Leach, Nicholson, Wood and Wallis
While the early art colonists had been attracted to St Ives in pursuit of a general approach to painterly practice and a way of life, the town's significance in the 1920s can be related to two specific events. The first of these was the decision by Bernard Leach to establish a pottery there on his return to England from Japan in 1920.
Leach had trained as a painter and printmaker, but had discovered his vocation as a potter through contact in Japan with the oriental ceramic tradition. This he saw as combining the production of essentially functional objects with the potential for full artistic and spiritual expression, achieved through the relationship between a pot's physical form and its decoration. Leach was invited by a wealthy patron to set up a pottery in St Ives.
Here, initially with his friend and associate the great Japanese potter Shoji Hamada, he set about promoting his vision of the artist-craftsman. Over the years, Leach took on many local assistants as well as visiting students in his pottery. They became an important factor in drawing together the artistic life of St Ives with the wider local community. In 1927 Leach was a founder member of the St Ives Society of Artists.
The second formative event of the 1920s was the visit by the painters Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood to St Ives in August 1928, when they came across the 'naive' paintings of the retired seaman and marine rag-and-bone merchant Alfred Wallis. Nicholson later described how they '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... We knocked at the door and inside found Wallis.'
Wallis's images, often painted on irregularly shaped pieces of old card, appeared childlike and incompetent by academic standards. Yet their freshness and immediacy had a strong appeal for more sophisticated artists who were striving for these qualities in their own work. Wallis, a socially isolated and eccentric man, had taken up painting in old age and lived in near-poverty. He was lionised by artists and intellectuals in the wake of Nicholson and Wood's 'discovery' of him, and his paintings were avidly collected.
In various ways, therefore, during the 1920s St Ives can be seen as a place of pilgrimage for artists seeking renewal and a vision of simplicity that contrasted with the values of the metropolitan art world. In Nicholson's words: 'One was wanting to get right back to the beginning and then take one step forward at a time on a firm basis.'