In 1876, when he married a widow twenty-three years his senior, Wallis listed “Mariner, Merchant Service” as his profession. He also worked as an inshore fisherman. After he and his family moved to St. Ives, Cornwall, in 1887, he worked as a marine stores dealer. His wife died in 1922, and Wallis started painting three years later. In 1928 he met Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood, younger trained artists who promoted his work. They were particularly impressed by how Wallis composed pictures in response to irregular pieces of cardboard, sometimes trimming the shapes to create a more desirable effect. He also painted the walls, tabletop, trays, cups, and bellows in his home. Although his work was appreciated and shown in several exhibitions and publications during his lifetime, he received little financial gain. In 1941 he was taken to the Penwith District workhouse, where he died a year later. Moved by the fact that the artist spent his last days in a workhouse, Sven Berlin wrote the first biography of Wallis in 1949.

Wallis’s work continues to gain recognition and was celebrated in the 1999–2000 exhibition Two Painters: Works by Alfred Wallis and James Dixon at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, which traveled to the Tate Gallery St. Ives.