Alfred Wallis

1855-1942 · St Ives, Cornwall, UK

A Cornish fisherman and scrap dealer who started painting at about seventy, for company after his wife died, using ship’s paint on torn cardboard. British modernism was never the same.

The life

Wallis went to sea young, deep-sea then inshore, and later ran a marine scrap store in St Ives. Widowed in 1922, he began painting boats, harbours and storms from memory at his kitchen table. In August 1928 the painters Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood glimpsed his pictures through an open door, and the St Ives modernists adopted him as master and mascot. It never made him money; he died in the Madron workhouse in 1942. His grave, decorated with Bernard Leach tiles, overlooks the sea.

The work

Ships heeling through grey-green seas, lighthouses, harbours tipped up like maps, painted with yacht enamel on scraps of card cut to whatever shape the picture needed. Perspective obeys memory, not optics, which is precisely what the modernists envied. Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge keeps the finest collection.

Why we love them

The UK’s foundational outsider. Every self-taught painter in Britain sails in his wake, including half of St Ives’ trained ones.

Go deeper

• Kettle's Yard, Cambridge
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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