Page 31 - Studio International - November 1966

Mr H. S. Ede had acquired directly from Wallis during to the quality of Wallis's best work: it also suggested the
the 1930's, while Mr Ede was an Assistant at the Tate most unusual situation of a painter of some importance
Gallery. Wallis would send him rolls of them by post, whose public reputation, such as it was, rested almost
heavily enmeshed with string and knots, and Ede would entirely upon second-best work. And of what other
pick out the best and return the others with a small figure in twentieth-century English art could that
cheque. Ede was one of only '3 or 4 that haves all honestly be said ? In the case of Wallis this was a parti-
i do', as Wallis would frequently tell him. Looking at cularly unfortunate state of affairs since, being a lonely
Ede's collection it was immediately clear that at least old man with nothing else to do but paint, inevitably he
one-third of the paintings were of an incomparably overproduced. He often did as many as three or four
higher standard than those which had hitherto reached pictures in a day; and I estimate that in all he must have
the London galleries and auction-rooms. And it was not painted several thousand in seventeen years. I have seen
hard to see why this was so. The few large private col- at least one thousand of those that have survived; yet
lections of Wallis's paintings, hand-picked with the barely one hundred of these are paintings of any out-
greatest care during the artist's lifetime, still remained standing merit.
(like Ede's) substantially intact, or at least (as in the case So much, then, for the reasons for writing about Wallis
of Ben Nicholson's collection) within a circle of family at all. After that it became largely a matter of systemati-
and friends. With very few exceptions, for example a few cally visiting the main private collections, and of tracing
presented to the Tate Gallery, the paintings which had the surprising number of important pictures which had
reached a wider public were 'weed-outs' from these been given away, lent, lost, borrowed, or were to be
▪ St lves Harbour with seine collections, or else pictures which that handful of pre- found 'somewhere in one of those trunks in the attic'.
nets and Godrevy Lighthouse
(Collection: Henry Moore, war collectors had rejected as inferior. When he sees so many paintings by one man in a period
• O.M.) Not only, then, did this visit to Cambridge wake me of less than a year, a writer becomes increasingly aware of
those traits in a man's work, often by no means the most
obvious ones, which mark out his personality as an artist
and provide the real clues to his aims and to his imagina-
tion. To give one example: a feature of Wallis's work
which, I came to realize, recurred surprisingly often, was
the way in which he would compose a landscape as if it
were a kind of map—a composite record of towns, light-
houses, harbours, and other landmarks of West Cornwall
(which he knew and wished to set down), seen as if from
the air. These paintings were intended to be factual
records. What counted for him were the facts, not a
photographic likeness. So he would distort his images
according to what interested him, and bend and cram
them into whatever shape of paper or board he was
working on, invariably leaving out whole stretches of
coastline in his determination to get in everything that
really mattered.
A St Ives general practitioner, Dr Roger Slack, has in
recent years been recording, on tape, descriptions of Wallis
by elderly patients who knew him; and one of these has
described how on fine days Wallis would put his paintings
outside his cottage in Back Road West, St Ives, and
explain to passers-by what they were, details of sails and
'what every part was used for—and the ropes'. It was his
way of being an old fisherman airing his knowledge; and
this account serves to emphasize the entirely literal,
factual approach which Wallis adopted in his work. He

Four Ships leaving harbour:
characteristically painted on
a strip of discarded board,
untrimmed. (Collection:
Miss Kate Nicholson.)

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