John Armstrong was born in 1893 in Hastings. He studied at St. John’s College, Oxford, 1912-13, and then at St. John’s Wood School of Art 1913-14. During the war he served in the Royal Field Artillery 1914-19, before briefly returning to St. John’s Wood School. He began his professional career as a theatre designer in London, gaining important patrons including Lillian and Samuel Courtauld, who commissioned Armstrong to decorate a room in their Portman Square home. His first solo exhibition was at the Leicester Galleries in 1928. In 1933 he joined Unit One alongside Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Edward Burra, Henry Moore, Edward Wadsworth, John Bigge and Barbara Hepworth, with whom he exhibited at the Unit One exhibition. From the early 1930s onwards his work became Surrealist in style – uncanny, romantically dream-like and heavily imbued with symbolism. Armstrong died in 1973. His work is held in numerous international public collections including the Tate, the Imperial War Museum, and the National Galleries of Scotland. Having spent the war years in Essex, by the end of 1945 Armstrong was installed in Oriental Cottage in Lamorna, Cornwall with his second wife, Veronica. An extraordinary place of exotic flora and fauna due to the balmy microclimate, Lamorna precipitated some of Armstrong’s most evocative, bold imagery of anthropomorphic organic forms, which live, grow and transform. As Herbert Read so famously argued, British surrealists made manifest a pre-existing ‘superreality’ in the British landscape. Individual artists were drawn to sites of psychic or mythological significance across the country: Paul Nash and Eileen Agar to the ancient rocks of Dorset, Graham Sutherland and John Piper to the Welsh landscape. Also resident in Lamorna was the deeply individual British surrealist Ithell Colquhuon, whose interests resided in the occult, myth and alchemical transformation. In her mystical tract on the region, Stones of Cornwall, Colquhuon details the giddy amalgamation in Lamorna of supernatural wildlife, Arthurian legend, provincial folklore, religious symbolism, Druidism, witch-covens and alchemical potential, all of which has its basis in the very “structure of its rocks [which] gives rise to the psychic life on the land”. The statuesque figures that populated Armstrong’s 1945 Lefevre exhibition morphed over the subsequent two years into anthropomorphic forms of feathers, leaves, and shells. Still animated with classically monumental presence and contrapposto sinuous curving frames, it was evident that Armstrong was immersing himself yet further into symbolism and allegory. 'Feathers and Leaf' pre-figures the so-called 'Embrace' series of encounters between anthropomorphic beings, as seen in 'Transfiguration', 1947, 'Leaf Forms', 1947, 'The Passion of the Inanimate', 1947, and 'Nocturne', 1947; Sheffield Galleries and Museum Trust. Psychologically foreshadowing these works, in 'Feathers and Leaf' an enigmatic meeting is occurring between a solitary leaf and a group of feathers. A subtle unease lurks beneath the surface of this interaction - the leaf is stripped down to its brittle veins and dominated by the much larger feathers, almost engulfed by the central pink protagonist with which it directly engages. These feathers are bizarre hybrids - the four in the foreground have curling tentacle-like tassels flanked by extremely erect orange feathers with curious black tips. Is the leaf being welcomed by these feathers or viewed suspiciously as a foreign outsider? Painted in 1947, Armstrong was palpably aware of the suspicion with which outsiders were treated in the early days of the Cold War. Certainly the leaf seems frail, fragile, vulnerable and isolated. Although similar in inexplicably surreal atmosphere to the 'Embrace' series, Armstrong's technique and palette in 'Feathers and Leaf' are more closely situated to paintings immediately post World War II such as 'The Iceberg', 1946, and 'Feathers Conclave', 1946. The surface of the painting is relatively uniform but a variety of small touches of paint, particularly in the background and the rocky landscape, serve to subtly animate the surface, almost tessera-like. The feathers are rich, autumnal colours - burnt orange, terracotta red, salmon pink and cornflower blue. As with the 'Embrace' series, begun just the following year, the quality of light becomes an integral protagonist within the painting. A strong, theatrical light falls from the bottom left of the composition, casting shadows across the painting. The veined shadow of the leaf falls across its challenger, the pink feather, whilst the distortion of the shadows on the ground draws attention to the unevenness of the barren landscape in which the encounter takes place. Rich in colour, symbolism, allusion and invention, 'Feathers and Leaf' is a powerful work from the Lamorna period, and amongst Armstrong's most sizeable works from the immediate post-war era. Monumental yet subtle, powerful yet elegantly beautiful, 'Feathers and Leaf' is an exquisite example of British surrealism.