Mount's Bay with St Michael's Mount, Cornwall - Alfred Wallis

A characteristic maritime scene by the self-taught Cornish artist Alfred Wallis, featuring his signature flattened perspective and raw, expressive style.

Alfred Wallis, a former mariner and scrap merchant from St Ives, began painting in his late sixties. Without formal training, he utilised discarded materials such as cardboard boxes and scraps of wood, often cutting them into irregular shapes to accommodate his compositions. His work is defined by a rejection of traditional perspective, favouring a flattened, map-like view that prioritises the relative importance of objects over their physical distance from the viewer.

In this depiction of Mount's Bay, Wallis captures the essential elements of the Cornish coastline. The iconic silhouette of St Michael's Mount is rendered with direct, unadorned strokes, while the surrounding waters are populated by dark, simplified vessels. Wallis often used a restricted palette, relying on household paints that were readily available to him. The application is thick and tactile, reflecting the physical nature of his chosen support. His approach to space is intuitive, placing the harbour walls, the sea, and the land in a configuration that serves his memory of the scene rather than a photographic reality.

Wallis's work gained attention from members of the St Ives art colony, including Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, who admired his lack of pretension and his ability to convey the spirit of the sea. His paintings are not concerned with atmospheric effects or the play of light. Instead, they function as records of maritime life, distilled into their most basic forms. The raw, honest quality of his technique provides a direct connection to the working life of the Cornish coast, stripped of the romanticism often found in professional marine painting of the period. This print captures the specific texture of his original cardboard support, maintaining the integrity of his unique visual language.