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, and the National Gallery of Australia.

Armstrong remained in Lamorna until 1955, when he returned to London upon the breakdown of his marriage. His move back to London, initially staying with his first wife, Benita, and her husband, precipitated a period of great personal happiness. In 1956 he met his future wife Annette Heaton, thirty-four years his junior, and by 1958 they were expecting their first child, a daughter born in 1959.

Armstrong painted a series of four works called Thorn and Seed, full of symbolism of this time of great hope, renewed energy, and possibility. Thorn and Seed, 1958, a painting that has only recently resurfaced and is the pair to Thorn and Seed III, 1958, is heavy with symbolism of copulation and fecundity – the very title alludes to the potential for new life through nurturing a seed to grow into a tree. A truncated tree, with blue and red bark, stands in an empty field, angular branches spreading across the composition. The two aggressively sharp points of giant, phallic thorns puncture an orb of white seed heads, whilst another cluster of dandelion-like seeds floats next to the tree. This explosion of new life, of potential for growth and propagation, is in stark contrast to the dying tree, with its bark peeling away in the process of decay. A transference of energy and life forces is in process.

The delicacy of the otherworldly colouring and the tender handling of tactile matte oil paint belie the vigorously modernist composition. In the top left corner an interweaving web of smaller branches is cropped by the edge of the composition, and Armstrong plays with the perspective of the thorns, severely receding and projecting from the branches. Like his contemporary Graham Sutherland and building on the precedence of early British Surrealists such as Paul Nash and Edward Wadsworth who were so influenced by the frame of the photograph, Armstrong takes recognisable elements from nature and makes them surreal – distorting scale and viewpoint, cropping disjointedly, and viewing them from unusual perspectives.