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. The second half of the 1940s was a period of great personal happiness and success for Armstrong. Situated in Lamorna with his wife Veronica, and with four shows in eight years from the end of World War II, Armstrong was at the height of his creative powers. Painted in 1949, The Visitation is a particularly exquisite painting from Armstrong’s St Teresa series, depicting the visions and visitations of St Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish nun made famous by Bernini’s erotic sculpture of her in ecstasy. Spanning from 1946 through to the start of the 1950s, St Teresa’s mystical hallucinations seem to represent for Armstrong a suitable personification of the veneer of hysteria in the Cold War era. In The Visitation, a benevolent Christ, robed in white, appears to a nun who is rapt in adoration. With her eyes closed, she is lost in the joy of the vision, as Christ gently touches her hands she holds aloft to him. The serenity of the highly stylised faces is deliberately evocative of the aesthetics of Byzantine icons but is also reminiscent of Stanley Spencer’s devotional painting. Stanley Spencer’s influence is not just aesthetic but also atmospheric – the intimacy, even domesticity, of The Visitation in size and restraint is redolent of Spencer bringing biblical scenes to the Berkshire countryside. Compact and radiant, The Visitation glows with an icon-like beauty. The blue of the sea and the blue of the sky combine to form a luminous background against which the opposing colours of the pure white of Christ’s robes and the black habit of the nun stand in resplendent contrast.