Maxwell Armfield

Maxwell Armfield
Self-Portrait (1901), Tempera on sketching board
Born	October 5, 1881 Ringwood, England
Died	January 23, 1972 Warminster, England
Nationality	English
Field	painting, tempera
Training	Birmingham School of Art, Académie de la Grande Chaumière
Movement	Arts and Crafts movement Birmingham Group
Influenced by	Joseph Southall, Edward Burne-Jones
Influenced	Birmingham Group

Maxwell Ashby Armfield (October 5, 1881 – January 23, 1972) was an English artist, illustrator and writer.

Born to a Quaker family in Ringwood, Hampshire, Armfield was educated at Sidcot School and at Leighton Park School. In 1887 he was admitted to Birmingham School of Art, then under the headmastership of Edward R. Taylor and established as a major centre of the Arts and Crafts Movement. There he studied under Henry Payne and Arthur Gaskin and, outside the school, received instruction in tempera painting from Joseph Southall at Southall's studio in Edgbaston.^[1]

He was later to recall:

“

Apart from invaluable benefit from guidance and advice from such masters as Henry Payne, Arthur Gaskin and Joseph Southall, I really taught myself, as must any one who hopes to do individual work... I detested the Life Class, and rarely attended it: I refused to learn perspective or anatomy as they bored me, and generally, I could not have been a worse student.

”

Leaving Birmingham in 1902, he moved to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Gustave Courtois and René Menard, where he became an associate of Gaston Lachaise, Keith Henderson, and Norman Wilkinson. He exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1904, where his painting Faustine was bought and donated to the Musée du Luxembourg.^[1]

In 1909 he married the author and playwright Constance Smedley and, like many with connections to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Birmingham, settled in the Cotswolds. The couple became close collaborators: working together to combine design, illustration, text and theatre. Armfield's wife also influenced him to become a pacifist and Christian Scientist.^[2]

From 1915 the couple spent seven years in the United States.^[3]

A detail from Armfield's painting Self-Portrait, 1901, is used as the cover illustration of the Oxford World's Classics 2006 edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Armfield has paintings in the collection of several British institutions including Derby Art Gallery, Southampton and Nottingham Gallery and the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery.^[4]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Skipwith, Peyton (2004). "Armfield, Maxwell Ashby (1881–1972)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30765. Retrieved 2008-12-17. 
2. ^ Chilvers, Ian, ed (1998). "Armfield, Maxwell". A Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t5.e118. Retrieved 2008-12-17. 
3. ^ Christian, John, ed (1993). "Maxwell Armfield 1881-1972". The Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art - Burne-Jones to Stanley Spencer. London: Lund Humphries Publishers. ISBN 0853315523. 
4. ^ Maxwell Armfield, BBC, accessed August 2011

Persondata
Name	Armfield, Maxwell Ashby
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	October 5, 1881
Place of birth	Ringwood, England
Date of death	January 23, 1972
Place of death	Warminster, England