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. In 1953 Armstrong returned to the subject of St Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish nun famed for her writings on her visions and experiences. He painted a group of four similar paintings, depicting St Teresa, eyes closed in rapturous imagining, supported by three nuns. Behind the nuns, a chapel rises up dramatically to meet a huge, glowing moon that rests above a mountain range. In this painting, the larger version of the study now in the Ingram Collection, a brick arch divides the nuns from the romantic, magical background. The serene mystery of Armstrong’s imagery disguises the physicality imbued in his painting, befitting a portrayal of St Teresa. In a passage of writing for the Whitechapel Gallery’s 1950 exhibition, Painters’ Progress: Lives and Work of Some Living British Painters, Armstrong described how painting constitutes pattern, “magic, ritual, the crystallization of religion”, and form, “the representation of a solid object in an imagined space, springing from the sexual instinct. The first is mental, the second bodily.” Understood through the lens of Armstrong’s foundation in the magic, ritual, and desire of Freudian-inspired Surrealism, the painting is spiritual rather than religious. The Vision of St Teresa is a continuation of a modern British legacy of a mystical and romantic tradition, of the pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley, Eric Gill, and into the post-war era such artists as Graham Sutherland and Cecil Collins. The pervasive atmosphere of clandestine secrecy, inexplicable happenings and romantic spiritualism situates The Vision of St Teresa within this heritage.