Alfred Wallis

Acquired from the Artist by Ben Nicholson by whom gifted to Denis Mitchell, and thence by descent to the present owner

Dortmund, Germany, Museum am Ostwall, Exhibition of Sunday Painters, British Council tour (lent by Ben Nicholson);
London, Tate Gallery, Alfred Wallis, 30^th May - 30^th June,1968, cat. no.17 (lent by Denis Mitchell), with Arts Council Tour to City Art Gallery, York, Aberdeen Art Gallery, and Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal;
St Ives, Penwith Gallery, Alfred Wallis, October 1983;
Penzance, Newlyn Orion, Cornwall County Council Centenary Exhibition, 2nd - 28th October 1989;
Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Two Painters: Alfred Wallis & James Dixon, 1999-2000, with tour to Tate St Ives.

The sheet is sound and is laid down on a prepared backboard. The edges are intentionally uneven and there is the artist's pin hole in the centre of the upper edge. There appear to be two minor spots of staining, one below the boat in the upper left corner, the other left of the island with the lighthouse; otherwise the work appears in excellent overall condition. Under UV light there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held under glass in a simple white painted, wooden frame; unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
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St Ives Bay with Godrevy employs a compositional structure that occurs in several of Wallis' works, suggesting it was a subject of some meaning to him. With St Ives harbour to the left, Godrevy lighthouse to the right and the seine nets off Porthminster Beach, it draw comparisons with St Ives with Godrevy Lighthouse – one of Wallis' broadest views of St Ives bay (Private Collection); Three Ships and Lighthouse (Pier Arts Centre, Stromness) and This is Sain Fishery that use to be (Private Collection). The title of the latter refers to the practice of seine fishing, in which large nets were kept anchored near the shore until shoals of pilchards were spotted in the bay, at which point fishermen would then row out in their boats which were kept ready on the shoreline. The seine nets and rowing boats can be seen lining Porthminster Beach in the present work. This was a method of fishing, along with the industry itself, that was in decline in St Ives and which Wallis had witnessed first-hand. This is significant for an important element Wallis felt of his paintings was their link to the past, serving as instructive documents of what life was like in the old days. It is a train of thought that recurs again and again in Wallis' letters with only slight variations: 'What i do mosley is what use To Bee out of my own memery what we may never see again as Thing are altered all To gether There is nothin what Ever do not look like what it was sence i Can Rember (letter to Jim Ede, 6^th April 1935, see Edward Mullins, Alfred Wallis, MacDonald, London, 1967, p.36, letter illustrated p.37).

In Wallis' paintings, we see not only a recording of his memories but also a concern to express his experiences. Wallis painted what he believed to be real and the experience of this reality took precedence over any concerns with exact representation. Thus Wallis instinctively used a distorted, multi-perspective viewpoint and disregarded extraneous details that a 'real' artist would include, typified in the present work. The boats loom largest and heed this way and that. For Wallis the mariner, the sea was the most real thing of all and it is brought to life in St Ives Bay with Godrevy through the varying textures, angles of brushwork and shades of white, broken in places. Notably, Wallis leaves blank the water of the harbour and this distinguishes it from the open sea, thereby indicating a feeling of security within the harbour walls. This is a practice Wallis emphasised in similar works and it demonstrates his paintings went far beyond the purely descriptive and notably, how he was able to quite naturally employ the property of his materials to imaginative effect.

It was this instinctive and untutored approach, producing images of such freshness and vitality, which resonated so strongly with the modernist sensibilities of Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood upon their 'discovery' of Wallis in St Ives in 1928. St Ives Bay with Godrevy - naïve, expressive and immediate - illustrates just why Nicholson and Wood were so captivated, the former keeping the present work in his own collection before gifting it to Denis Mitchell when he left St Ives in 1958.