Maxwell Ashby Armfield 1881-1972

Born in Ringwood, Hampshire, into a Quaker family, Maxwell Ashby Armfield trained at the Birmingham School of Art, one of the leading centres of the Arts and Crafts movement. There, he studied under Henry Payne, Arthur Gaskin and Joseph Southall, from whom he acquired his mastery of tempera painting.

Drawn from an early age to Symbolism, Japanese prints and the decorative arts, he developed a highly personal visual language based on stylised forms, a taste for ornament and refined colour harmonies. In 1902, he moved to Paris and continued his training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in the studios of Gustave Courtois and Émile-René Ménard.

His distinctive talent was quickly recognised: Faustine, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1904, entered the collections of the Musée du Luxembourg that same year. Alongside the Parisian salons, Armfield exhibited extensively in London, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Dublin, Glasgow, Berlin, Leipzig and Venice.

After returning to England, he worked as an illustrator for several publishing houses and socialist publications. He illustrated numerous books, including Andersen’s Fairy Tales, With Shelley in Italy, Sylvia’s Travels and The Confessions of Saint Augustine.

In 1909, he married the writer and playwright Constance Smedley, with whom he maintained a close creative partnership for more than thirty years, combining painting, illustration, theatre and the decorative arts. After living in the Cotswolds and later in London, the couple moved to the United States in 1915, where Armfield achieved considerable success, particularly with the Tempera Society and the Architectural League.

While in America, he continued his research into Asian and Native American art, whose motifs gradually enriched his decorative vocabulary. Following his wife’s death in 1941, Armfield continued to paint and refine his technique, publishing his treatise Tempera Painting Today in 1946. An indefatigable idealist, he increasingly directed his aesthetic and spiritual reflections towards the occult sciences and Theosophy.