A Life of Alfred Wallis — Cornish Artist
Alfred Wallis is one of the most influential artists to come out of Cornwall in the last two-hundred years, although he lived most of his life never contemplating such an outcome to a long life.
Wallis was born on the 8th of August 1855 in the naval town of Devonport, Devon, although his parents were Cornish with his father Charles, a paving stone repairer from Penzance, and his mother Jane either from Penzance or the Scilly Isles. Soon after Jane’s death in 1866, Charles Wallis moved back to Penzance with his other son Charles, leaving Alfred to fend for himself.
According to Sven Berlin’s biography of Wallis, Alfred Wallis had joined the British Merchant Navy at the age of nine, spending the next twenty years or so as an ordinary seaman, most of them aboard the great trading schooners that plied the North Atlantic, taking coal and Italian wine to Canada, returning with salt cod caught off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, which eventually ended-up in Greece, Spain and Italy.
Wallis left the Merchant Navy in the late 1880s, taking up that job with Mr Denley in Penzance, and then St Ives. Wallis was also the first person to introduce and sell ice cream in St Ives, and a man who today is hailed a hero by the seagull population of the town.
