ALFRED WALLIS (1855-1942)
ST IVES SCHOOL (founded c.1929)

Provenance

Lucy Wertheim;
Purchased from the family

Exhibition History

Redfern Gallery, June 1947

Description / Expertise

Alfred Wallis started painting at the age of seventy in 1925 and continued to work consistently until his death in 1942. Very few facts are known of his life before Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood discovered him in 1928. He was partially deaf and somewhat of a misanthropist and painting became virtually the sole outlet for his feelings. In the words of Ben Nicholson: `Wallis's motive: creating “for company” and his method: using the materials closest to hand is the motive and method of the first creative artist. Certainly his vision is a remarkable thing with an intensity and depth of experience which makes it much more than merely childlike.' (1)
Mrs Lucy Wertheim described how she first met Alfred Wallis:
`One summer I was staying with my friends M.Lenny-Smith and Sophie Thomson in their little house at St Mawes and we had been talking of Wallis and his paintings, for which they both had a great enthusiasm. I found the old man in his hovel (for it seemed to me no better) painting away with what appeared to be boat paint on odd bits of canvas, old photographs and scraps of cardboard. He had a special predilection for the ends and sides of Quaker Oats boxes! He was surrounded by scores of his own paintings of all shapes and sizes. As the old man was almost completely deaf it was not a very easy matter to `talk business,' but after much smiling and gesticulation he gathered that I was anxious to become the possessor of some of his paintings and was prepared to pay for them. He was so completely unmercenary that I believe he would have been satisfied with a tenth of the sum I gave him for the collection that he handed over to me.' (2)
Lucy Wertheim was one of only a small group of people who appreciated the artist's work during his lifetime and she formed a substantial collection.
In common with much of the artist's work, Rounding the Light is painted on cardboard and Wallis has retained its natural colour and texture for the sails of the boats. In this way the material becomes an integral part of the painting. For the sea Wallis used white. Edwin Mullins describes its importance to him: `And the most real thing of all to Wallis was the sea - whether or not he had spent his youth sailing it. The sea he described not as a mirror for light effects but as an actual substance. And it is here that the actual texture of his paint (ordinary ship's paint) mattered so deeply to him. Wallis could stir up his paint into a boiling, frothy substance to suggest a storm. It could be as thick as cement, as sharp as scythes flailing up over a boat's prow, or brown and sluggish as beer... The variety and subtlety of these effects he achieved in describing the sea are very remarkable. Wallis had stumbled quite naturally on a rare gift: the ability to use the tactile properties of his materials to imaginative effect. It was a gift, which, as I see it, had nothing to do with being a so-called “Primitive” painter. On the contrary, Wallis's handling of the paint reveals an astonishing degree of natural sophistication.' (3)
In the Rounding of the Light, he has imparted to the boats a sense of movement by physically allowing the paint to swirl in between and behind them. Wallis's use of a white surface, which gives a unity to the whole arrangement of geometrical shapes, can be compared to the work of another `sophisticated naïve' artist painting at the same time, L.S. Lowry. Both made use of the white ground to emphasize the abstract qualities of their composition.
It was this unconscious abstraction that attracted other St Ives artist's such as Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood to Alfred Wallis's work. Rounding the Light ranks amongst Wallis's most successful compositions and the closest comparison is that of his masterpiece, Three Ships (Kettles Yard, Cambridge). Thus it comes as no surprise that, out of all her collection, Lucy Wertheim chose to hold on to this particular work.


1. Ben Nicholson, Alfred Wallis, Horizon, volume VII, number 37, 1943.
2. Lucy Carrington Wertheim, Adventure in Art, Nicholson and Watson, London, 1947, page 84.
3. Edwin Mullins, Alfred Wallis, Cornish Primitive Painter, Macdonald and Co, London, 1967, page 35.