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.

The next work in the Thorn and Seed series, Thorn and Seed I is one of a pair with Thorn and Seed II, constituting the two portrait oriented trees of the grouping. As opposed to the lyricism with a jagged edge of Thorn and Seed, Thorn and Seed I is a more angst-ridden work – the frame of the painting constricts the tree, which appears about to burst the confines of the picture plane. The thorns sharpened to a dangerous point are more evident in this work, with only one erupting into an explosion of white seeds. The stylised foreshortening of the thorn closest to the foreground evokes the foreshortening in Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano, illustrating Armstrong’s continued references to this Renaissance Master throughout his career, as seen in earlier paintings The Iceberg and The Battle of Nothing.

An absolute master craftsman with technique, Armstrong frequently echoed subject matter through his methods, delighting in the sublime surrealism of, for example, painting architecture through touches of paint mimicking brickwork. The additional detail of the broken fence to the lower right of the painting is a mysterious touch. Is this a punctum to catch our attention or is it further, elusive symbolism included by Armstrong? Certainly as well as possessing personal symbolism for Armstrong’s present situation with a new marriage and the imminent arrival of his daughter, the seed encompasses certain religious connotations such as the crown of thorns.

Whereas with Thorn and Seed the orbs of seed heads are redolent of life springing forth, here the tree itself seems to be coming to life, with branches bending and straining, as if caught in active growth. Even the paint seems to be vital – the matte quality of the paint creates a beautifully appealing texture to the surface of the canvas, imitating the bark of the trunk in its grain-like application. Armstrong delights in the juxtaposition between the dark, decaying bark and the light delicacy of the life-carrying seeds.