Alfred Wallis (1855-1942)
"Houses, Trees and Ships"
Signed, inscribed to the backboard, "To Sheila and Peter, from Barbara, April 1946, Peter Lanyon", oil on dark grey paper, 23cm by 35cm

Provenance: Wedding present from Dame Barbara Hepworth to Peter and Shelia Lanyon. As per 1976 letter between the vendor and Harry Francis Constantine Director at Sheffield City Art Gallery.
Purchased from Shelia Lanyon by Mrs Markova Noel in the 1970's.
Loaned to Sheffield Museums Trust

Alfred Wallis (1855-1942), retired mariner and self-taught artist, is much celebrated for his naïve paintings that reflect his direct experience of the sea and fishing communities in Cornwall.

“Houses, Trees and Ships” was given by Dame Barbara Hepworth to fellow St. Ives artist Peter Lanyon and his wife Sheila for their wedding in 1946. Mrs Markova Noel, from whose estate it is now being sold, purchased “Houses, Trees and Ships” from Sheila Lanyon in the 1970s, before loaning it to Sheffield Museums Trust.

Alfred Wallis spent his childhood in Devon and Cornwall and worked as an apprentice basket maker before becoming a mariner in the merchant service in the early 1870s, sailing schooners between Penzance and Newfoundland. Following his marriage to Susan in 1876, when he was 20 and she was 41, he found work deep sea fishing off Newfoundland before switching to local fishing and labouring in Penzance. In 1890 the family moved to St. Ives, where Wallis became a dealer in marine reclamation and supplies.

When his wife died in 1922, Wallis took up painting ‘for company’, never seeking any form of artistic training. Using a limited palette of marine paint and any scraps of cardboard, packing box or wood he could get hold of, he developed his own unique style, depicting what he knew best – port landscapes and shipping. His instinctive, naïve approach saw formal perspective abandoned, and scale was often based on an object’s importance in a scene. Everything he drew came from his memories, largely from his formative years before sail gave way to steam. Indeed, he is recorded as saying he painted “What use To Bee out of my memory what we may never see again”.

The present painting is dominated by Wallis’s distinctive, idiosyncratic trees, which are perfectly described by Edwin Mullins in Alfred Wallis, Cornish Primitive Painter, Unicorn Press Ltd., 2014:

"Nothing in Wallis is more child-like than the trees he painted. In contrast to his ships, he never tried to describe his trees accurately – perhaps because there was no rigging for the old sailor in him to bother about. He just set his trees down on the ground like great black skittles sprouting hundreds of little stiff arms. What did impress him about trees was how their dark massiveness could belittle the houses and people beneath; also how a forest can become a secret and magic garden full of birds, animals and flowers."

Painting solely for his own enjoyment, he was discovered in 1928 by founding members of the St. Ives School, Ben Nicholson (first husband of Barbara Hepworth) and Christopher Wood. Wallis’s direct approach to image making had a profound impact on Nicholson and his work, and Nicholson later said of Wallis, "Using the materials nearest to hand is the motive and method of the first creative artist. Certainly, his vision is a remarkable thing with an intensity and depth of experience which makes it much more than merely child-like".

Harold Stanley ‘Jim’ Ede, an art collector, champion of Modern Art and friend of a great many avant-garde artists, was introduced to Wallis through Nicholson and Wood, and promoted his work in London. Whilst Wallis’s work became celebrated amongst a circle of progressive artists in the 1930s, he never saw commercial success in his lifetime, remained living in poverty, and would spend the last year of his life in the workhouse in Madron, whilst his work hung in London.

Wallis left and extraordinary artistic legacy, and the influence his work had on the direction of British art in the 20^th century cannot be understated. Nicholson summed up Wallis’s work when he stated it was “Something that has grown out of the Cornish seas and earth, and which will endure”.