A crowdfunding campaign has been launched to get a new edition of Matilda Webb’s biography of St Ives artist Alfred Wallis published.
The book was published last year, to much acclaim, and was officially launched at an event held in St Ives Museum.
Wallis (1855–1942) took up painting at the age of 70. As a child, he survived extreme poverty before becoming a Cornish fisherman, sailor, marine-stores dealer, Salvation Army soldier, and family man, living through hardship and enormous personal loss.
His paintings went on to have a profound influence on British Modern art, yet Wallis himself ended his days in the workhouse. Today, he is regarded as one of Britain’s best-loved artists, but the real story of his life and his remarkable years as an artist were clouded by myth.
“I’ve been busy with my Wallis book and was thrilled when it won the Holyer an Gof Cornish Book Awards in July,” Webb told St Ives Local. “Since then, the book has almost sold out, and I’m keen to keep the real story of Wallis in print through a new edition, using a crowdfunding campaign to help make this possible.” Read more about the crowdfund campaign, and support it, here.
The book has received exceptional reviews from art historians, writers, and artists. Andrew Wilson, former senior curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate Britain, described it as “an utterly compelling read — the depth of research is unparalleled and changes the understanding of Alfred Wallis’s painting in so many ways.”
Writer and art critic Colin Rhodes said: “This book makes Wallis a real person and not some semi-mythical modernist cipher.”
