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. Merging architectural elements of earlier works with the anthropomorphic motifs that populated Armstrong’s output of the late 1940s, The Iceberg is a work of understated mystery, enigmatically surreal and evocatively suggestive. Feathers, assembled in distinct small groups, stand guard around and survey a fortress-like floating iceberg, reflected in a perfectly still ocean. The eponymous iceberg is inspired by the dragon’s lair in the early Renaissance painting St George and the Dragon by Florentine artist Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) in the National Gallery, London. With its gothic arcading the iceberg is an extraordinary construction, surely suggesting the sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice of Kubla Kahn in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s hallucinatory poem. Peculiar shapes interlock in The Iceberg – the ice-cave construction, the cliff precipice, the feathers and their shadows all intermingle and overlap on the surface of the painting. The layers of illusion in The Iceberg are complex – the iceberg may have a ‘real’ source in Uccello’s St George and the Dragon but that is a painted representation of the product of another artist’s imagination. Armstrong’s visual quotations and repetitions in The Iceberg situate his work firmly within a Surrealist practice: the use of signifiers that are paradoxically referential addresses the problem of representation and resemblance inherent in the very act of painting. Of the Surrealists, René Magritte conducted the most sustained investigation into meaning and symbolism - similarities between the work of Magritte and Armstrong abound, particularly in their respective interest in anthropomorphic transformation. Simultaneous with Armstrong’s Lamorna-inspired leaves and feathers, Magritte was producing paintings of surreal landscapes populated by monumental erect skeletal leaves. Uniting in The Iceberg the concerns of international Surrealism with his personal experience of the Lamorna landscape, Armstrong produces a work of delicate beauty and surreal complexity. By the end of 1946, Armstrong was painting in two “divisionist” modes. With the first of these, the original style of Feathers Conclave, the surface of the paint was broken up by relatively broad dabs of paint. The Iceberg represents the evolution of a more subtle approach whereby the surface remains relatively uniform but a variety of small touches of different colours unite in one form. Such an intermixture gives The Iceberg a tonal depth and warmth, a luminosity of colours combining in the eye. Decidedly autumnal tones dominate the canvas – yellow, burnt orange and pink-brown feathers are complemented by the pale cream of the iceberg and the warm blues of sky and sea.