The real story about Wallis is written in his work, but I will try to recall some of the facts about him and some of his remarks. He was born in 1855 and lived to be eighty-seven. He began painting when he was over seventy, as he said "for company" because his wife had died and he did not care for the rest of the company in St. Ives, where he lived for the last fifty years of his life.

In August 1928 I went over for the day to St. Ives with Kit Wood: this was an exciting day, for not only was it the first time I saw St. Ives, but on the way back from Porthmeor Beach we passed an open door in Back Road West and through it saw some paintings of ships and houses on odd pieces of paper and cardboard nailed up all over the wall, with particularly large nails through the smallest ones. We knocked on the door and inside found Wallis, and the paintings we got from him then were the first he made. In a recent Horizon there was a description of how Klee brought the warp and woof of a canvas to life; in much the same way Wallis did this for an old piece of cardboard: he would cut out the top and bottom of an old cardboard box, and sometimes the four sides, into irregular shapes, using each shape as the key to the movement in a painting, and using the colour and texture of the board as the key to its colour and texture. When the painting was completed, what remained of the original board, a brown, a grey, a white or a green board, sometimes in the sky, sometimes in the sea, or perhaps in a field or a light

house, would be as deeply experienced as the remainder of the painting. He used very few colours, and one associates with him some lovely dark browns, shiny blacks, fierce greys, strange whites and a particularly pungent Cornish green.

Since his approach was so childlike one might have supposed that his severe selection of a few colours was purely unconscious, but I remember one day he was complaining that he was short of some colours, and when I asked him which, he said he needed rock-colour and sand-colour, and I got these for him in the yacht-paint he was using. Kit Wood remarked that it might easily spoil his work to give him new colours when so much of its point depended on the use of a few, but it seemed to me that since he had asked for them he must be ready to deal with them. Next day he made a new painting, using, of course, rock-colour for anything but rock and sand-colour for anything but sand, and keeping to his usual small number of colours; and as I went out, having admired the colour of the painting (we had, of course, not spoken to him about the number of colours he used), he said: "You don't want to use too many colours." All the same, he was still sufficiently childlike to make the "s" at the end of his signature whichever way round he felt inclined to, and, when I showed him a reproduction of one of his paintings in a book, to push it away and remark: "I've got one like that at home."

The neighbourhood where he lived regarded him as an eccentric curiosity and his paintings as nothing at all. He was a very fierce and lonely little man and I think it obviously meant a very great deal to him (almost everything, in fact, as it does to any artist) to have the idea in his paintings appreciated and taken seriously; and although he appeared to ignore the money when he sold a painting, he was really very proud of selling his work, and the grocer to whom he used to take cheques which were posted to him, said that he used to come in with them as proud as punch.

When I returned to London I showed his work to many friends, and he soon had a large number of admirers like H. S. Ede, Herbert Read, Adrian Stokes, Geoffrey Grigson, C. S. Reddihough, John Aldridge, Helen Sutherland, Margaret Gardiner, John Summerson, Barbara Hepworth, Winifred Dacre and many others. Ede in particular took a great deal of trouble about him and his work, and several Wallis's were usually to be seen hanging in his office at the Tate Gallery. He used to post us parcels of paintings done up in many sheets of old brown paper, criss-crossed and knotted with a thousand pieces of string, and it was always exciting opening these parcels to see what good ones might be inside.

At about that time some of his paintings were shown in London at a "7 and 5" group exhibition at Tooth's Gallery, and later some also at the Wertheim Gallery; more recently I gave one to the New York Museum of Modern Art. These, I think, were the only paintings which have been exhibited, though the first article to be published in Cahiers d'Art, in 1938, on contemporary art in England, commenced with a reproduction of a particularly fine Wallis and contained an appreciation of his work by Herbert Read.

He was not apparently interested in the paintings of any other painters, although I think the fact that he lived almost next door to the St. Ives Art Gallery, and that artists were working all round where he lived, must have originally set him going. He did occasionally get hold of an old canvas with a portrait on it which someone had thrown away and would start to correct it, i.e. to make it into a Wallis, but he usually left off correcting it about half-way through and the result was rather astonishing. He used to refer to other artists as real artists, saying that he was not a real artist.

He enjoyed talking about his paintings, speaking of them not as paintings but as events or experiences. I can remember when looking at one of those paintings of houses, into which he put so much affection (and to which he gave such fierce expressions), he said "Houses-houses -- I dn't like houses-give me a ship and you can take all the houses in the world!" Another day, after talking about the war, he said: "To think that man has come to this," and, looking at a painting he had made of the Ark on Mount Ararat, he said: "What man requires is more worship in the valleys and on the mountain tops too."

On another occasion, after he had stood by his table and talked for a long time about mankind, and the Bible, and about £4° he had kept in a chest and which someone had stolen from him (an event which must have happened long ago but which he always referred to as if it had happened yesterday), and after he had told me to mind what company I kept and eXplained that he never kept any company, "male or female, town or country", as he was then very deaf and there was no possibility of replying, I held up a painting and pointed to a large, fierce-looking fish in it, as big as a fishing boat, near the edge of the sea, and said, "What's this?" He stopped talking, his face lit up with the most charming expression and he shrugged his shoulders. "That," he said, "that's a land-shark"; and he went on smiling for a long time after that.

As far as I could see he read only two books: an enormous, black Bible and an equally enormous, black Life of Christ. The Bible he read every day and continually pointed to it, saying that all that man required to know was written in there. He wrote in a letter in 1935: "i shall only do one in and out if i see any Thing new That strik my atension i Tell you what i am a Biblekeeper it is Red 3 hundreds sixty times a year By me and that is averyons Duity."

One day, on knocking at his door, I could get no answer and discovered from a neighbour that he had been ill and had been taken to Madron Institute. We explored the possibilities of having him removed from there and looked after, but under wartime conditions the difficulties proved too great. He was well cared for by the master and matron of the Institute, who were intelligent and extremely kind, and it was not long before he was telling the nurses to mind what company they kept, or before the inmates, nurses, matron, master and even the cooks were admirers of the ships he drew and painted, and he was working up to within a fortnight of his death. On one of the last occasions on which I saw him, about a month before he died, as soon as he caught sight of me he got up and came straight towards me saying: "I've been wanting to see you. I want black and white and green. Enamel. In tins. 6d. each." As he had recently been using blue I said: "What about blue?" "No," he replied, "I want Black and White and Green."

Wallis's motive: creating "for company" and his method: using the materials nearest to hand is the motive and method of the first creative artist. Certainly his vision is a remarkable thing with an intensity and depth of experience which makes it much more than merely childlike. In the painting reproduced here of a fishing boat entering a harbour there is a formidable organization, a rhythm in which the movement of the whole landscape (in which every form and space has been experi¬enced and perfected) and of the small boats leads up to the decisive purpose with which the fishing boat moves and the four men direct it into the harbour: his imagination is surely a lovely thing-look at the mysterious green field in which that strange animal moves behind the thatched houses, or at the ships sailing past that dark hillside with the moon beyond the trees and thickets so densely populated with birds - it is something which has grown out of the Cornish earth and sea, and which will endure.