One hundred years ago this month, Alfred Wallis started to paint. His wife, Susan, had died, and he had had no children with her. Disturbed by how people treated him, the auditory hallucinations of a domineering female figure called Dooty Mighty, and a concern to ‘pass away the time’, he found refuge in drawing and painting ‘what use To Bee’. Using simple materials, cardboard, boat and house paint, and everyday objects, he created some of the most instantly recognisable works of art in the twentieth century. Featuring sailing ships and boats from a bygone maritime world, Wallis drew inspiration from his time as a fisherman and as a merchant mariner in the North Atlantic dried cod trade.
His work soon attracted the attention of ‘proper’ painters like Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, and they began to collect Wallis’ work and to incorporate his ‘Primitive’ style into their own pieces. Over the next 17 years, his paintings were bought by art collectors such as Jim Ede who paid pennies for paintings that are now worth tens of thousands of pounds. You can see many of them in Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge.
Wallis died in the Madron Poorhouse in 1942. He was destined for a pauper’s grave, but Wallis had previously given a neighbour £20 to keep for him to cover his funeral expenses. The Salvation Army conducted the service as he had requested, and he was buried in Barnoon cemetery in St Ives near the house where he had lived with his wife, and in full view of the beach he had painted many times. The committal service was attended by a handful people who knew Wallis and some of his admirers, including Barbara Hepworth.
His simple, flat grave is covered with tiles by Bernard Leach and features a lighthouse with an open door and a small human figure with a walking stick in his right hand making his way up the steps into the tower.
The inscription reads:
ALFRED WALLIS
ARTIST & MARINER
1855 AUG 18 AUG 29 1942
INTO THY HANDS O LORD
Somehow, Bernard Leach got the birth date wrong, but 8 August 2025 marks the 170th year of Wallis’ birth into poverty and the centenary of his setting sail as a visionary artist.
The Voyage Home
Spirit-led and lonely sea battered hulls
black as Bible leather worn-cornered gilt-gone
to do business in great waters wonders in the deep
the white seas vertiginous and the sail’s
raw substrate of cereal box transcendent
of the same stuff as the lighthouse thrust of tower
and there you go over the cardboard bay
over the ripped off shreds the teapot
the wooden box the baccy tin the tabletop
mast stepped fenders stowed bound fathoms deep
the offshore banks the deadly reefs and all proportion
gone ships bigger than towns taller than trees
the old ways come close to shore you guessed it all
the way things used to be red sails gone West
past Godrevy out into Atlantic cold
grey walls of ice haloed fish as big as whales
then back like Jonah from the gates of death
the voyage home those lonely watches of the night
and tack at last a course around the mournful Stones
haul tight and keep the kindly light to port
into the arms of the boat and fish-filled bay
into the hands of the Lord.