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ENTRY: Armfield, Maxwell
Maxwell Armfield (b. 1882 - d. 1972) was a British artist and illustrator.
Born in Ringwood, Hampshire, to a Quaker family, he schooled at
Sidcot and Leighton Park. As an art student at Birmingham School of Art,
he was influenced by the excellent collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings
in the city art gallery, and by the methods of Burne-Jones.
He visited Italy and studied fresco painting, then in 1902 completed his studies in
the ateliers of Paris. He established himself in London as a romantic
symbolist painter, in the late Pre-Raphaelite style. After a few years of success moved to the Cotswolds
so as to be within easy reach of Birmingham.
He designed and illustrated books by [[William Morris]]. He was a key early figure of the
influential Birmingham Group and was also influential through his authorship of
''A Manual of tempera-painting'' (1930) - in the revival of tempera painting that
was led by Birmingham and Birmingham-trained artists.
He married Constance Smedley and the couple moved to Gloucestershire.
They spent the war years in the USA, returning to England in 1922. The couple were
involved with theatrical production and with the English Folk Dance Society.
After the Second World War he was forgotten, as were nearly all of the late Romantics in the visual arts. Modernism and later Abstract Impressionism were the fashion, until the slow revival of interest in Romanticism began during the mid 1970s. Armfield did however, live to see a large retrospective of his work that was held in 1972.
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Last updated: 18th Jan 2007. Site search by PicoSearch. Some of the initial E-BNR text was sourced or partly derived from Wikipedia, used here under the GNU licence. | ||||||||||||||||||||
