The White House shows a distinctive building in Porthmeor Square, St Ives, which is today called ‘Norway Cottage’ but is cited in Wallis’s titles and correspondence as the ‘Old House’ and ‘Hold House’. To this day the building remains largely unchanged and can be found on the corner of the square in an old part of town known as the Downalong, a peninsula with Porthmeor Beach to the north and the town harbour to the south. While Wallis famously painted from memory, in fact, this house was clearly visible from the doorway of his cottage at 3 Back Road West, where he lived from 1912 until a year before his death. The unusual features of the building - the high steps leading to the front door, which sits oddly between ground and first floors, the second door to the left and the angled wall of the adjoining building - make it easy to spot in Wallis’s paintings. To the right of Norway Cottage, in the square, sit smaller cottages which have even higher steps leading to their first floor entrances. Norway Cottage is the main focus of the Tate Gallery’s picture St Ives, circa 1928, which was given to the museum by the Artist's acquaintance Ben Nicholson in 1966.