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’s 1951 solo exhibition at Lefevre was largely dominated by works inspired by his home in Lamorna – exotic, otherworldly flora spring forth in the paintings – but alongside these more decorative works Armstrong was becoming increasingly preoccupied by the threat of nuclear annihilation. Together with the battle series, Armstrong turned to the motif of the anonymity of the city to elucidate the blinkeredness of humanity. In Gaslight, over-coat glad men scurry through the lamp-lit streets of a mysterious rain-soaked city. Hidden underneath their umbrellas they are unidentifiable and blind to their fellow city dwellers, unknown and unknowable, each surviving in a cocooned existence.

Umbrellas first appeared in Armstrong’s oeuvre in 1950, with the painting Umbrella Men, 1950, and become an intrinsic element of Armstrong’s symbolic language, intimately related to the Everyman, Harlequin and the battle series. He explained their significance to his work in the catalogue for the 1951 show: “they symbolise also the inadequate beliefs under which men attempt to shelter from the growing storm of despair”. In Gaslight these shelters have become barriers to divide men from one another whilst also blinding them to reality. Armstrong’s utilisation of an umbrella has important Surrealist precedents, most obviously in the work of René Magritte but also Max Ernst’s famous definition of Surrealism as the “fortuitous encounter upon a non-suitable plane of two mutually distant realities…the chance meeting upon a dissecting table of a sewing-machine with an umbrella”. In Gaslight rather than eliciting a surreal encounter, the umbrella acts as a physical blockade preventing any meetings or chance happenings that were the bedrock of the political potential of the city in Surrealism.

By 1952 Armstrong had moved away from tempera on board, the primary medium of his work up to this point, and turned instead to working predominantly in oil on board. This change is largely inexplicable – it was suggested that he gave up tempera due to the rationing of eggs but his tempera paint was pre-packaged rather than freshly mixed. Perhaps Armstrong felt that the works relating to the battle series lent themselves more to oil. Certainly, in Gaslight, Armstrong expertly exploits the potential of oil. The slight glean to the surface of the painting evokes a rainy, dark evening in the city. The shoes of the men are reflected on the damp surfaces of the streets, whilst the gas lamps glow with a blue tinge, picking out water on the umbrellas and the pavement. A disconcerting atmosphere is heightened by the supremely unsettling composition – disjointed buildings are decorated with inexplicably placed gaslights whilst a central street lamp dissects the canvas. The gentlemen seem to be caught in an endless cycle of tramping, relentlessly and endlessly, around the street lamp, caught in a never-ending merry-go-round.