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Lot Essay
Few self-portraits can be more indicative of an artist's interests and influences than the present extraordinary watercolour. It shows a precious youth theatrically posed on a promontory holding a hat and stick. His black suit is of a particular cut that tells us immediately that he is an artist or actor. A Byronic cravat is knotted at his neck, he is clean-shaven and his hair is neatly trimmed in the manner made popular by Aubrey Beardsley. Eight years on from the illustrator's death, his image, as much as his art, clearly conditions the self-presentation of this precocious young man.
Maxwell Ashby Armfield's air of confidence in the present portrait is perhaps the consequence of his recent success. Having studied at Birmingham School of Art he had, like many British students at the turn of the century, taken the channel packet to complete his training in Paris, but disinterested in academic ritual, he registered at La Grande Chaumière under Gustave Courtois and René Ménard. Of the two, Ménard, with his mystic-religious subject matter, is likely to have been the more sympathetic. Close ties were established at the same time with fellow students, Norman Wilkinson and Keith Henderson who both adopted variations of the Armfield costume. However he leapt ahead of the others when, in 1904, Faustine, based on the closing lines of Swinburne's poem, was purchased at the Salon d'Automne and donated to the Museé du Luxembourg when it was discovered that the French government wished to purchase it.
It is easy to see the appeal of such a picture to a French audience. Its unmistakable echoes of Burne-Jones would have reminded the museum's director, Léonce Bénédit, of the British sections of the Expositions Universelles of 1878 and 1889 that the Pre-Raphaelites had dominated.
However, the present portrait contains no such echoes. This Wildean 'man in black' is standing on what may be an English hillside overlooking the sea. Armfield's chisel-toed shoes, tight-waisted jacket and baggy trousers, nipped in at the ankles, were the badge of the artist around 1900. The trousers were in part derived from 'peg-tops', the pantaloons worn by fishermen in the Low Countries and Picardy. The Rothensteins, Augustus John and William Orpen and many of their contemporaries adopted this attire - as is illustrated by Albert Rutherston's Self-Portrait, 1898.
Armfield's swagger may, as a returning English artist, covertly express his triumph in Paris, where he would continue to show at the Salon. It also points to his continuing fascination with early Renaissance techniques that prized linear plotting and decorative effect. Where the Rothensteins appealed to the later 'cavalier' mannerisms of Velázquez, Armfield remained firmly in the 'Birmingham School' tempera painters' camp of Joseph Southall, Charles March Gere and Arthur Gaskin. These were artists who, in spite of the advent of modernist abstraction, were determined to keep the romantic spirit alive and in this battle, the sensitive young man, commanding the landscape, was a standard-bearer.
KMc.
Maxwell Ashby Armfield's air of confidence in the present portrait is perhaps the consequence of his recent success. Having studied at Birmingham School of Art he had, like many British students at the turn of the century, taken the channel packet to complete his training in Paris, but disinterested in academic ritual, he registered at La Grande Chaumière under Gustave Courtois and René Ménard. Of the two, Ménard, with his mystic-religious subject matter, is likely to have been the more sympathetic. Close ties were established at the same time with fellow students, Norman Wilkinson and Keith Henderson who both adopted variations of the Armfield costume. However he leapt ahead of the others when, in 1904, Faustine, based on the closing lines of Swinburne's poem, was purchased at the Salon d'Automne and donated to the Museé du Luxembourg when it was discovered that the French government wished to purchase it.
It is easy to see the appeal of such a picture to a French audience. Its unmistakable echoes of Burne-Jones would have reminded the museum's director, Léonce Bénédit, of the British sections of the Expositions Universelles of 1878 and 1889 that the Pre-Raphaelites had dominated.
However, the present portrait contains no such echoes. This Wildean 'man in black' is standing on what may be an English hillside overlooking the sea. Armfield's chisel-toed shoes, tight-waisted jacket and baggy trousers, nipped in at the ankles, were the badge of the artist around 1900. The trousers were in part derived from 'peg-tops', the pantaloons worn by fishermen in the Low Countries and Picardy. The Rothensteins, Augustus John and William Orpen and many of their contemporaries adopted this attire - as is illustrated by Albert Rutherston's Self-Portrait, 1898.
Armfield's swagger may, as a returning English artist, covertly express his triumph in Paris, where he would continue to show at the Salon. It also points to his continuing fascination with early Renaissance techniques that prized linear plotting and decorative effect. Where the Rothensteins appealed to the later 'cavalier' mannerisms of Velázquez, Armfield remained firmly in the 'Birmingham School' tempera painters' camp of Joseph Southall, Charles March Gere and Arthur Gaskin. These were artists who, in spite of the advent of modernist abstraction, were determined to keep the romantic spirit alive and in this battle, the sensitive young man, commanding the landscape, was a standard-bearer.
KMc.