Beschreibung:

Alfred Wallis (British, 1855-1942) Trawler at sea signed and inscribed by Terry Frost 'Alfred Wallis/coll Terry Frost' (verso) and further signed 'Terry Frost' (on the frame) oil on card 18.3 x 29 cm. (7 1/4 x 11 3/8 in.) Fußnoten Provenance Sir Terry Frost (1915-2003), thence by family descent to the present owner Private Collection, U.K. Terry Frost first arrived in Cornwall in Spring of 1946. Whilst he will have never met the mariner artist Alfred Wallis who died in 1942, nor did he adopt the naïve depictive idiom that had made Wallis so legendary among artists of the area, the two painters are strongly tied by their connection to the fishing town of St Ives. Wallis, a retired mariner who took up painting in his late sixties, lived at 3 Back Road West, St Ives. With no formal training, Wallis arrived upon a unique lexicon primarily concerned with mapping his coastal surroundings and recalling tales from his former life at sea. The subsequent embrace of Wallis by a section of avant garde artists, critics and patrons in the late 1920s, especially Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood intrinsically linked the fabled fisherman painter with the most modern of art produced in the town from Nicholson's arrival there in 1939. Terry Frost's association with St Ives began in the late 1940s when he spent three years in the town, initially living in a caravan near Carbis Bay, at the suggestion of Adrian Heath Frost returned to St Ives for stints in the 1950s and the 1960s before settling in nearby Newlyn in 1974. The location that had so inspired Wallis, informed much of Frost's early work and important paintings such as Walk Along the Quay (1950), Green, Black and White Movement (1950) and Harbour (1951) are indebted to the town. It is therefore fitting for Frost to have sought out Trawler at sea by Wallis for his own collection. It is a picture symbolic of the rich creativity that St Ives has yielded, and the tendency with which this has passed from generation to generation.