Page 35 - Studio International - November 1966

Steamer and Fish. (Collection: the few he actually titled, the source of the idea seems to
Justin Knowles.) be Brunel's great metal bridge over the River Tamar at
Saltash, near Plymouth. Wallis was born at Devonport,
Top right
A letter from which is only a few miles from Saltash, and he was a
Alfred Wall is to child of four when the bridge was completed in 1859. It
H. S. Ede, dated
April 6,1935 seems likely to me that he was brought up to regard this
bridge—which looks immensely impressive to this day—
as one of the Wonders of the World, and that when he
started to paint some sixty years later this was one of
the images from childhood that came back into his mind. during the Second World War by Sven Berlin* at a time
Wallis rarely got the bridge quite right, but then he may when many more first-hand accounts of Wallis were
scarcely have seen it since he was a boy, and it may also available than they are now. While I have sometimes
have grown confused in his mind with numerous other found myself in strong disagreement with Mr Berlin (who
bridges and viaducts built in the West Country during never met Wallis and compensated with a highly roman-
the second half of the nineteenth century. But, whatever tic imagination), mostly over points of interpretation, his
shape it took, Wallis's bridge was always presented as an book remains an indispensable source of biographical
object of strange and dream-like grandeur. minutiae for which anyone interested in Wallis will
I have given here, in précis form, one or two of the con- always be grateful. It is to be hoped that this book will
clusions I drew from studying a quantity of Wallis's some time be reissued.
work. What proved much less conclusive were any Wallis's letters to Ede, while they supply no actual
attempts to compile a coherent biography of the man; details of his early life (except the splendid pronounce-
and very early on I abandoned such an endeavour in ment that he was born on 'the day of the fall of Serveser-
favour of an abbreviated biography which concentrated pool Rushan War'), do put across the extent to which
on those details of his life that had some bearing on his Wallis was re-living that early life in his paintings, and
work. this is what counts. In letter after letter, with only slight
First of all, there proved to be a severe lack of reliable variations, there recurs the thought 'i do most what used to
biographical data. Wallis was semi-literate, had no sur- Be what we shall see no more avery Thing is altered'.
viving children, and scarcely any friends. Except for a And whether or not Wallis actually went to sea, as he
few letters, he left no written records of his life. He was claimed he did, the sea and ships remained the most
not, furthermore, a native of St Ives where he lived for valuable memory to him, and this was what he painted
much of his life, but a 'foreigner' from Devonshire (he most often. Today West Cornwall is more concerned
was born in Devonport). This, added to the solitariness of with the tourist trade than the fishing trade, but in the
his nature, meant that few people knew him even in his years when Wallis was a young man the Cornish fishing
home town. Local accounts of him during his St Ives days industry was at its height, and from dozens of early photo-
(from 1890) contradict each other alarmingly, while graphs I have dug up it is often possible to count between
virtually nobody has provided any sound information at fifty and one hundred fishing-boats packed into the little
all concerning the thirty-five years before his arrival in Cornish harbours. (Today St Ives has about two!) These
St Ives. And since those first thirty-five years contained photographs supply a dramatic and rather moving ac-
his all-important years at sea—and even this part of his count of the kind of scene that would have been familiar
life remains conjectural— the fruitlessness of attempting a to the young Wallis, and to which his mind wandered
full biography does not need to be stressed further. What *Published by Nicolson and Watson in 1949 and now long out
is more, a biography of sorts does already exist, written of print.