Alfred Wallis

Gifted by Leonard Elmhirst to The Dartington Hall Trust, 20th November 1971

Dartington Hall, High Cross House, c1995 - 2010.

There is a loss to the board in the lower left corner (visible in the catalogue illustration). There are a few circular spots in the corners and to the centre of the edges, which appear to be artist nail holes that have been infilled. There are a few resultant surface cracks about one or two of these holes. There are a few scuffs and abrasions about the edges and an additional small surface tear to the upper half of the right edge and to the old pinhole along the right of the upper edge. There is a very minor surface scratch running from the bottom right of the boat to the left edge. The surface of the board is inherently uneven, and this is characteristic of the artist's work. Ultraviolet light reveals spots of uneven fluorescence to the aforementioned artist's nail holes. Other pigments fluoresce which appear to be the hand of the artist. Float mounted under glass in a wooden white painted box frame with a gray backing. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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'The arrival of the Wallace [sic] pictures was a moment of great excitement for Leonard and me. They are utterly fascinating...'
(Dorothy Elmhirst, letter to H.S. Ede, 10^th December 1935).

The so-called 'discovery' of Alfred Wallis by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood in Back Road West, St Ives in 1928 has achieved legendary status. According to Nicholson's account in a 1943 issue of Horizon, Wallis 'had begun painting when he was over seventy, as he said "for company" after his wife had died' (Horizon, Vol.VII, No. 37, 1943). The two artists were instantly fascinated by the old mariner's paintings of 'ships and houses on odd pieces of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall' which had a raw immediacy that appealed directly to their modernist sensibilities. In the context of post-WWI Britain, Wallis' simple yet striking images and his instinctive and untutored draughtsmanship struck a particularly resonant chord for a generation who had witnessed the horrors of the machine-age at work on the Western Front.

Nicholson's friend, H.S. (Jim) Ede became an ardent early supporter strategically dispatching packages of works by Wallis to those collectors he deemed particularly worthy. He wrote to Dorothy Elmhirst:  'I wonder if you would like a batch of pictures by Alfred Wallis? Anyhow I sent for some for you + am posting them on. They would be £3 the lot! If you don't like them, forgive me and post them back – but if you would get your people to frame them up like the one I brought you, you will find that they suddenly look no end good [sic]. All together they always look a bit of a jumble. I've sent 9 or 10...' (H.S. Ede, letter to Dorothy Elmhirst, 29^th November 1935). The Elmhirsts were clearly exhilarated to receive them and given their aim of uniting education and the arts at Dartington, would have been especially predisposed to Wallis' naive and so-called 'childlike' style.

The raw creativity and directness conveyed in child art had already been championed by Roger Fry who had organised exhibitions of child art in 1917 and 1924. He proposed that children's art exemplified, 'just the kind of invention, just that immediate expressiveness, which we admire so much in primitive art' (Roger Fry, 'Children's Drawings', The Burlington Magazine, Vol.XXX, June 1917, p.226). Fry had even visited Dorothy at Dartington in 1932 and it is not inconceivable that child art was amongst their many topics of conversation. She recalled to Leonard that his visit had been 'such fun and not at all paralysing for me – I wish you might have heard Mr Fry's exclamations as we walked around...' (Dorothy Elmhirst, letter to Leonard Elmhirst, 1^st October 1932).

Wallis' use of scrap materials, such as the uneven board adapted in the present work, added a further immediacy to his style, drawing attention to the dynamic interaction between the board itself, the unpainted background and the paint surface. This relationship would have appealed directly to Nicholson's interest in the physicality of the picture surface which resulted in his first carved board abstracts of the early 1930s.