Alfred Wallis was born on August 18, 1855 on Devonport, Cornwall, United Kingdom, into the family of Charles and Jane Wallis. His parents were from Penzance in Cornwall and moved to Devonport, Devon to find work in 1850 where Alfred and his brother Charles were born. Later, when Jane Wallis died, the family returned to Penzance.
After leaving school, Alfred was apprenticed to a basketmaker. He was mostly self-taught, and never had art lessons.
When Alfred left school, he joined the merchant navy, sailing schooners across the north Atlantic between Penzance and Newfoundland. He went to sea as a cabin boy and cook at the age of nine, and from about 1880 worked as a fisherman in Cornwall. In 1890 he opened a rag-and-bone store and after retiring from that did odd jobs, including selling ice cream. After his marriage and the death of his two infant children, Wallis moved his family to Saint Ives, where he worked for twenty years as a marine scrap dealer, buying and selling iron, sails, and rope for use on sailing boats.
After his wife died in 1922, Wallis took up painting 'for company', finding his inspiration in 'what used to be out of my memory what we may never see again.' Very poor, Wallis used whatever materials were to hand. "Two Masted Ship" was painted on the back of a G.W.R cheap fare schedule for 1928, "Two Boats" was painted on the back of a Selfridges box lid, and Wallis' palette was limited to the paint he could get from ship's chandlers.
In 1928, Alfred Wallis was discovered by Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, both established artists, when they came to Saint Ives to found an artist's colony. Wallis was propelled into a circle of some of the most progressive artists working in Britain in the 1930s. His influence on them was undeniable, although the influence was all one way, and Wallis continued to paint as he always had, with an immediacy and directness that they could never match.
Despite being introduced to art dealer, Jim Ede, and much admired by artists working at the time, Alfred Wallis died penniless in the Madron workhouse in 1942. Nevertheless, he influenced a generation of painters. As Nicholson remarked, Wallis' paintings represented 'Something that has grown out of the Cornish seas and earth and which will endure.' Wallis is buried in the Barnoon graveyard, which overlooks Porthmeor beach and the Tate Saint Ives, which holds many of his paintings.
Nowadays, Wallis' paintings are considered fine examples of 'naïve art', the most striking feature of which is probably the way in which perspective is ignored and the scale of objects is based on their relative importance in the scene rather than on their size.
Wallis married Susan Ward at St Mary's Church in Penzance in 1876, when he was 20 and his wife was 41. He became stepfather to her five children.
