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, the National Gallery of Australia, MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Pompidou.

The imagery of lengths of curling seaweed as imagined in Armstrong's 1944 painting Seaweed Gatherers, not the most evidently romantic of organic matter, clearly caught Armstrong’s imagination, inspiring a collection of paintings with bending, curving, dancing figures of classical grace placed in serenely balanced, harmonious compositions. Perhaps unsurprisingly for an island nation, the mysteries of the underwater world and the coastal landscape frequently featured in British Surrealist imagery. Armstrong’s turn to marine life to uncover surreal, enigmatic forms was paralleled in the work of his Unit One colleagues, Paul Nash and Edward Wadsworth. From the bleak coastlines of Dymchurch and Rye to the decaying Victorian seaside town of Swanage to the French coastal town of Toulon, the sea held an insatiable appeal for Paul Nash. During the 1930s Paul Nash and fellow Surrealist Eileen Agar travelled the Dorset coastline, cameras in tow, photographing coastal ephemera and beach debris. Experimenting with camera angles and framing devices, Nash and Agar explored the disconcerting effect of unexpected cropping and the disjuncture of inexplicable angles. Wadworth’s harbour scenes of the late 1930s and 1940s, such as Anticyclone; Newport Museum and Art Gallery [cat. 4], likewise play with scale, perspective and unexpected juxtapositions of beach objects – fish, lobsters, starfish, buoys, ropes and anchors. Arrayed in lyrical compositions painted in tempera, like Armstrong, these inanimate objects adopt human characteristics. The organic and inorganic merge in surreal anthropomorphism, and suggestions of elaborate dances abound.

Part of this series beginning with The Seaweed Gatherers, and among the most lyrical, Bacchanale, 1944, makes explicit the connection to the ancient world in title and content. A group of four figures are gathered in a Mediterranean landscape, with an olive tree in the background. Perhaps a meditation on the corresponding harmony of art and music, one figure plays the lyre, whilst the remaining three perform an elegant dance in a manner far removed from bacchanalian. Armstrong delights in pure formal beauty in Bacchanale. Writing to a collector in 1953, Armstrong explained that formal qualities were of utmost significance in making a work successfully: “What makes it a good picture if, as we both suppose, it is one are, as you may say, the colour first…and finally the sweep of the composition”. In Bacchanale, colours of the robes gradate from pale cream to yellow, peach to rosy red across the picture whilst sinuous curving lines draw the eye from upper left to lower right in a sweeping flow of delicate movement. Armstrong clearly deemed the composition a success, returning to it with a further, smaller version in 1945 also entitled Bacchanale.