Alfred Wallis Cornish Primitive Painter Alfred Wallis gallery cornwall paintings for sale

Alfred Wallis (1855-1942)

Art history owes a huge debt of gratitude to Sven Berlin for his superb, near-contemporary monograph on Wallis. It remains by far the most accurate and informative account of Wallis to this day. Later monographs by Edwin Mullins (1967) and Matthew Gale (1998) comlete the "trilogy" of definitive publications.

For those of you who are not familiar with Wallis I have included the basic facts in simple bullet points, and a bibliography should you wish to read further.

In preparing the copy for this section, I have resisted the temptation of duplicating in any way the widely available 'accepted' accounts of Wallis's life and times. Instead, my aim is to shed light on lesser known facts, to shift the emphasis away from the questionable 'facts' which underpin the popular mythology which has built up around Wallis, and breathe fresh air on an ongoing story.

So, what is wrong with the generally accepted accounts of Wallis?

The conventional perception of Wallis is that of a lonely, impoverished, uneducated, testy old man who shunned relatives and neighbours alike and was ridiculed by local children. Whilst such a description does bear a semblance of truth, these negative qualities and events, along with his later dementure and fate at the Madron workhouse, are generally over-emphasised at the expense of many positive aspects of his personality, life and times.

A typically rhetorical account follows:

Wallis was an ancient mariner, a former rag-and-bone man, a maker of ice-cream and a religious recluse haunted by demons who howled down his fireplace at night. He painted ships and the sea in yacht paints on cardboard - provided by the local grocer. He died in a poorhouse. JONATHAN GLANCEY , The Inependent, Wednesday, 23 June 1993

The above account paints a largely inaccurate picture of Wallis. In describing him as a "religious recluse, haunted by demons" it focuses mainly on the year or so leading up to his admission to the Madron Institute, the district workhouse (which functioned in Wallis's case much like a modern-day residential care home). The reference to demons is described in a short passage by Sven Berlin (1995) which illustrates the caring nature of Wallis's good friends.

Of course, once the romantic mythology had built up around Wallis it was there to stay, it persists to this day, but what is the truth behind the myth?