Beschreibung:

ALFRED WALLIS (1855-1942) DESTROYER AT SEA Signed alfred wallis upper centre, oil and pencil on card, painted on the back of a Great Western Railway train schedule (Carbis Bay and St. Ives) for September 1928 30 x 60.5cm. Provenance: Purchased by the owner at Phillips London, 14th March 1983, Wallis only began painting in 1925 after the death of his wife three years earlier. Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood "discovered" Wallis in August 1928, possibly shortly before this painting was produced if one attempts to date it from the timetable verso. Nicholson recounted that momentous meeting in Horizon magazine in 1943: "..we passed an open back door in Back Road West and through it saw some paintings of ships and houses on odd pieces of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall, with particularly large nails through the smallest ones. We knocked on the door and inside found Wallis, and the paintings we got from him then were the first he made... He was a very fierce and lonely little man, and I think it obviously meant a great deal to him..to have the idea in his painting appreciated and taken seriously." Wallis preferred house or ship's paint to artists' oil paints. He favoured white, grey, black, brown, blue, pink and (in Nicholson's term) "a particularly pungent Cornish Green" which is evident here. To all intents and purposes, Wallis was uneducated but one observation of his, made as much in reference to his own pictures as those of other artists, reveals his innate understanding of the craft: "Been a lot of paintings spoiled By putin Collers where They do not Belong.." £12000-15000