Alfred Wallis: ships and boats

of works by Alfred Wallis from Kettle’s Yard which will travel to the University of Essex before heading across the Eastern region to the Time and Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth and The City Gallery, Peterborough. It is the first time in over 40 years that many of these works have left Kettle’s Yard.

This book highlights the best works in the Kettle’s Yard collection, including many that are not normally on display. It reflects the range of Wallis’ subjects as well as the extraordinary diversity of compositional and painterly effects that he created from his basic palette and materials.

It draws together new and archival materials in order to explore Wallis’ importance in terms of the context of Kettle’s Yard and the other artists in Ede’s collection. To this end, Michael Bird’s insightful new essay conjures the mood of the 1930s, the ideas and attitudes that coloured the ‘discovery’ and significance of Wallis for Ede and his circle with brilliant clarity. We have reproduced in full Ben Nicholson’s seminal introduction to Alfred Wallis, which was commissioned by the magazine Horizon in 1943 just a year after Wallis’ death. Nicholson’s words provide a contemporary response, and a vivid personal memory of Wallis the person. But the words of Jim Ede and Alfred Wallis are at the heart of this book.

These are drawn from letters and other unpublished sources, including a short text written by Ede in 1962, for the first solo exhibition of Wallis’ work at the Piccadilly Gallery in London.

Ede was a passionate champion of Wallis and helped to organise the 1962 exhibition. But he was one of a relatively small group of supporters. A note scribbled on the back of a letter in the archives reveals his frustration at the critical response to the 1962 exhibition: “The critics’ judgment of Alfred Wallis was sadly ineffective and beside the point with their talk of six year old children and the Douanier Rousseau; the former lacking in discipline or experience to instruct them and the latter being not naive but a highly conscious artist and one of the great geniuses of all time.

Alfred Wallis was experienced in the ways of ships and the sea, and had an immense discipline and instinct for selection and happened to express these things in terms of paint...It is unfortunate that the realm of painting is still subject in its critics (who are not themselves painters) to that lack of humility which thinks that the eye sees all there is to see. In other matters – medicine, science, Greek scholarship – the need for expert knowledge is recognised. George Moore knew this and when asked what he thought of Sargent replied ‘an artist is made by other