intheboatshed.net

IBTC class of 2008

The International Boatbuilding Training College at Lowestoft in Norfolk is having an open day on Saturday the 11th October. It’s the only weekend day in the year that it’s open to visitors - so grasp the opportunity and get along if you can. It sounds very much like a grand day out…

The latest addition to Jeff Cole’s wonderful collection - a postcard from 1914

This postcard is a new item in Jeff Cole’s collection. It’s a postcard that was sent on the 5th March 1914 to a Miss J Crookhall, Tasmania. Just months from the outbreak of World War 1, it seems so long ago but now that many people live well into their 80s it’s little more than a lifetime away.

The message reads ‘In this one you can see the little pleasure steamer from Torquay. It is about to go across I think. Best wishes, Eadie.‘

The boat number in the centre of the photo BM127, which would make sense in a picture of Brixham!

Thanks Jeff!

Examples of Alfred Wallis’s work. Click on each one
for a larger image

Like most other areas of human activity, the art establishment tends to favour its own - so no matter how bohemian they may be, most artists are cultured and educated, and quite often rather posh. But every now and again the art establishment finds an artist whose work it finds so interesting and charming that the usual rules no longer apply. Beryl Cook was one of these - and Alfred Wallis was another.

Wallis seems to have had many roles - he was first a basket-maker, then a hand on merchant seaman, then a deep-sea fisherman, and then ran a business as marine stores dealer in St Ives, buying scrap iron, sails, rope and other items until his business closed in 1912. He then went to work for a local antiques dealer, an experience that may provided some understanding of the world of objets d’art.

He seems to have begun painting in earnest after his wife died. Short of money as he was, he painted on whatever objects came to hand and his subjects were often seascapes painted from memories going back to the era before the steamships took over from sail.

Life changed for him in 1928 when a group of artists led by Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson set up the well known artists’ colony in the little town, for their arrival led to Wallis’s discovery by the art world.

Recognition doesn’t seem to have brought riches, for he eventually died in the workhouse in Penzance, but  Wallises are now highly collectible, and the artist behind them has become a legend. I gather that examples of his work have even been minaturised and made into fridge magnets…

Read all about Alfred Wallis and see the galleries of his work at http://www.alfredwallis.org.uk.

Wallis meets Ben Nicholson in 1928,
photographed by Christopher Wood