Did Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) and Jim Ede (1895–1990) take advantage of Alfred Wallis (1855–1942)?

 

 

 

James Scott

 

 

 

Ben Nicholson (1894–1982) and Jim Ede (1895–1990) each bought a great many paintings by Alfred Wallis (1855–1942) soon after he was ‘discovered’ in St Ives, in the late summer of 1928. They paid what seem trivial sums of money for them. Were they simply taking advantage of a lonely, isolated, semi-literate retired sailor, who took up painting aged 70 after his wife died? This question has often been asked and there are many aspects to be considered when seeking the answer.

Nicholson and Ede probably met in 1924. Both were at critical periods of their careers. They became life-long friends, and both lived to a great age. Nicholson and his first wife, Winifred, moved into a farmhouse, Bankshead, built on the remains of Hadrian’s wall, during this year. Here, Ben Nicholson began to develop a primitive style of landscape painting while exploring the surrounding wild Cumberland hills and moorlands. He also further developed a naïve approach to still-life painting. This was much admired by his earliest patron, Helen Sutherland. She wrote in her diary, of her first purchase entitled 1925 (Still Life, Bottle and Goblets) (Pl 1), ‘My goblets are impressive because the inward idea – life – is big, weighty, though it is puzzling to say how this spiritual thing has been expressed in goblets and their shadows, – what this picture says is spiritual and is said in paint.’^[1]

 

 

The illustrations are of works by Alfred Wallis (1855–1942) unless otherwise stated

1 Still Life, Bottle and Goblets (1925) by Ben Nicholson (1894–1982). Oil on canvas, 54 x 75cm

 

 

Ede worked as an assistant curator at the National Gallery at Millbank in London (which became the Tate Gallery formally in 1932), mainly at this time cataloguing photographs. He too much admired the naïve still-life style in Nicholson’s recent painting. His biographer, Laura Freeman, wrote of a very similar painting from 1925, Jar and Goblet, ‘Jim thought the subject was friendship.’ He said of it, ‘What came to my mind was the togetherness of these two objects, and their separateness: the effect of one line on another, the flow of one to the other, and I scarcely saw that they were vases.’^[2]

Ben and Winifred’s first child, Jake, was born in June 1927. When in London they lived on the southern edge, in 20 Dulwich Common. Also, when in London, they regularly visited Ede and his new wife, Helen, who kept ‘open house’ at teatime on Sundays at their house in North London, in Hampstead, often entertaining an extensive group of artistic friends. Ede’s annual salary at the Tate at that time was £250. Although he had only been working there for about three years, he was already somewhat frustrated by his limited role. Collecting works of art was central to Ede throughout his life. He would collect very diligently and thoughtfully. He also supported good causes, and gave money to his artist friends generously, when funds allowed. He was shortly to make the two most important purchases of his life. In 1927, he bought the estate of the sculptor, Henri Gaudier Breszka, who had been killed in the trenches in Northern France in June 1915. Gaudier’s estate, which included about 1,500 drawings, 19 sculptures and 13 paintings was passed to the Treasury and eventually ended up being stored at the Tate Gallery. Ede paid £60 for it. In order to avoid being accused of insider trading, he made the purchase with his friend, the American painter Edward McKnight Kauffer, acting as an intermediary.

Like Gaudier, Ede had also seen trench warfare, in his case with the 6th Battalion of the Welsh Borderers. He had endured prolonged shelling and a gas attack in January 1916 in Southern Belgium, near the French border, when there was extremely fierce fighting, with heavy losses, and Ede was much affected by this experience. He developed gastritis and jaundice and was transferred to hospital near Calais, and later to a convalescent home in the South of France. He very rarely thereafter spoke of the war.

A few weeks after acquiring Gaudier’s estate, while in Paris in December 1927 Ede bought a small brass sculpture, Le Poisson d’Or, from the Hungarian sculptor Constantin Brancusi for about £80. (This would have represented about a quarter of his annual salary at the Tate.) He paid for it in two instalments and arranged for the sculpture to be brought to London by the ballerina Lydia Sokolova, to save the expense of the shipping.

Disaster struck at the Tate on the night of Friday 7 January 1928, when the Thames flooded in London. Four people were killed and about 4,000 were made homeless. The basement of the gallery filled with ice and water. Ede arrived during the night, worked all day and through the following night, furiously rescuing and drying paintings, up to his waist in water for much of the time. He was given breakfast at the Ritz Hotel on the Sunday morning by Sir William Burrell, whose collection was on loan to the gallery. The next few days and evenings at the gallery were extremely tense and busy. As described by Laura Freeman, although Turner’s watercolours and drawings were ‘miraculously preserved, the waters seeped into Jim’s limbs and mind, and he found himself dwelling again on Flanders and the trenches, … flooded with memories of the war.’^[3]

Two months later, the painter Christopher Wood (1901–1930) stayed with the Nicholsons in Cumberland. Winifred recalled ‘His arrival was like a meteor, – the wild country delighted him. We all three painted and thought of nothing else.’^[4] Nicholson bought an old Austin Seven car so that they could drive round the countryside to choose places to paint. Together they were wishing to continue the pursuit of a newly found kind of primitivism. Perspective was to be rejected in new forms of flat two-dimensional directness and simplicity. Nicholson remembered that ‘The aim was to make something particularly primitive, sustained and enduring.’^[5]

Wood returned to Paris, but later in the year joined them again for more painting in Feock, on the Helford River in South Cornwall. During this stay, they drove one day to St Ives, about thirty miles away. Wood had stayed there two years previously for about two months, painting happily and successfully in a small bungalow overlooking the sea. It was Nicholson’s first visit. They wandered admiringly around the town and harbour and in the early evening, shortly after leaving Porthmeor Beach, they passed an open door in Back Road West, through which they saw ‘some paintings of ships and houses on odd bits of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall, with particularly large nails through the smallest ones’.^[6] They were captivated. They knocked on the door and there, recalled Wood, rather incongruously, was ‘Alfred Wallis, looking like Cezanne.’^[7]

The details of Wallis’s past life and lifestyle up to that time would become evident during the next few years, and were very simple. He was 73 years old when they met and had been born in Devon. His mother died when he was about 10 years old, at which time he went to sea. In the mid-1870s he lived in Penzance with the family of a friend, George Ward. Before leaving on a trip to Newfoundland in April 1876, he had married Ward’s widowed mother, Susan. He was aged 20, and she 43. They had two children – a son, who only lived for a few weeks, and a daughter, who died when aged 15 months, but by all accounts Wallis and Susan were very happy together.

In 1882, when his sea-faring career ended, they moved to St Ives and set up a marine store, dealing mainly in secondhand and salvaged goods and initially lived near the harbour. In 1908, they bought a small cottage at 3 Back Road West, just behind Porthmeor Beach, for £93. The marine store closed in 1912, partly owing to a dramatic decline in the fishing industry in North Cornwall.

Susan died in 1922, and Wallis started to paint about three years later and thereafter it became his main activity. (He and Susan were members of the Salvation Army and he never painted on a Sunday.) The cottage was tiny, with two rooms downstairs and a bedroom upstairs. The front room opened directly onto the road and was dominated by a table and all his work seems to have been done on it. The room was always full of paintings; he never went outside to paint; and there was a small box-shaped couch on which he slept. The back room was a small scullery, in which was an indoor earth lavatory, which was emptied now and then into the sea. There was a small wooden staircase, up which he and Susan would have climbed with a candle or oil-lamp to go to bed, but he did not go up to the bedroom after she died. Other features included a stuffed magpie in a glass case on the mantelpiece in the front room, two books, a very large bible, and a life of Christ. There was no electricity or running water.

Wallis was very short, probably only about four feet six inches tall, and was described to the artist, sculptor and writer Sven Berlin, as being ‘too short to fall over’.^[8] He was also, by the time Nicholson met him, very deaf, but Barbara Hepworth described him as ‘the most serene and dignified man I have ever met’.^[9]

When they met, Nicholson immediately wanted to buy a painting, and asked Wallis what the price would be, to which he answered, ‘Gimme what you like.’^[10] The first painting that Nicholson chose was named by him ‘Schooner and Lighthouse’(Pl 2) and it was, of course, the first painting that Wallis sold, for which Nicholson gave him 2s 6d. Wood and Nicholson returned to Feock, presumably with the painting.

 

 

2 Schooner and a lighthouse (undated). Oil and pencil on card, 16 x 30.5 cm

 

 

Nicholson was with Winifred and the one-year-old Jake. Wood was with his new lover, the Russian artist Frosca Munster and a few days later the group moved to St Ives. The Nicholsons took a flat near the cemetery above the town while Wood and Munster moved into a cottage overlooking the beach, near Back Road West. They continued to paint and saw Wallis regularly. Nicholson bought several more paintings, and photographed others.

The Nicholsons returned to London after about six weeks, Ben shortly before Winifred and Jake. Nicholson took his Wallis paintings and some photographs of others back to Dulwich Common and showed them to various artists and friends whom he thought might be interested. The two who were the most intrigued from the outset were Jim Ede and the poet, writer and critic Herbert Read (1893–1968). Ede wrote to Nicholson on 20 October: ‘You can’t expect me to pay much attention to pictures by you or by Winifred when you send me this by Wallis. It is enchanting.’^[11]

Wallis started to send packages of paintings to London, initially to Nicholson, who wrote, ‘They were done up in many sheets of old brown paper, criss-crossed and knotted with a thousand pieces of string’,^[12] some with sealing-wax added. Parcels were soon also sent to Ede. The paintings came without titles but many were given simple titles by Nicholson and Ede. There was, however, occasionally a long description of the painting in Wallis’s handwriting on the back of the painting, usually including capital letters. Thus, an early package addressed to Nicholson at ‘20 Dulwick Coman’, dated 28 November, included a painting, on the back of which was written ‘St Ives Bay with fishing Boat Drove a shore over by Hayle a Steem Drifter’. Some paintings kept these as titles. Some acquired two titles. Many remained untitled. Nicholson would keep a few that he particularly liked and return the rest, with a small amount of money as a postal order. As noted by the writer Edwin Mullins, ‘Neither Nicholson nor the other collectors whom he put in touch with Wallis had much money at the time. Nicholson probably bought many more of Wallis’s paintings than he sold of his own during the same period.’^[13] And Nicholson wrote later ‘He [Wallis] appeared to ignore the money when he sold a painting.’^[14] Wallis would usually rework the ones that were returned, as he had very limited materials.

Ede recalled ‘When I first began to get paintings by Wallis, they would come by post, perhaps 60 at a time, at a price of one, two or three shillings according to size. I once bought as many as 20, but usually could not afford as many.’^[15] After hearing about the circumstances in which Wallis lived, Ede contacted a Miss Bromby in St Ives and asked her to visit him. He wrote to Nicholson on 13 December that Miss Bromby had reported that Wallis was working hard but that ‘he says he will have to do less as it is only a hobby, so you mustn’t overwork him, poor old thing’. The next batch were ‘… all grey, – he’s feeling grey it seems’.^[16]

Both Nicholson and Ede promoted Wallis’s works whenever possible and Nicholson put two of his paintings into the next exhibition (the ninth) of works by the prominent ‘Seven and Five Society’ at Arthur Tooth’s Gallery in March 1929. They were given titles of Lugger and Mounts Bay with prices of £7 and £4, respectively. This was the first time that Wallis’s paintings were seen in public and he was called ‘guest exhibitor’ in the catalogue. There is no record of whether Wallis knew that his paintings were exhibited in this way, or whether either painting sold. It seems that Lugger was later given the title PZ 11 ‘The Flying Scud’ (Pl 3), and was subsequently owned by Marcus Brumwell, a marketing executive, collector and neighbour in Dulwich, whose suggestion it had initially been for the Nicholsons to holiday in Feock. The vorticist painter and writer Wyndham Lewis, reviewing the exhibition, thought that ‘Wallis’s work far outshone that of his admirers’.^[17]

 

 

3 PZ 11 ‘The Flying Scud’, 1928). Oil on board, 40 x 60 cm

 

 

Ede had a further minor break-down at this time with cumulative persistent symptoms arising from his experiences during and after the flood at the Tate, with insomnia and a variety of associated nervous complaints. In April, he was given six months sick leave from the gallery.

Wallis was visited in May 1930 by Lucy Wertheim, the patron and sponsor of Christopher Wood, who was to open her own gallery in London in 1930. She had been told of Wallis and his work by Wood and went with two friends. She recalled in her autobiographical Adventure in Art (1947): ‘He was thrilled at three people calling on him. I found the old man in his little hovel (for it seemed to me no better) painting away with what seemed to be boat paint on odd bits of canvas, old photographs and scraps of cardboard. As the old man was almost completely deaf it was not a very easy matter to “talk business”, but after much smiling and gesticulation he gathered that I was anxious to become the possessor of some of his paintings and was prepared to pay for them. He was so completely unmercenary that I believe he would have been satisfied with one tenth of the sum I gave him for the collection that he handed over to me.’

Lucy Wertheim was the only gallerist to have an exhibition of Wallis’s paintings during his lifetime, writing, ‘I showed twenty of them in the gallery in the early spring of 1931.’ Again, there is no record that Wallis knew of this exhibition, or whether, if any pictures sold and to whom, and for how much. In any event Wertheim recalled, ‘They did not cut much ice, either with the public or the critics. Now, after a number of years (she completed the first draft of this book in 1939), Wallis is coming into his own and his work is frequently compared with Christopher Wood. Indeed, I have often heard it remarked that Wallis influenced the young painter.’^[18]

Ede, for his part, hung several paintings by Wallis in his office at the Tate, where they joined works by the Nicholsons and Gaudier-Brzeska. He also sent Wallis materials which he thought he would like to paint on. Neither he nor Nicholson still had much spare money to buy paintings, and Nicholson saw Wallis infrequently in the 1930s. He and Winifred had two further children, Kate, born in 1929, and Andrew in 1931. In 1931 Nicholson earned £90.

Helen Sutherland, who continued to help him financially sent him a cheque for £50 shortly after he left Winifred and moved in with Barbara Hepworth at 7 Mall Studios in Hampstead, in early 1932. He was also particularly grateful to Ede, who bought a painting from him a few months later, for £22. He wrote, ‘The food bills had reached a point where there was no credit left.’ They had been reduced to ‘… breaking open a small money box to get our bus fares. Your £22 seems more like £222 & gives us liberty to work.’^[19]

Nicholson enjoyed renewing his friendship with Wallis in September 1932. He was staying with Winifred who had rented a house in Par, near St Mawes in South Cornwall, and they went to visit Wallis. There is no record of whether he bought more paintings during this visit, although it is likely that he would have done. Wallis often in his letters to Nicholson suggested that he and Ede should go to St Ives and choose paintings. He wrote to Nicholson in April 1934, ‘I got a nice lot here would suit you and Mr Ede. But I would rather you to com and see and select for yourselves.’ And again, later that year, in September, he wrote to Ede, ‘I should lik for you to come and select for yourself any tim.’^[20]

It is strange that Ede never went to St Ives to meet Wallis. He knew St Ives, which he had visited when he had been, for a short time, a student of the painter Stanhope Forbes in Newlyn before the first World War. He preferred to visit Helen Sutherland in her large, mainly Regency, manor house, Rock Hall in Northumberland, which had 15 bedrooms. This was probably because he would always meet many friends when staying there, particularly David Jones, another artist whom Ede regularly supported financially.

The writer and critic Adrian Stokes (1902–1972) had, in 1933, turned his attention from Italian art and the Renaissance to modern art in Britain, and in 1934, aged 30, stood in for Anthony Blunt as art critic of The Spectator, writing particularly about Nicholson and Hepworth. He fell in love with St Ives after taking painting lessons himself briefly there in early 1936 and visited the town again the following summer when he met Wallis, recalling as others that his ‘tiny room was crammed with paintings’. Stokes also quickly bought paintings by Wallis, although finance was less of an issue because he had significant private means. Stokes would also write extensively about Wallis, particularly in relation to his use of colours.

Although still unsettled at the Tate, Ede’s annual salary was increased to £450 in 1930. He supplemented this by writing reviews and the introductions to catalogues of exhibitions, particularly those that included works by Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Alfred Wallis. He received £26 monthly for a while as secretary of the Contemporary Art Society, and £90 annually from the rent for the top-floor flat in their house in Hampstead. He received small sums for stories that he read for the BBC, £5 or £10 now and then. He also, in 1930, published a biography of Gaudier-Brzeska, Savage Messiah, which was very well received. The frustration with his role at the Tate Gallery was fuelled by his perception of a general lack of interest in modern British art.

In the autumn of 1931, Ede spent a hectic four weeks in America. An aim of this trip was to investigate the possibility of finding a job as an agent between an American museum and contemporary artists in Britain and Europe. He made many useful contacts in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, very much enjoyed the trip, and conceived the idea of a possible lecture tour.

The first all-white reliefs that Nicholson produced in 1934 immediately divided opinion. Ede was uncertain about them and Ivon Hitchens remarked, ‘This is surely going too far.’^[21] Helen Sutherland, however, acquired several, though she wrote to him of the first one, ‘It is strange to me to like anything without having a good idea as to why I like it.’ She called them ‘My little darlings.’^[22] Barbara Hepworth gave birth to triplets in October 1934, at which time the couple received financial help from Hepworth’s close friend and neighbour in Hampstead, Margaret Gardiner. Although Helen Sutherland also continued to give Nicholson small amounts of money, she disapproved of his spending her money, for instance, for the purposes of staying in a hotel in Paris near Winifred for Christmas of that year. His earnings from painting remained modest and his declared income in the year 1936–7 was £119.9s.3d.

Ede eventually resigned from the Tate in 1936 and moved to Tangiers in the autumn. He immediately started to work seriously on his lectures and arranged a six-week tour in North America. He and Helen sailed from Lisbon on Christmas Day, arriving in Montreal about two weeks later. It was a very successful trip, in which they covered over 5,000 miles, while he gave more than 20 lectures.

The parcels from Wallis stopped at this time, although the letters continued for about three more years. He was knocked down by a car in March 1937 and, while his injuries are not recorded, it is clear that his general health now deteriorated. The tone of his letters to Ede changed from being interested and concerned to being increasingly cantankerous, and his handwriting further deteriorated. He wrote sadly in April 1938 that, ‘I thowght I was forgot.’ And in July that he was ‘… thinking of giving up the paints all together’.^[23]

In September 1939, Nicholson and Hepworth moved from Hampstead to the village of Carbis Bay, just along the coast eastwards from St Ives, initially staying with Adrian Stokes and his (now) wife, Margaret Mellis, who with the worsening situation in Europe had moved there a few weeks earlier. Nicholson and Hepworth arrived on 25 August in the middle of a thunderstorm, with the triplets, a nurse and a cook, all squeezed into a 1931 Morris Oxford, which Nicholson bought for £17, the proceeds of the sale of a picture. Hepworth took ‘one hammer and a chisel and lots of paints’.^[24]

Mellis remembered, about Wallis: ‘When we first went down there we looked after him, only he was Ben’s property, so to speak. So, after Ben came we didn’t go to see him quite so much because Ben went to see him then. By the time he was staying with us he didn’t buy any paintings. He’d bought so many really good ones. They were frightfully poor. Margaret Gardiner kept them going by buying their works all the time.’^[25] Nicholson and Hepworth moved, just after Christmas, into a small nearby house although Stokes paid the rent at the beginning and Nicholson persuaded Margaret Gardiner to pay for ‘… quite a few of Barbara’s precious carvings and my big paintings to be transported from London’.^[26]

Margaret Mellis recalled: ‘In the sitting room we had a white relief by Ben Nicholson, the very big one that is now in the Tate, which has got blue and black in it. He wanted to get it out of London. He said that if Adrian paid the carriage and the glass then he would lend it to us. It was in the garage for a while. Adrian bought many paintings from Wallis, and we hung them in the passages and bedrooms.’ Stokes made the frames. She also visited Wallis by herself and recalled, ‘I insisted on paying Wallis ten shillings when lots of people were buying his pictures for only two shillings. He said, “Take a painting and wrap it in newspaper.” He was sitting at the table. He didn’t mind what the money was. It was on board. I still have it. I wouldn’t get rid of that for anything.’^[27]

The general life at 3 Back Road West after Wallis was knocked down would have become more disorganised and difficult, and he became more isolated. There were reports of him shouting up the chimney at the devil, and also at his late wife, and of persecution by local children. He often, it seems, refused food bought for him by members of his extended family and his neighbour, Mrs Peters, as he thought he was being poisoned.

Sven Berlin (1911–1999) was a large bearded bohemian presence among the artistic community in St Ives. Born in Southeast London, he left school when aged 12 and worked for many years doing a form of acrobatic dance in musical shows around England with a partner called Helga, who became his wife. They moved to Cornwall in 1938, to a cottage outside St Ives, as he was keen to develop a career as an artist. He heard about Wallis and, particularly after meeting Nicholson and seeing Wallis’s paintings in Carbis Bay, became anxious to learn as much as possible about his life from conversations with his relatives and those who knew him in the town.

Ede and Helen went to America again, this time they were away for about two-and-a-half years, between October 1940 and February 1943. He had advertised his lectures widely among his new-found friends in museums and galleries. Initially they travelled around by train. In March 1941, he bought a second-hand two-seated Buick, in which they were to cover about 50,000 miles during the next two years. Before he left Tangier, Ede made himself familiar with the work of the Tangier War Emergency Fund, for which he wished to raise money. To begin with he gave two lectures a week for a fee per lecture of $100. (He had previously, when lecturing in England, charged £10. 10s.) By June 1942, he had raised about $7,000 for the emergency fund.

Herbert Read used Wallis’s painting ‘Cornish Port’ (Pl 4) to illustrate a survey of British art which was published in the magazine Art Now in 1933. In 1940 Hepworth took Read to visit Wallis and recalled:

When he opened the door quite suddenly he began to talk, and he spoke non-stop, I think, for something like forty minutes in a rather sonorous voice. We stood absolutely transfixed. He spoke of all his life, his friends, his troubles, his cousins, his enemies, the bible and the course that one must take in life. He mentioned that a distant cousin had gone to South Africa and ended in a pauper’s grave and that he himself thought that this was the most terrible thing that could happen to anybody. He said he’d saved £20 long ago and given it to a friend who would hold onto it so that he would have a proper grave, and he referred to this over and over again. It was a sort of epic poem of his life.^[28]

 

 

4 Cornish Port (undated). Oil on card, 25.7 x 31.4 cm

 

 

Read used a painting by Wallis, Houses and Animals, at the beginning of an article for the influential Parisian Magazine Cahiers d’Art in 1938, in which he discussed Wallis’s work.

In December 1940, Nicholson wrote jokingly to Read that he had learned the secret of long life from Wallis, ‘One simply must have long, thick (dirty grey) pants & put them on damp every Monday for the first 84 years – also it seems to help to keep one’s window shut, a ¼ inch layer of dust over all & to sleep in a coffin (no lid).’^[29] About four months later Wallis was found to be unable to look after himself and he was admitted to the Madron workhouse near Penzance in South Cornwall. Margaret Mellis recalled:

We were terribly upset. The next thing was we went and the paintings were there and the relieving officer was going to burn them. Adrian and Ben and I went down in the car… and we were going through them when all of a sudden, I felt a nip, nip, nip. I looked down at my blue sailor’s trousers. They had changed colour from navy to rust. A swarm of fleas was moving slowly up each leg. The others got bitten, so we bundled paintings into a rug and took them back to the house. Ben went off and walked straight into the sea, fully dressed, blue and white striped T-shirt, blue linen shorts, nice cotton cap, white shoes and socks. He stayed there until the fleas were drowned and then we went home. We took our clothes off in the garden and made people bring out large towels and we shoved all our clothes in the bath to get rid of the fleas. We had to put weights on the clothes to keep them under the water. My beautiful blue and white striped jersey which I’d just bought was ruined. The Wallises were left in the garage.^[30]

About 100 paintings were saved which they initially divided them among themselves: Nicholson had the first choice, then Stokes and then Mellis. And then, ‘They were offered to everybody we knew. It was very odd how uninterested people were. Everybody all around was told to come. Very few did. So, I took some more.’^[31] Many were given to Sven Berlin.

Wallis continued to paint and draw while in the workhouse and Nicholson took him four sketchbooks which he filled. He particularly drew with crayons during this time. For Christmas 1941, Stokes and Nicholson gave him some paints, in colours which they thought he would like. They bought them from a Mr Burrell, a decorator in the town from whom Wallis had bought paints.

Nicholson, continuing his promotion of Wallis, gave the painting called Cornish Port to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in early 1942. It would hang opposite one of Henri ‘Douanier’ Rousseau’s most famous paintings, La Bohémienne Endormie (Pl 5).

 

 

5 La Bohémienne Endormie by Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), 1897.
Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 200.7 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

 

Later that year, when visiting Wallis in July, Nicholson recorded, ‘As soon as he caught sight of me, he got up and came straight towards me saying, “I’ve been wanting to see you. I want black and white and green. Enamel. In tins. 6d each.”’^[32]

Ede and Helen were tiring of the travelling by the summer of 1942. He was only lecturing infrequently and was increasingly thinking of home and the continuing circumstances of the war. He wrote to Nicholson from San Francisco (his favourite American city), ‘What news from Cornwall? Is Alfred Wallis still alive? What are his paintings like? I miss them very much & I miss those that I have of yours.’^[33] On 28 August Back Road West was struck by machine-gun fire. One woman who was shopping was killed. Nicholson was on duty as a warden and went to help with the tidying up. The next day he wrote to Ede in America to explain that the previous summer Wallis had become ‘too old to look after himself and had been taken to the Madron Public Assistance Institution’. Nicholson described how he visited him regularly:

In the end he settled in v. well & with an extremely nice Welsh “master” and charming matron who looked after him well. It was not long before he was telling the nurses to mind what company they kept, – & after a month or two his ptgs were admired greatly by them & the cooks & the inmates! But about three weeks ago he took to his bed. I went over shortly after, and he seemed to me to be through with his life. Up till a short time ago he’d been drawing and painting, but he seems so old now and there is not much of him left. He asked after you once or twice some time ago and I said you were in America which seemed to comfort him as otherwise I think he thought that you had forgotten him and his work.^[34]

Wallis died on the day this letter was written. Ede’s letter, dated August, would probably have crossed in the post with this letter.

Although since the death of his wife, Wallis had become a ‘lapsed’ Salvationist, Stokes was able to add £4.10s to the £20 which he had given to his neighbour, Mrs Peters, to pay for a full Salvation Army service and thus avoid a pauper’s grave. The funeral took place on 3 September and he was buried in the main part of Barnoon cemetry, with a fine view of Porthmeor Beach and the sea, where his wife Susan is also buried.

The last letter from Wallis in Nicholson’s papers is an undated note in a wobbly hand saying, ‘Its my wish for you to give Them a picture what Will suit them’^[35] – implying that Nicholson had made some forward planning before his death. Nevertheless, although about 100 paintings had already been saved, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, whose studio was next to Back Road West and who also knew Wallis and admired his work greatly, recalled, ‘The locals thought nothing of his art and a cartload was destroyed.’^[36] Nicholson wrote to John Rothenstein, the Director of the Tate gallery, in April 1943 suggesting that the gallery should have an exhibition of works by Wallis but although Rothenstein replied that he had ‘no objections’, nothing came of the idea.

Berlin continued his interviews after Wallis died, and in December (1942) he joined the Royal Artillery. He took a considerable amount of material with him when he left St Ives and wrote much of the first draft of his book about Wallis in billets, barracks, canteens and tents, and sent an early part of this manuscript to Nicholson in January 1944 which included a footnote showing that at one time Nicholson had only paid 13 shillings for nine paintings. Hepworth wrote to Berlin a few weeks later denying that Nicholson had exploited Wallis and told him, ‘On one occasion we tried to keep fewer things & send the same money so that we paid more for each.’^[37] Nicholson merely returned Berlin’s manuscript, congratulating him on his efforts and suggesting an extensive list of corrections.

Berlin was with the Royal Artillery at the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944 and saw action near Arnhem in Holland, after which he was admitted to hospital in Brussels, from where he wrote to Helga describing himself as being ‘yellow and feeling lousy’.^[38] He still had his Wallis manuscript with him when he was flown home to hospital in Penzance. His book Alfred Wallis – Primitive was eventually published in 1949. Berlin, at one time, owned 96 paintings or drawings by Wallis and gave most of them away.

Another who was fascinated by Wallis’s life and work was Dr Roger Slack, who became a General Practitioner in St Ives in 1947. This was just before the National Health Service was founded when practices were still purchased. He served as a naval surgeon during the war on destroyers escorting convoys through the U-boat infested North Atlantic. Although originally from Warrington in Cheshire, he was attracted to St Ives by the harbour and the fact that the GP practice was relatively small and not very expensive. Many of the artists living in and around St Ives became his patients. Over a period of about 40 years Dr Slack recorded the observations of many members of Wallis’s extended family and people who had known him. He initially recorded his findings in notebooks and latterly used a tape recorder. He summarised some of his conclusion:

I thought Wallis was probably straight forward. He wasn’t Cornish. He was a bit of an outsider, – but not much. He was an ordinary part of the community. He retired early and took up painting because he was lonely. He’d been drawing long before. There’s no real evidence that he was odd or peculiar, except that he painted. He became old and paranoid, obsessed with his paintings. He got very dirty. I feel he was ordinary in lots of ways and extremely unordinary in others. He wasn’t in any way different from other people when younger. He worked hard. He was certainly full of character, not odd, but he painted pictures that are very odd.^[39]

And, in relation to his legacy, Alan Bowness, Director of the Tate Gallery from 1980 to 1988 (and Nicholson’s son-in-law), wrote in the introduction to a major exhibition of Wallis’s works at the Tate in 1968, which included 177 works:

When art reaches an over-sophisticated stage, someone who can paint out of his experience with an unsullied and intense personal vision becomes of inestimable value. The way in which he [Wallis] used the very simple means at his disposal, – yacht paint and odd irregular scraps of cardboard and wood – is an object lesson to any painter. Wallis shows such easy natural mastery of colour and forms that one can only look with delight and astonishment. It must be enough to make real artists (which he always said he was not) despair.^[40]

Nicholson and Ede were undoubtedly responsible for bringing Wallis’s work to the attention of galleries, museums and other artists and to all who were concerned with Modern Art in Britain. How much of any of this would have been of interest to Wallis, had he known about it, is debatable. Wallis, as repeatedly recorded, showed no interest in money. Although they bought a great number of his paintings for prices that now seem trivial, it should be borne in mind that neither Nicholson nor Ede had much money at the time. Laura Freeman wrote that Ede paid ‘what he could afford’.^[41] And so, it seems, did Nicholson, who had difficulty earning much money from his paintings until well after Wallis had died. The painter and writer Patrick Heron, recalled: ‘Ben sold one of his best hard-edged abstractions to a friend of mine, in 1948, framed by himself for £15, and he wrote, “If you would like to pay me in monthly instalments of £1 it’s OK with me.”’^[42]

The last word must go to Roger Slack who when interviewed for the BBC in 1981 said:

After Wallis died a neighbour found a box stuffed full of uncashed postal orders on his mantelpiece. Ben would pay him 15 bob, which he could ill afford, as a postal order to send to Alfred, who wouldn’t cash it. He was terrified of losing his old-age pension. I’m absolutely sure they didn’t exploit him. Having gone to great trouble to find out as much as possible about him, there’s really nothing to say about him. His paintings are what matter, – they’re very eloquent.^[43]

 

 

Advance notice James Scott has organized an exhibition at Pallant House, Chichester, opening in November 2026, of paintings by Alfred Wallis chiefly from the collections of the many artists who admired his work.

 

 

1. Peter Khoroche, Ben Nicholson. Drawings and Reliefs, London 2008, pp20–21. ↑
2. Laura Freeman, ‘Ways of Life’ Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, London 2023, p45. ↑
3. Freeman, p82. ↑
4. A Painter’s Place. Banks Head, Cumberland, 1924–1931, exh cat., Abbot Hall Kendal, 1991, Introduction by Judith Collins. ↑
5. A Painter’s Place, p9. ↑
6. Ben Nicholson, ‘Alfred Wallis’, Horizon, VII, 37 (1943), pp50–54. ↑
7. 7 Richard Ingleby, Christopher Wood An English Painter, London 1995, p192. ↑
8. Sven Berlin, Alfred Wallis. Primitive (1939), Bristol 1992, p16. ↑
9. ‘Portrait of Alfred Wallis’, compiled by Edwin Mullins, BBC Radio 3, 29 May 1968, TAV 275AB. ↑
10. Edwin Mullins, Alfred Wallis. Cornish Primitive Painter, London 1967, p31. ↑
11. Laura Freeman, p87. ↑
12. Nicholson, loc cit. ↑
13. Mullins, Alfred Wallis, p32. ↑
14. Nicholson, loc cit. ↑
15. Jim Ede, Kettle’s Yard: An Illustrated Guide, Cambridge 1980, p9. ↑
16. Freeman, p88. ↑
17. Michael Bird, The St Ives Artists, London 2008, p53. ↑
18. Lucy Wertheim, Adventure in Art (1947), London 2022, p151. ↑
19. Sarah Jane Checkland, Ben Nicholson. The Vicious Circles of his Life and Art, London 2000, p109. ↑
20. Freeman, p89. ↑
21. Khoroche, p39. ↑
22. Frances Spalding, ‘Helen Sutherland. Patron, Collector and friend of Ben Nicholson’, Burlington Magazine, CLV (2013), p483. ↑
23. Freeman, p172. ↑
24. Charles Harrison, ‘Mondrian in London’, Studio, vol 172, no. 884 (December 1966), p285. ↑
25. Margaret Mellis interviewed by David Lewis and Sarah Fox-Pitt, 31 May 1981, TAV 272AB. ↑
26. Checkland, p183. ↑
27. Margaret Mellis interviewed by Mel Gooding for ‘Artists’ Lives’, 2008. Tate Library. DVD 466. ↑
28. Mullins, 1968. ↑
29. Checkland, p204. ↑
30. Margaret Mellis 1981. ↑
31. Mullins 1968. ↑
32. Nicholson, loc it. ↑
33. Freeman, p189. ↑
34. Checkland, p216. ↑
35. Checkland, p434. ↑
36. Wilhelmina Barns-Graham interviewed by Tamsyn Woollcombe, June 1994, TAV 1752. ↑
37. Checkland, p224. ↑
38. David Wilkinson, The Alfred Wallis Factor, Cambridge 2017, p108. ↑
39. Roger Slack interviewed by David Lewis and Sarah Fox-Pitt, 23 June 1981, TAV 266A. ↑
40. Alfred Wallis’, exh cat., London 1968, Alan Bowness, Introduction. ↑
41. Freeman, p89. ↑
42. Patrick Heron interviewed by David Lewis and Sarah Fox-Pitt, 11 April 1981, TAV 247AB. ↑
43. Roger Slack 1981. ↑