drawing
- Museum number
- 2003,0601.75
- Description
-
Two Ships on Blue Sea; large waves engulfing two black steam ships, the iron parts painted black, the rigging in graphite, one central with four figures in graphite, one set diagonally on a wave r, the sky exposed cardboard, painted on an irregular shaped piece of cardboard, rounded at the bottom edge, thought to be a cake-box lid. c.1939
Ship paint and graphite on cardboard
- Production date
- 1939
- Dimensions
-
Height: 175 millimetres
-
Width: 398 millimetres (irreg)
- Curator's comments
- Unmarked label on back of frame: no 47 Two Ships on Blue Sea c.1939
The following label was written by Kim Sloan for Places of the Mind, 2017:
The West Country was seen as a repository of traditional occupations and values. Its people were characterized as placid, content with their lot and at one with their landscape. Wallis was a fisherman before becoming a marine scrap merchant in St Ives in 1890. Around 1925, after he retired and his wife died, he took up painting to relieve his loneliness, using ship paint on scraps of cardboard or driftwood. On their first visit to St Ives in 1928, Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson ‘discovered’ Wallis, romanticizing him as a Cornish ‘primitive’, ‘grown out of the Cornish seas and earth’.
See also S. Smiles, 'Representation and reality in West Country landscapes', in K. Sloan (ed.), Places of the Mind: British watercolour landscapes 1850-1950, (London, 2017), pp. 118-139.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
ND, Southampton Art Gall, Ships on the Sea
1961, Waddington Galleries
2003-4 Dec-Apr, BM, Three Great Gifts: The David Brown Bequest
2017 23 Feb-27 Aug, London, BM, G90, Places of the Mind: British Landscape watercolours 1850-1950
- Acquisition date
- 2003
- Acquisition notes
- This item has an uncertain or incomplete provenance for the years 1933-45. The British Museum welcomes information and assistance in the investigation and clarification of the provenance of all works during that era.
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2003,0601.75
