Barque with a Man at the Wheel on a Stormy Sea - Alfred Wallis

A striking maritime scene by Cornish artist Alfred Wallis, depicting a barque navigating a storm with his signature raw, intuitive style.

Alfred Wallis, a retired Cornish fisherman, began painting in his late sixties following the death of his wife. He utilised scavenged materials, such as cardboard packaging and scraps of wood, to document his memories of the sea. His work is characterised by a lack of formal training, resulting in a direct, unmediated visual language that prioritises personal experience over academic perspective.

In this piece, Wallis depicts a barque navigating turbulent waters. The composition is flattened, a common trait in his work, where the scale of the vessel is determined by its importance to the narrative rather than its distance from the viewer. The ship, rendered in stark white against a dark, moody sea, dominates the frame. The man at the wheel is a small, singular figure, providing a sense of scale and human presence amidst the vastness of the ocean. Wallis used a limited palette, relying on the contrast between the light sails and the deep, murky tones of the water to convey the motion of the storm.

His approach to painting was intuitive. He often cut his cardboard into irregular shapes, allowing the physical form of the support to dictate the boundaries of the scene. This work reflects his deep familiarity with maritime life, capturing the essence of a vessel under sail without the constraints of traditional artistic conventions. His output was largely ignored during his lifetime, yet he became a figure of interest to the St Ives group of artists, including Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, who admired his raw, honest aesthetic. This print captures the texture of the original cardboard support, preserving the tactile quality of his brushwork and the immediacy of his vision.