NO. 10 DRAUGHT SCREEN

And finally, here is a photo I took when I was privileged to be shown Alfred Wallis's draught screen in a private collection. You can see the screen in situ in the image below, which shows Wallis standing in his doorway in 1940.

Visitors to Wallis's cottage described seeing different scenes on the screen, including “a boat above a lighthouse”, “St Ives harbour”, “a huge fish − bigger than the schooner", and “luggers going out and coming in all over that with sky and gulls”.

It is therefore likely that Wallis simply painted over each scene when he felt the urge to create a new one.

When I showed my photo of the screen to Wallis's step great-grandson (aged 90 and now the last living person to have met Wallis), he responded wrily, “the fish looks annoyed that the ships are all trespassing and the lighthouse with the sea running downhill shows the picture wasn’t painted for anybody else”.