SOLDSigned with each artist’s monogram between the date ‘1916'
Embroidered lunette, silk and woollen threads on rectangular unbleached linen ground, 37 x 76 in. (94 x 193 cm.)
Tags: Maxwell Armfield embroidery/needlework design farms/domestic animals
Provenance: The Artist's Studio
Prov: coll. the late Dr. Paul van Saanen
Lit: Maxwell Armfield 1881-1972, Southampton Art Gallery 1978; Nicola Gordon Bowe, ‘Maxwell Armfield 1881-1972: an account of his decorative art’ in Aspects of British Interior Design (The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 to the present, no. 12), ed. Barbara Morris, Brighton 1986, pp. 26-37; Nicola Gordon Bowe, ‘Constance and Maxwell Armfield: An American Interlude 1915-1922, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, no. 14, Fall 1989, pp. 8-27.
This striking composition, epitomizing the Armfields’ Arts and Crafts background and their current work with avant-garde theatre design, depicts two damsels frozen in mid-action as they proceed through a wood. One bends to pick the lustrous flowers that carpet their path; the other savours the scent of a flower before adding it to her basket, while a capricious goat, in mid-bound, munches an ivy leaf trailing from it. A mistle thrush is the only other protagonist, perched on the branch of one of the grey tree trunks that provide a strong, neutral vertical rhythm to the girls’ frieze-like progression. A thin line of black running stitch delineates their forms, while the profiled girls and goat are outlined in the colours used for the decorative patterns which describe their forms. The girls’gestures, their long dark hair, one girl’s stripey stockings, and the goat’s black horns and hooves emphasize these. Warm reds are used for shoes, a geometrical sash, a hair band and fallen leaves, while the silk of golden leaves on hanging fronds catches the light.
The Armfields had worked in close collaboration since their marriage in January 1909, whether in the experimental community theatre that was central to their lives in Gloucestershire, in London and, between 1915 and 1922, in California and New York, or on the various books, poems and articles that they wrote and illustrated. In the autumn of 1916, the year of this panel, the International Studio magazine featured a three page article on the embroidered work they had exhibited with the National Society of Craftsmen; this was held at the New York Arts Club on Gramercy Park, where they had a studio apartment and re-established their Greenleaf Theatre during much of the First World War. It is likely that this panel featured in this 1916 exhibition, which was rapturously reviewed in the press. That December, Armfield was recorded by his wife as covering the bare rooms of their apartment with flowers, while she made samplers and cushions and gave a course of eight lectures on English embroidery, and he painted murals, canvases, tempera panels and made wall-hangings and embroideries. She particularly noted some “wonderful embroidered flowers on black silk - a jewelled blaze of colour”, which appeared on the cover of the December 1916 issue of the fashionably progressive American Ladies Home Journal. The following year, they began making embroidered hangings on a larger scale, as screens and wall and table covers, perhaps prompted by the scale of this piece. Their friends, the McKnight Kauffers, were instrumental in suggesting exhibition venues on both coasts of America. It was not long before both Armfields were in demand, one critic noting how “intensely modern, both in his mentality and in his technical accomplishments” the versatile young Mr. Armfield was.
For several years, Maxwell Armfield’s designs, whether stencilled, embroidered or painted on fabric, drawn or painted on paper, panel or canvas, had favoured outlines rather than tones or any suggestion of voluminous forms, the frozen frieze-like action of his figures emulating eurhythmic poses. His tempera illustrations and costume and set designs for Shakespeare’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’ (published in 1922), influenced by Ancient Greek and Egyptian as much as early Renaissance painted images and expounded through the productions of their Greenleaf Theatre, were described as ‘visualising actual movement on stage’, rather than as being ‘illustrations of a text’. They encapsulated the esoteric mathematical principles of ‘Dynamic Symmetry’ that he would hear propounded in New York by Professor Jay Hambidge.
This panel is an extremely rare survival from the Armfields’ American sojourn, when they abandoned their beloved England in the throes of a war they could not countenance. It is very unusual in that it is signed by both Armfields, ‘MA’ and ‘CA’, using the forms of the colophon habitually marking Maxwell Armfield’s work. (Another surviving lunette, also dated 1916, painted in tempera on board, depicts ‘Goats’ nibbling leaves, but is of course signed by Armfield alone.) The stitching, reflecting Constance Armfield’s training at the Birmingham School of Art and both Armfields’ interest in craftsmanship and in mediaevalism made modern, is effectively spare in its restraint, allowing the natural materials they have carefully chosen to become as much part of the panel’s appeal as its subject matter.
Nicola Gordon Bowe
January 2007
