Skip to main content
University of Cambridge

Open: Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm

We are closed on Bank Holiday Mondays

Kettle’s Yard will be closed for the festive period between 24 December 2024 – 1 January 2025 inclusive. We will open as normal from 2 January 2025.

Book Tickets

Open: Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm

We are closed on Bank Holiday Mondays

Kettle’s Yard will be closed for the festive period between 24 December 2024 – 1 January 2025 inclusive. We will open as normal from 2 January 2025.

Photo: © Kettle's Yard

Painting

Mount's Bay with four lighthouses, undated

Alfred Wallis
Oil, crayon and graphite on card (brown)
445 x 650 mm
[AW 13]
On display

About the artist

Born 1855 – Died 1942

Wallis was born in Devon. He worked as a fisherman and later a scrap-metal merchant in St. Ives, Cornwall. After the death of his wife in 1922, he turned to painting as a way of fending off loneliness.

Read the full biography

DISCOVER MORE

This was a very familiar landscape for Wallis. He knew it well both as a sailor and from the vantage point of the hills above St. Ives. The composition is centred around the conical form he often used for St. Michael’s Mount. This secures an off-centre pivot around which the rest of the landmarks and the ships revolve. Along the top are the familiar shorthand signs for the ports of Mullion and Porthleven and the Lizard lighthouse, on the Eastern coast of the bay. On the left, the two piers represent Penzance harbour, and at the bottom Newlyn harbour. The strip of land on the right is the Western shore, with the gap recognisable as Mousehole because of the protective reef, which Wallis rarely fails to show. This determines a composition dominated by disconcertingly angled piers, yet geographically very accurate.