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.

Painted in the same year as Thorn and Seed and Thorn and Seed I, Victory (1958) is their antithesis – rather than the hope in new life fostered by Thorn and Seed, Victory makes palpably evident Armstrong’s all-encompassing fear for humanity headed towards imminent death and destruction. Alongside Victory, there are only two further works on this subject - a small preparatory work, Study for Victory, and Victory, the large-scale painting Armstrong exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in 1958 and which is now in the Royal Academy’s Collection. Armstrong was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1966, and a Senior Associate two years later.

Victory is a more compact rendering of the Royal Academy piece: Armstrong frequently used to paint small but complete versions of a particular theme, which he would later enlarge as with Victory. The Victory series is undoubtedly the masterpiece of this mature phase of Armstrong’s career, a raw and brutal vision of humanity at its most base. At the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1958, Armstrong explained, “the central figure is a parody of a human being - half-human scarecrow. He’s the winner of a nuclear war. The crumpled lumps at either side – they’re the losers…”. Victory is a prophetic history painting, a violently modernist satire of the genre.

Armstrong was not alone in his portentous vision of the Cold War era – the so-called ‘Geometry of Fear’ sculptors, including Lynn Chadwick, Bernard Meadows and Eduardo Paolozzi, headed by his Unit One colleague Henry Moore, were featured in the infamous 1952 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Herbert Read, the championing critic of Unit One, coined the phrase in the catalogue for the show: “These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt…the geometry of fear”.

The composition of Victory is dominated by the figure of a demonic scarecrow lurching towards us, with his arms upraised in horror or caricatured victorious celebration. The scarecrow, character of beloved children’s tale The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, becomes the haunting protagonist of a nightmare. With manically glowing eyes, and a disintegrating body, he is terrifyingly suspended between life and death, yet potently threatening.

Even in this veritable crucifixion scene, however, there is the suggestion of hope through the knowledge that Christ was raised from the dead three days later. Such optimism is perhaps difficult to fathom in such a prophecy of horror, desperation and annihilation, but it this very paradox of life and death, hope and fear between which Armstrong was torn in 1958. Whilst joyfully anticipating the imminent birth of his daughter in Thorn and Seed and Thorn and Seed I, he was nonetheless fearful of the world she could inherit. In an undated poem, Prayer to the Earth, Armstrong simultaneously expresses fear of death and hope in birth:

Pity our distress
Who feel the winter’s breath in thy decline.
Save us from death, for power of life is thine.
We are thy children. Earth, thine is our blood!
Send us thy strength that we may ride the flood
Of our misgivings and our feebleness.
Our hope of life is hourly less and less.
Give us thy fruits, refresh us with thy rain;
Grant us our prayer; That we be born again.