Alfred Wallis

Alfred Wallis: An Artists’ Artist explores the remarkable impact of fisherman and rag-and-bone storekeeper turned painter, Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) on Modern British art. Based in St Ives, Cornwall, where he was first encountered by Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson, Wallis started painting aged 70 despite no formal training, creating bold depictions of the Cornish coast and fishing community that captivated leading contemporary artists. They were struck by his flattening of the picture plane; the representation of landscapes as viewed from above; as well as his particular sense of colour and the wish to record daily life, which was at the heart of Wallis’s practice. The period during which Wallis was painting (1925–1942) and immediately after his death was one of remarkable development in Modern British art; development that Wallis showed little interest in himself, and yet marked so greatly. Wallis’s paintings were admired and collected by many artists: some who knew him - including Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Christopher Wood, Peter Lanyon, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and John Wells – and others who never met him, despite also living in Cornwall, such as his first biographer, Sven Berlin, Patrick Heron, Bernard Leach, and John Walls. Bringing together paintings by Wallis that were owned by these artists, alongside key contemporary works by the artists themselves, the book explores why so many leading artistic figures acquired his work and reveals Wallis’s lasting influence on modernist approaches to perspective, form, colour, composition and lived experience. Ultimately it reveals how his work remained forever inimitable. Distributed for Pallant House Gallery