Wreck of the Alba

A popular picture at the heart of the summer exhibition in the Tate, St Ives is 'The Wreck of the Alba' by Alfred Wallis.

It depicts what happened just outside the gallery, and to the entire nation.

Michael Bird, art historian and surfer, uncovers the universal and local significance of this great and popular painting.

Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson are great St Ives artists. But it is Alfred Wallis, the old fisherman and sailor who in his 70s began painting with left over boat paint on bits of cardboard, who combines greatness (he's acknowledged by the critics) with real popularity. Wallis is on the mugs, in the auction room (one painting sold recently for £50,000) and he's big in Japan.

In the gallery above Porthmeor Beach people huddle around The Wreck of the Alba, his painting of a ship on its side, overwhelmed by a huge, cold wave. Just outside surfers talk about 'going down boiler end', the east of the beach, where the waves break biggest and low tide exposes a huge rusty cylinder from that ship, after which one of St Ives' new upscale restaurants is named.

The Alba, wrecked on Porthmeor on 31 January 1938, lives on in the imagination because - like the Torrey Canyon or the Titanic - it caught the historic moment. She was carrying coal, dug by Welsh miners, to fascist Italy, part of Chamberlain's attempt to keep Mussolini and Hitler sweet.

The courageous rescue of the steamer's Hungarian crew - still remembered by locals - highlights St Ives' global connections, in contrast to Chamberlain's infamous appeal to British insularity (the Czechs were people about which 'we know little', too 'far away' to be of concern).

Alfred Wallis painted the shipwreck obsessively, his empathy as a seaman informing an image of great symbolic intensity. His Alba paintings are among his last, and close to his grave a stone commemorates the Hungarian mariners drowned in the wreck and buried together nearby.

But there is more to it than this: the name on the ship in the painting is ALBIAN - this is, as well as a tramp steamer, the ship of state, Albion, overwhelmed as war approaches.

And one of the drowned Hungarians is not in the communal grave close to Wallis. He was Jewish, and as there is no synagogue in Cornwall, was taken to Plymouth to be buried. Michael Bird has recently discovered the Rabbi's eulogy, which praises the people of St Ives for the rescue, hospitality and respect given to strangers. It is on such things that civilisation, he says, depends.

Michael Bird tells the story of Wallis's great painting, and reveals its wider political as well as local historical resonances using new material that he has discovered.

He interviews people in St Ives who remember both Wallis and the disaster, the son of one of the lifeboat crew and the widow of the man who bought the painting from the artist for half a crown. He also speaks to Martin Clark, Artistic Director at Tate St Ives, people looking at the painting, and a surfer 'down boiler end'.

Michael lives in St Ives and has written several books and catalogues.

Producer: Julian May

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 2009.