Ex-rag-and-bone man's art famous brought fame but turned jealous neighbours against him

One such exponent, and perhaps the most famous, was self-taught Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) and he, like Maud Lewis, had a hard life, often beset by bad luck. He went to sea as a cabin boy and cook aged nine and later worked as a rag-and-bone man and ice cream seller before becoming a deep-sea fisherman on the Newfoundland run. He switched to local fishing after the death of two infant children with wife Susan and only took up art full-time in about 1925, at the age of 70, to help his get over Susan's death in 1922.

Untrained and uneducated, Alfred made little money from his port landscapes and shipping scenes around St Ives in Cornwall and his naive images, created with household paints on scraps of cardboard, packing boxes and bits of wood, sold poorly. They would have remained in obscurity but for the championing of progressive artists including Ben Nicholson (1894-1952) and Christopher Wood (1901-1930). Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth's first husband, observed that "to Wallis, his paintings were never 'paintings' but actual events".

Wallis, by now in his 80s, was propelled into a circle of some of the most progressive artists working in Britain in the 1930s. He was still poor but that did not preclude him from the jealousy and resentment of his neighbours, who believed him to be secretly rich. In one of his last letters to a friend, artist Kim Ede, he wrote: "i am thinkin of givin up The paints all to gether i have nothin But Persecution and gelecy [jealousy] and if you can com down for an hour or 2 you can take them with you and give what they are worf [worth] afterwards."

Although he rapidly became the best known of British naive artists, painting "what used To Be out of my memory what we may never see again", he died in a workhouse, leaving an extraordinary artistic legacy.

Now poor old Wallis's work is enjoying a 21st century renaissance, with an undated oil on dark grey paper, Houses, Trees and Ships, fetching £12, 400 at a Modern and Contemporary Art sale at Tennants. The image, dominated by the artist's distinctive and idiosyncratic trees, was a wedding present from Dame Barbara Hepworth to Peter and Sheila Lanyon and was later bought in the 1970s by Mrs Markova Noel, who loaned it to Sheffield Museums Trust.

Wallis's trees made a deep impression on biographer Edwin Mullins, who wrote: "In contrast to his ships, he never tried to describe his trees accurately - perhaps because there was no rigging for the old sailor in him to bother about. He just set his trees down on the ground like great black skittles sprouting hundreds of little stiff arms. What did impress him was how their dark massiveness could belittle the houses and people beneath and how a forest can become a secret and magic garden full of birds, animals and flowers."

Still on the theme of naive art, work by Lancaster-born Stephanie Dingle (1926-2017) is now attracting the attention of collectors. Several semi-naive oils from her estate popped up at the Tennants sale, with Red Roses fetching £595, Figure and Boat, Étretat £470 and others ranging from £135-£225. The artist spent her childhood in Dalton-in-Furness, home of celebrated portrait painter George Romney (1734-1802), trained as a nurse and midwife and later attended art school and became a pupil of William Ralph Turner of Manchester (1920-2013).

French Post-Impressionist painter Henri Julien Felix Rousseau (1844-1910) is regarded as the Father of Naive, or Primitive, Art. He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), in reference to his job as a toll and tax collector, which he quit at 49 to work on his art full-time. Although he was ridiculed during his lifetime by critics, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works exerted an extensive influence on several generations of avant-garde artists through the absence of correct proportions, one-point perspective and use of sharp, often unnatural colours. These features combined to imbue his work with a sense of mystery and eccentricity.

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