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. Painted in the same year as Gaslight, Flight is also part of the series of umbrella-carrying, top-hat wearing metropolitan gentleman, but takes on a particularly lyrical, romantic tone. Whilst in Gaslight the umbrellas become barriers to human interaction, here the umbrellas become tools of escape: a gentleman dressed in Victorian attire and a clown-like man seem about to lift up into flight, borne aloft by their open umbrellas. Rather than being trapped within the towering walls of a city, these men are in a beautiful English countryside of rolling hills (with more than a touch of the Wittenham Clumps), woods, drifting white clouds and deep blue skies, so perhaps they have just touched down in this bucolic idyll, landing in front of a pile of golden straw. Again Armstrong’s handling of oil is exquisitely detailed, picking out gleaming golden straw, the sheen on shoes, highlights on the white ruff of the clown. Flight seems as a wistful daydream, a light-hearted, playful fantasy about escaping the monotony of every-day existence through magical flight. In his use of the umbrella as a symbol of fairy tale enchantment and the desire to escape from the confinements of mundane urban life, Armstrong strongly evokes the children’s novel, Mary Poppins, 1934, by P.L. Travers. Turning to the world of children’s stories or folklore and mythology, Armstrong was continuing in a well-established Surrealist tradition of rejecting rational Western adult experience for those with a marginal perspective. The gentleman facing out of the picture is a self-portrait of the artist, heightening the poignancy of the desire to escape, particularly as his marriage to Veronica was struggling by 1952, and his correspondence to friends and Veronica expressed his feelings of entrapment in Lamorna . Armstrong clutches to the back of the clown, who seems to lead him towards the hills in the distance. Perhaps Armstrong, the Edwardian gentleman, feels he needs to regain the clear perception of the timeless fool in order to truly understand his present situation.