institutional
Constance Armfield
(1876 - 1941)
Damsels in a Wood, 1916
Institutional Collection
Constance Armfield (1876 - 1941)
Signed with each
artist‚Äö√Ñ√¥smonogram between the date ‘1916’.
Embroidered lunette, silk and woollen threads on rectangular unbleached linen ground, 37 x 76 in. (94 x 193 cm.)
Size:
Height – 94cm
Width – 193cm
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, ageometricalsash, 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 Londonand, between 1915 and 1922,in California and New York, or on the various books, poems and articles that they wrote andillustrated.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 ofthe 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 eurythmic 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
Smedley [married name Armfield], (Annie) Constance, author and founder of the International Lyceum Clubs, was born in Trinity Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, on 20 June 1876, the elder daughter and first among the three children of William Thomas Smedley (1851’1934), a chartered accountant, and his wife, Annie Elizabeth (1851’1923), daughter of William Duckworth, a Birmingham coffee merchant, and his wife, Elizabeth Seaborn (1776’1854).
Smedley began her education at home before attending King Edward VI High School for Girls and Birmingham School of Art. Her severe physical disability, probably caused by childhood polio – which confined her to crutches, and, from her mid-thirties, to a wheelchair – rarely prevented her from pursuing her ambitions, or attracting admiring attention. She excelled at art school, publishing her first illustration, in Pall Mall Magazine, at sixteen, yet her interests shifted toward writing for the theatre. Through a combination of personal acquaintance and initiative, she attracted the attention of eminent theatrical figures, notably Sir Charles Wyndham, Mary Moore, and Mrs Patrick Campbell. While she was in her early twenties several of her plays were staged, including Mrs Jordan, with Campbell in the title role. Her family moved to London, where she mixed in artistic circles, associating with, among others, Richard Le Gallienne, Alice Meynell, and Gertrude Hudson. Her ‘Princess’ series in the St James’s Gazette, dramatizing the dilemmas of modern womanhood, appeared as The Boudoir Critic in 1903, the same year as her first novel, An April Princess, about a young woman’s rebellion against her philistine Victorian family. The works were, to an extent, self-referential. Smedley had two nicknames among her intimate circle: the Princess, a tribute to her benevolence and fantastical imagination; and Peter (the fairy-tale miller’s third son), recognizing her longing for masculine freedom and adventure.
The books, the first of over forty, coincided with the beginning of Smedley’s career as founder and honorary secretary of the International Lyceum Clubs for Women Artists and Writers, established to provide professional women with institutional support. In her vision the clubs were pioneering. She aspired, not only to enable women to compete equally with men, but to create a democratic, non-hierarchical, centre for worldwide cultural exchange, and travelled across Europe, helping women in Amsterdam (1904), Berlin (1905), Paris (1906), and Florence (1908) to open clubhouses.
Despite ambassadorial and administrative commitments Smedley continued to write for adults and children. Works published during her Lyceum years include Conflict (1907), a novel about the unsheltered lives of working women, and Women: a Few Shrieks (1907), a feminist polemic. Her encounters in the art world, through the Lyceum, eventually led her away from the institution. Meetings in Germany with Count Harry Kessler and Ruth St Denis were particularly important for the development of her beliefs and theatre practice. Kessler, the art patron who promoted Gordon Craig, encouraged her dedication to international peace and synthetic theatre. St Denis, the modernist dancer, identified rhythm as the basis of all art, and introduced Smedley to the Christian Science church, of which she became a lifelong member.
On 20 January 1909 Smedley married Maxwell Ashby Armfield (1881’1972), painter, illustrator, and writer. They had an unconventional partnership: her handicap, and his sexual preference for men, precluded full marital relations, and thus children. Yet their intense working relationship, and romantic friendship, led to fertile collaboration in literature and theatre. Upon their marriage Smedley resigned from the Lyceum, and they set up house at The Uplands, Minchinhampton (and from 1912 at Rodborough Common) in the Cotswolds, writing and illustrating books together. They founded the Cotswold Players, for which they both wrote plays, developing symbolist performance techniques, and a philosophy of communal, democratic art.
At the outbreak of the First World War the Armfields moved to Glebe Place, Chelsea, en route for America, where they hoped to participate in the ‘little theatre’ scene. They established a new drama company, the Greenleaf Theatre, promulgating their radical methods, and played a prominent part in an avant-garde, anti-war community centred on Margaret Morris’s theatre on the King’s Road, which included Morris herself, Hilda Spencer Watson, Geoffrey Whitworth, Vernon Lee, Haddon Squire, Henrietta Leslie, and McKnight Kauffer. At the end of 1915 they procured visas for America, where they directed and taught Greenleaf drama for seven years, basing themselves in New York and Berkeley.. Armfield, however, wanted more seclusion, so, to Smedley’s regret, they returned to England in 1922, setting up a Greenleaf studio at Mockbeggar Hill, Ibsley, the New Forest, and then at 8a Clareville Grove, South Kensington. Her publications during the 1920s included Tales from Timbuktu (1923, for children), Justice Walk (1924), Greenleaf Rhythmic Plays (1922’5), and Greenleaf Theatre Elements (1924’6, theatre textbooks). Her autobiography, Crusaders (1929), which unabashedly promotes herself and her work, captures her theatrical extravagance and warmth of character.
Deteriorating health and finances blighted Constance Smedley’s last decade. The Greenleaf folded, and her publications dwindled. In 1939 she and Armfield moved to the Old Coaching Inn, 15a High Street, West Wycombe, where she died of heart failure on 9 March 1941. Her death may have been avoidable, but her Christian Scientist faith discouraged her from receiving treatment for her final illness, or for the cataracts that afflicted her towards the end of her life. She was buried on 14 March at St Lawrence’s Church, West Wycombe. Her final obscurity has clouded her earlier achievements, yet her eloquence, inventiveness, and audacity, conveyed through all her projects, have made a lasting impact. Her writing remains fresh and persuasive, while the Cotswold Players and International Lyceum Clubs continue to thrive.
With thanks to artbiogs.co.uk
