DOI issue:
No. 289 (April 1917)
DOI article:Whitworth, Geoffrey: Maxwell Armfield, painter and decorative artist
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.24576#0126
" A DISH OF FRUIT ” AND “ ANEMONES ”
Il6
Maxwell Armfield, Painter and Decorative Artist
receptive of every kind of outside influence.
And certainly the work of an artist like Maxwell
Armfield has lost nothing of its individual
quality from its many points of close contact
with the work of predecessors and contem-
poraries of various schools and tendencies.
Commencing his career as a student of the
Birmingham School of Art, Mr. Armfield went
through the usual phase of Pre-Raphaelite
adoration. But he was soon to find his way
to a larger freedom of outlook and expression
in an enthusiastic yet always critical study of
the art of Japan. There he discovered the
beautiful simplification of design and colour
which he afterwards was to make his own, while
from the Italian primitives he retained the
tendency to a conventionalized scheme of figure-
drawing which was later to be combined with a
quite classical sense of the dignity of form. It
will be noticed that all these varied sources of
influence share at least one common charac-
teristic—the characteristic of purity. And it is
purity which is, perhaps, the most fundamental
and innate quality in Mr. Armfield’s spiritual
and artistic equipment.
As to the subjects of his pictures, Mr. Armfield
has not scrupled to go to literature for many of
them. But there again, no less than in his
works of a more abstract nature, the same
qualities of austerity and purity are paramount.
Whether as a book-illustrator or as a painter of
portraits, Mr. Armfield does not, I think, inter-
pret his subjects so much as utilize them for
some private purpose of his own. The result
is often a surprise in relation to the subject;
but always a perfectly consistent variation on
Mr. Armfield’s logical scheme of visual percep-
tion. For his main concern is not simply with
the forms of things, nor yet with any of the
conventional meanings usually attached to
those forms. He is concerned with the general
rather than with the particular, and a mood,of
spiritual insight or revelation is more to him
than ten thousand matters of fact. Here it
would seem that his artistic theory, in some
respects so close to that of the Post-Impres-
sionists, breaks away, for he brings to the
discovery of the soul of an object a tempera-
ment so personal that his own spiritual values
are always added to whatever may be under
BY MAXWELL ARMFIELD
Il6
Maxwell Armfield, Painter and Decorative Artist
receptive of every kind of outside influence.
And certainly the work of an artist like Maxwell
Armfield has lost nothing of its individual
quality from its many points of close contact
with the work of predecessors and contem-
poraries of various schools and tendencies.
Commencing his career as a student of the
Birmingham School of Art, Mr. Armfield went
through the usual phase of Pre-Raphaelite
adoration. But he was soon to find his way
to a larger freedom of outlook and expression
in an enthusiastic yet always critical study of
the art of Japan. There he discovered the
beautiful simplification of design and colour
which he afterwards was to make his own, while
from the Italian primitives he retained the
tendency to a conventionalized scheme of figure-
drawing which was later to be combined with a
quite classical sense of the dignity of form. It
will be noticed that all these varied sources of
influence share at least one common charac-
teristic—the characteristic of purity. And it is
purity which is, perhaps, the most fundamental
and innate quality in Mr. Armfield’s spiritual
and artistic equipment.
As to the subjects of his pictures, Mr. Armfield
has not scrupled to go to literature for many of
them. But there again, no less than in his
works of a more abstract nature, the same
qualities of austerity and purity are paramount.
Whether as a book-illustrator or as a painter of
portraits, Mr. Armfield does not, I think, inter-
pret his subjects so much as utilize them for
some private purpose of his own. The result
is often a surprise in relation to the subject;
but always a perfectly consistent variation on
Mr. Armfield’s logical scheme of visual percep-
tion. For his main concern is not simply with
the forms of things, nor yet with any of the
conventional meanings usually attached to
those forms. He is concerned with the general
rather than with the particular, and a mood,of
spiritual insight or revelation is more to him
than ten thousand matters of fact. Here it
would seem that his artistic theory, in some
respects so close to that of the Post-Impres-
sionists, breaks away, for he brings to the
discovery of the soul of an object a tempera-
ment so personal that his own spiritual values
are always added to whatever may be under
BY MAXWELL ARMFIELD