Boats - Alfred Wallis

A characteristic marine scene by Alfred Wallis, featuring his signature flattened perspective and direct, unrefined approach to depicting Cornish harbour life.

Alfred Wallis, a former Cornish fisherman and scrap merchant, began painting in his late sixties following the death of his wife. Working primarily on salvaged cardboard and scraps of wood, he utilised whatever household paints were available to him. His approach to composition ignores traditional perspective, favouring a flattened, map-like arrangement that prioritises the relative importance of objects over their physical distance from the viewer.

In this work, the sea is rendered through rhythmic, swirling brushstrokes that suggest movement without attempting realistic representation. The vessels, including steamships and sailing boats, are depicted with a directness that reflects his lifelong familiarity with the maritime industry of St Ives. Wallis did not seek formal training, and his work is defined by this lack of academic constraint. He often painted on irregular surfaces, sometimes cutting the cardboard to fit the shape of the scene he intended to capture.

His output was discovered by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood in 1928, who recognised the authenticity in his unrefined technique. Wallis painted from memory, often combining different types of vessels within a single frame to create a narrative of the harbour. The colour palette is restricted by the materials he could source, resulting in a focus on blacks, whites, and earthy tones that mirror the industrial reality of the Cornish coast. This print captures the raw, immediate quality of his original application, preserving the texture of the paint and the deliberate simplicity of his forms.