100 years of Alfred Wallis

After the death of his wife Susan in 1922, Alfred Wallis was living alone in a two-room cottage in the old part of St Ives nearest the harbour, known as Downlong. He wasn’t important or well-known, and had a small circle of friends in the town and in the congregation of the Salvation Army. He did odd jobs for local antique dealers called the Armours. Then, on 8 August 1925, he turned 70 and was finally eligible to receive the Old Age Pension. It must have been a relief to know that he no longer had to work to provide for himself. Between the Wars, Downlong was run-down and many there struggled with poverty. As one resident put it,

"In those days, there was no dole, no social security. You couldn’t put a loaf of bread on the table if you didn’t get money to put it there".1

Wallis had worked harder than most all his life. As a child in the slums of North Corner at Devonport in the 1860s, he earnt what little he could assisting the Watermen who rowed out supplies and mail to the Royal Navy ships anchored on the River Tamar. He worked for a year as a cabin boy at the age of 10 – most likely on his uncle Abraham Ellis’s ship, the Ann – and at 15 he was apprenticed to a basket maker in Penzance. As a teenager he worked as a fishermen with the Mount’s Bay lugger fleet out of Newlyn, fishing locally for mackerel and pilchards, but also sailing up to the herring grounds in the North Sea. He found this disagreeable, writing on the back of a painting of a lugger,

"i was sea sick i never Eat anything on Till we got to scarBro from newlyn".2

In 1876 Wallis married at the age of 20 and, very soon after, took work on a schooner, the Pride of the West, bound for Newfoundland in the dried cod trade. Although fishing had provided his first steady work, Wallis needed a more reliable source of income. Marriage to Susan, who had five children, brought new responsibilities, and with them the need to seek out better-paid work that did not rely on success of the fishing catch.

But Wallis’s time at sea was short-lived. After a near death experience on the return journey from Labrador on the schooner Belle Aventure, he gave up life as a merchant mariner and became a quay labourer and, soon after, a marine stores gatherer at Penzance for Joseph Denley. In 1882 Denley set up Wallis and his family in St Ives to run a new marine stores business on his behalf. Wallis and his wife spent the best part of thirty years in the business before retiring to their cottage in Back Road West in 1911. There they made ends meet by doing various odd jobs; Wallis at the antique shop and Susan making Honiton lace.

Susan died in 1922 and Wallis continued working for the Armours, attending Salvation Army services, and spending time with friends around the town. There is little doubt that he felt lonely without Susan, although his step family and the family of his nephew, William Wallis, were regular visitors to his home.

It was three years after his wife’s death - and a hundred years ago - that Wallis began to receive the Old Age Pension following his 70th birthday in August 1925. He now had a modest but regular income for the first time in his life, comprising ten shillings a week. No longer having to work to make ends meet, he had more time on his hands, and this was the likely catalyst for him to take up painting as a hobby. For the first time, Wallis could direct his energy not to survival, but to self-expression. Shortly after receiving his first pension, Wallis told his friend Richard Edwards, the watchmaker in Fore Street,

“I dono how to pass away time. I think I’ll do a bit’a paintin’ – think I’ll draw a bit.”3

Not a man to be idle, Wallis went straightaway to a ‘paperhangers shop’ next door to get two soft-headed brushes, and also bought ‘some ordinary house paint’.4 Needing something to paint on, he went to his friend’s grocery shop to ask for some scraps of cardboard. Having gathered the materials he felt he needed, Wallis started painting in the front room of his cottage. The following day he took the finished results to show his friends:

“Next day, the old man – he was only a little slip of a man you know – he came in here with two or three paintens of boats an’ the like; an’ they were the very fust paintens ’e did”.5

Edwards suggested to Wallis that he prop the paintings on an old clock hanging in the shop. When Andrew Armour senior came in, he asked who had done them and, in a serious manner that conveyed ‘both pride and modesty’, Wallis replied that they were his. Armour was complimentary, telling him,

“You done a mighty fine job by en”, and Edwards recalled “From then on”, Wallis “wen on painten”’.6

Wallis “wen on painten” for the following seventeen years. He often said he depicted “what use To Bee out of my own memery”, having a great concern to paint “what we may never see again as Thing are altered all To gether”.7 To this end, he portrayed sailing vessels of all kinds, with a passion for the two-masted topsail schooners and luggers he had once crewed on. His painting style and skill evolved from his early paintings, resulting in beautiful, large-scale works such as Schooner Passing a Lighthouse. This stunning, metre-long painting holds a wealth of information about Wallis's life, his emotions, and his approach as an artist. I firmly believe it to be Wallis's record of his departure from Penzance and his new wife in April 1876, aboard the schooner Pride of the West bound for Newfoundland.

As a self-taught artist, Wallis was not confined by academic conventions of proportion and this painting exemplifies the way he often portrayed subjects relative to the emotional significance they held for him. As the ship would be his only haven for the foreseeable future, the topsail schooner dominates the composition. It is sailing towards the prominently-depicted Lizard lighthouse, regarded by mariners as the last point of departure from the English coast. Conversely, needing to suppress all thoughts of home, Penzance is shown in miniature in the top right-hand corner, just to the left of St Michael’s Mount. The ship is sailing away from all that was familiar to Wallis, and he has included the harbours, landmarks and lighthouses of Mount’s Bay and St Ives Bay beyond.

It is well known that Wallis's paintings were greatly admired by the artists, critics and collectors of the Modern British Art scene in the 1930s, who avidly bought his work. So the fact that he was to end his days at Madron Workhouse remains as much a point of contention today as it was in 1949, when author George Manning-Sanders wrote to the local newspaper:

"It must puzzle your readers to know how it came about that a group of distinguished artists, connoisseurs and intellectuals could allow a fellow artist, whom they acclaimed superior to the best of them, to industriously produce works of genius and beauty, and yet live out his days in misery and privation".8

Although confined to Madron, Wallis continued to create artworks, drawing strength from a sustaining faith in the Bible, and through the joy and fulfilment he found in painting. These had enabled him to emerge from the shadow of work and familial responsibility to develop a true sense of self. In his depictions of solitary ships battling great storms at sea, he arranged and shaped his beliefs and memories. In so doing, he found a way to make sense of the demanding life he had led, and feel a deeply satisfying sense of achievement.

A hundred years after Alfred Wallis first picked up a paintbrush, his story continues to reach far beyond St Ives. His paintings are admired as widely as Japan, Canada, Germany and New Zealand, proof of their universal appeal. Out of loneliness, loss and a lifetime of hard work, he created a body of art that still inspires today. His life reminds us that it is never too late to begin again, and that resilience and creativity can turn the hardest of circumstances into something meaningful and long-lasting.

Matilda Webb August 2025

1. James Freeman recorded on the Roger Slack tape recordings, 1960s, quoted throughout Matilda Webb, Alfred Wallis Child Pauper To Artistic Luminary 2025

2. Matilda Webb, Alfred Wallis Child Pauper To Artistic Luminary 2025 p125 and illustration 56

3. Sven Berlin, Alfred Wallis Primitive 1949 p61, quoted in Webb 2025 p358

4. Berlin, Alfred Wallis Primitive 1949 p61, quoted in Webb 2025 p358

5. Berlin, Alfred Wallis Primitive 1949 p61, quoted in Webb 2025 p358

6. Berlin, Alfred Wallis Primitive 1949 p61, quoted in Webb 2025 p358

7. KY/EDE/1/17/14 Alfred Wallis letter to Jim Ede 6 April 1935, quoted in Webb 2025 p401

8. The Cornishman 10 March 1949 p4: George Manning-Sanders letter, quoted in Webb 2025 p461