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, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Gallery of Australia, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Pompidou.

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. Originally titled Feathers, Feathers Conclave represents one of Armstrong’s earliest ambitious group compositions of an assemblage of erect feathers, gathered in a positive riot of exquisite pastel colours. In Stones of Cornwall, Colquhoun dedicated a chapter to describing the multitude of birds in Lamorna, claiming “the pink, russet, bronze-green and Sèvres-blue of a chaffinch is never so glossy as here”.

In light of Armstrong’s increasing political activism and vocal pacifism during the late-1940s – he designed the front-cover for the Labour party manifesto for their successful 1945 election campaign – Feathers Conclave takes on a subtly anti-war meaning. The feathers stand to attention, like a battalion of soldiers, but during both world wars feathers were handed to conscientious objectors to draw the attention of the general populace to their cowardice. The contrast between the soldier-like, even confrontational demeanour of these feathers and the reality of feathers’ lightness lends the painting a surreal humour characteristic of Armstrong’s anthropomorphic work. There is a certain theatricality to Feathers Conclave – the unit of feathers, dazzling, luminous and graceful, is staged for our delectation.