spent his life on and around boats.

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