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.

John Armstrong’s solo exhibition in December 1938, in which he presented ‘Funeral of a Lady’, was his first one-man exhibition since 1929. With the exception of his activities as a member of Unit One, Armstrong had primarily dedicated the 1930s to his work in the performing arts, as a set and costume designer for film, theatre and ballet productions. He worked with luminaries of the arts world, including Alexander Korda, the legendary film producer, the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton and the composer Sir William Walton (also famed for pinning a herring to a Miró object on the opening night of the 1936 Surrealist exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries). Armstrong’s 1938 exhibition was one of two halves – the first half consisted of paintings directly inspired by the Spanish civil war of crumbling houses and abandoned streets. The second comprised work that formed, in essence, a coda to his multi-faceted design-oriented practice of the 1920s and 1930s.

During this early period of his career, Armstrong produced many elaborate and decorative murals for the London homes of society figures, such as Lillian and Samuel Courtauld, for the infamous London cabaret club founded by Elsa Lanchester, The Cave of Harmony, and for various hotels owned by Tom Laughton, brother of Charles. These murals and decorative panels were often populated by wild animals and exotic, mythological figures inspired by the ancient world. Armstrong was well versed in the classical world, studying Classics from an early age at St Paul’s School, visiting the antique exhibits at the British Museum and cemented by his years spent during World War I in the Royal Field Artillery in Egypt and Macedonia, experiencing the wonders of classical civilization at first-hand.

‘Funeral of a Lady’, alongside its sister piece ‘Funeral of a Poet’, 1937, York Museums Trust, was exhibited in the second half of the exhibition, representative of Armstrong’s bold and stylised decorative work from the 1930s. As with ‘Funeral of a Poet’, ‘Funeral of a Lady’ depicts four horses with elaborate headpieces pulling a simple cart on which rests an elegant cream vase, perhaps the funeral urn. The vase, on a delicate stand, is enclosed within a temple-like structure; ionic columns support a pediment and curtains are drawn back to reveal the cargo within. Decorative elements, ubiquitously but non-specifically from antiquity, surround the procession: palm trees, a flat-bottomed boat with prominent prow, the profile of a head, and a tempietto sheltering another vase on a pedestal. Naturalism is elided and instead separate motifs are scattered across the painting in ornamental rather than realistic space and convincing modelling is replaced by pattern and flattened forms.

‘Funeral of a Lady’ was owned by the famous film and theatre actor Robert Donat, described as the ‘British Clark Gable’, whom Armstrong would have met through his film design work with Alexander Korda, as Donat starred in Korda’s ‘Men of Tomorrow’, 1932, ‘The Private Life of Henry VIII’, 1933 (alongside Charles Laughton as Henry), ‘The Ghost Goes West’, 1935, and ‘Knight Without Armour’, 1937. Aside from acting, Donat also produced his own theatre, and Armstrong worked directly for Donat, providing designs for Donat’s Much Ado About Nothing at the Aldwych Theatre in 1946. Donat presumably purchased ‘Funeral of a Lady’ from Armstrong’s 1938 Lefevre exhibition as, by the end of the year, Donat had already gifted the work to the film actress Rosamund John - later to marry the Labour MP John Silkin. Donat and John had embarked upon a tempestuous affair, that ended bitterly three years later when John married her first husband Lieutenant Russell Lloyd.