This article forms part of the Decorative and Applied Arts Encyclopedia, a master reference hub providing a structured overview of design history, materials, movements, and practitioners.
John Rutherford Armstrong (1893–1973) was a British painter, muralist and designer whose remarkably varied career encompassed Surrealist painting, theatre scenery, film costumes, advertising, book illustration and ceramic decoration. Although best remembered for his meticulously painted, dreamlike pictures, Armstrong belonged to a generation that moved confidently between fine art and commercial design.
His theatrical imagination remained visible throughout his career. Carefully staged figures, architectural fragments, empty landscapes and enigmatic objects gave his paintings the atmosphere of scenes from an unidentified drama. At the same time, his work for Shell, Alexander Korda’s film productions and the Staffordshire pottery industry placed modern British art before a much wider public.
Early Life and Artistic Education
John Armstrong was born in Hastings, Sussex, on 14 November 1893. The son of a clergyman, he attended St Paul’s School in London before entering St John’s College, Oxford, where he studied law during 1912 and 1913. He soon abandoned the subject in favour of art.
Armstrong studied at St John’s Wood School of Art in London from 1913 to 1914. The First World War interrupted his training, and he served with the Royal Field Artillery in Egypt and Macedonia. Following his military service, he briefly returned to the school during 1919–1920.
This corrected chronology is more plausible than the occasionally reproduced claim that Armstrong attended St John’s Wood School continuously from 1913 until 1924. Museum and collection biographies instead describe two relatively short periods of study separated by wartime service.
During the 1920s Armstrong established himself as a decorative painter and theatre designer. His early commissions included murals for private interiors, while his friendship with the actor Elsa Lanchester helped him secure work designing scenery and costumes for theatrical productions. These activities were not peripheral to his painting. They encouraged the staged spaces, precise silhouettes and carefully controlled arrangements that became characteristic of his mature art.
Armstrong held his first solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1928. A second exhibition followed in 1929. His early pictures often featured performers, mannequins, acrobats and doll-like figures, suggesting both his experience of the theatre and his growing interest in an imaginative alternative to conventional realism.
John Armstrong, Unit One and British Surrealism
In 1933 Armstrong joined Unit One, the short-lived but influential association founded by Paul Nash to promote modern painting, sculpture and architecture in Britain. Its members included Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Edward Burra, Edward Wadsworth and the architects Wells Coates and Colin Lucas.
Unit One accommodated both abstraction and Surrealism rather than enforcing a single visual doctrine. This breadth suited Armstrong, whose paintings combined recognisable objects with strange changes of scale, empty settings and psychologically charged encounters.
The group’s principal London exhibition opened at the Mayor Gallery in April 1934 before touring regional venues. The Mayor Gallery was in London, not Liverpool. The exhibition subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and other British cities. The Mayor Gallery’s exhibition record confirms Armstrong’s participation.
Armstrong’s Surrealism was restrained and highly finished. He generally avoided the automatic techniques, violent juxtapositions and overtly erotic imagery associated with some continental Surrealists. Instead, he painted with an exacting technique, frequently using tempera to create smooth surfaces and sharply defined forms.
Classical statues, broken walls, eroded landscapes and isolated figures recur throughout his work. These elements often suggest a civilisation in decline. The influence of Giorgio de Chirico can be detected in Armstrong’s deserted architectural spaces and sense of suspended time, yet his muted colours, dry wit and distinctly English settings gave the paintings an individual character.
Pro Patria and Armstrong’s Political Art
Armstrong’s political concerns became particularly visible during the late 1930s. His tempera painting Pro Patria (1938) responded to the destruction of the Spanish Civil War and the growth of European fascism.
The title came from a political slogan Armstrong encountered on posters during a visit to Rome. In the painting, ruined architecture, shattered classical sculpture and a vulnerable human figure occupy a desolate landscape. The remains of European culture appear unable to protect either civilisation or the individual.
The Imperial War Museums describes the work as one of several paintings Armstrong made in opposition to General Francisco Franco’s regime. Its imagery connects the destruction of towns and communities with a wider collapse of cultural values. Rather than depicting a particular battle, Armstrong constructed an allegorical landscape of its consequences. Imperial War Museums dates and interprets Pro Patria as a response to fascism and the Spanish Civil War.
This symbolic treatment of political events anticipated Armstrong’s later paintings about propaganda, conflict and nuclear destruction.
Theatre and the Ballet Façade
The stage provided Armstrong with one of his most significant fields of design. In 1931 he created the scenery and costumes for the first production of Frederick Ashton’s ballet Façade, set to William Walton’s music. The Camargo Society presented the ballet at the Cambridge Theatre in London on 26 April 1931.
Armstrong’s playful designs complemented Ashton’s witty choreography and the music’s sophisticated parody of popular dance forms. The production established an important association between Armstrong and the emerging world of British ballet. His original contribution is documented by both the Frederick Ashton Foundation and the Royal Ballet School.
During 1933 and 1934, Armstrong also designed productions for the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells. His theatre work included designs for Shakespearean drama and opera, among them Macbeth, Measure for Measure and The Magic Flute.
The Victoria and Albert Museum also preserves a mid-twentieth-century set design by Armstrong for an unidentified ballet, demonstrating his continuing involvement with theatrical design. The work, V&A accession S.2097-1986, was given to the museum by the British Council.
Film Costume Design for Alexander Korda
Armstrong brought the same historical knowledge and visual discipline to British cinema. During the 1930s he worked extensively for producer Alexander Korda and served as head of costume at Denham Studios for part of the decade.
His film credits included costume work for The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Rembrandt (1936) and H. G. Wells’s Things to Come (1936). He also designed costumes for Josef von Sternberg’s unfinished I, Claudius project of 1937.
Several dates in the original reference notes require correction: The Scarlet Pimpernel was released in 1934, while Rembrandt and Things to Come appeared in 1936 rather than 1935. The BFI’s discussion of costume design in Things to Come illustrates how its designers combined classical references with experimental modern materials.
Armstrong’s film costumes were more than decorative additions. They helped define character, historical setting and the visual scale of Korda’s ambitious productions. His involvement demonstrates how readily British modern artists crossed between galleries, theatres and commercial studios during the interwar period.
Shell Posters and the Shell-Mex House Murals
From the early 1930s until the 1950s, Armstrong produced advertising designs for Shell. These commissions formed part of the company’s influential programme of employing prominent artists to create posters for motorists and the travelling public.
In 1933 Armstrong completed eight mural panels for the staff dining room at Shell-Mex House in London. Based on the theme “before and after petrol”, the murals contrasted earlier forms of transport with the motor age. Their combination of narrative, wit and simplified imagery was well suited to a modern corporate interior.
Armstrong also designed posters for the General Post Office and worked for Imperial Chemical Industries. Such commissions demonstrate that he did not regard commercial design as incompatible with serious painting. Instead, advertising, mural decoration and easel painting formed connected parts of his practice.
Chevaux Ceramics, Foley China and Clarice Cliff
Armstrong’s most familiar contribution to ceramic design was the Chevaux dinner service of 1934. The pattern is also known as Chaldean ware, a name that reflects its archaic-looking equestrian imagery.
The service featured highly simplified horses painted in a restricted palette of blue, brown and black against a pale ground. Armstrong adapted his interest in ancient and classical imagery to the circular surfaces of plates, serving dishes and tureens. The result was modern yet deliberately rudimentary in appearance.
A. J. Wilkinson Ltd of Burslem produced the earthenware service, with the pieces carrying marks associating Armstrong’s design with the “Bizarre by Clarice Cliff” range. A surviving dinner service described by Christie’s includes tureens, a sauce boat, graduated platters and dinner, entrée and side plates. Factory marks, Armstrong’s facsimile signature and the “First Edition” inscription help distinguish pieces made for the original project.
Armstrong also designed a bone-china slop bowl decorated in brown and grey with fish moving through rippling water. Manufactured by E. Brain & Co. Ltd at Fenton in 1934, the bowl formed part of an initiative instigated by Thomas Fennemore, sales manager of Foley China. Contemporary British artists supplied patterns that were produced either in bone china by E. Brain & Co. or in earthenware by A. J. Wilkinson, whose contribution was directed by Clarice Cliff. The resulting tableware was launched at the Modern Art for the Table exhibition at Harrods in 1934. The Victoria and Albert Museum preserves Armstrong’s bowl as accession MISC.2:175-1934.
The project represented an ambitious attempt to bring contemporary British art into the domestic interior through industrial production. Although Armstrong is sometimes described as a ceramicist, “ceramic designer” is the more precise term. Available evidence associates him with the form and surface pattern of manufactured tableware rather than with personally throwing or firing pottery.
Official War Artist and Post-war Murals
During the Second World War Armstrong worked as an official war artist on the British home front. Paintings such as Coggeshall Church, Essex, Building Planes and Building Mosquitoes record wartime Britain through carefully ordered compositions rather than spontaneous reportage.
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Even when addressing industrial production or bomb damage, Armstrong retained his characteristic stillness. Buildings, machines and figures appear lucidly described yet strangely remote. His wartime paintings occupy a space between documentation and poetic interpretation.
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After the war, Armstrong moved to Lamorna in Cornwall. His later work increasingly employed symbolic imagery to address political power, propaganda, money and the threat of destruction. For the Festival of Britain in 1951, he produced The Storm, one of a series of large paintings commissioned for the exhibition 60 Paintings for ’51.
Armstrong continued to receive important mural commissions. Between 1953 and 1955 he worked on the decorated ceiling of the Council Chamber in Bristol’s Council House, now City Hall. In the early 1960s he created The Fantastic Park for the Royal Marsden Hospital at Sutton. These projects extended the theatrical and allegorical qualities of his painting into architectural space.
John Armstrong’s Legacy
Armstrong was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1966. He continued to paint despite developing Parkinson’s disease and died in London on 19 May 1973. The Royal Academy organised a memorial exhibition in 1975, which subsequently toured to several regional galleries.
Today, Armstrong’s work is held in collections including Tate, Imperial War Museums, the Royal Academy, the Courtauld, the Government Art Collection and numerous British regional museums. The National Portrait Gallery’s biography summarises the breadth of his activity as a painter, muralist, illustrator and designer for stage and screen.
Armstrong’s achievement rests partly on this breadth. He carried ideas between apparently separate fields: the dramatic space of the theatre entered his paintings; archaeological imagery migrated onto commercial tableware; and the precision of mural and costume design informed his treatment of modern political anxieties.
His finest paintings are unsettling without being sensational. Through ruined monuments, deserted spaces and vulnerable figures, Armstrong transformed the visual language of British Surrealism into a quiet meditation on civilisation, memory and destruction. His career also challenges the division between fine and applied art, revealing a designer who could address a gallery visitor, cinema audience, theatre-goer or domestic consumer with equal intelligence.
References
Byars, M. (1994). The Design Encyclopedia. John Wiley & Sons. Originally based on notes published in Art, December 1991, p. 14.
National Portrait Gallery. (n.d.). John Armstrong (1893–1973).
Redfern Gallery. (n.d.). John Armstrong ARA: Biography.
Rennie, P. (2014). Modern British Posters: Art, Design & Communication. Black Dog Publishing.
Spalding, F. (1990). 20th Century Painters and Sculptors. Antique Collectors’ Club.
Thirties: British art and design before the war. (1979). Arts Council of Great Britain and Hayward Gallery.
