Alfred Wallis (Devonport, August 18, 1855 – August 29, 1942) was a Cornish fisherman and artist. On leaving school Alfred became an apprentice basket maker before becoming a mariner in the merchant service by the early 1870s. His paintings are an excellent example of naive art: perspective is ignored and an object's scale is often based on its relative importance in the scene. This gives many of his paintings a map-like quality. Wallis painted his seascapes from memory, in large part because the world of sail he knew was being replaced by steamships. As he himself put it, his subjects were "what use To Bee out of my memery what we may never see again..." Having little money, Wallis improvised with materials, mostly painting on cardboard ripped from packing boxes using a limited palette of paint brought from ships chandlers.
[Oil on board covered in dark green cloth, 6.5 x 7.5 inches]
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