63.5 × 50.5 cm
(25 × 19 ⅞ inches)
Signed with initials lower right
No. 143
Dating from the first half of the 1930s, Figure and Wild Plants on a Hillside reveals a remarkable aspect of Armstrong's early modernism. At first sight its strange interlocking shapes appear almost abstract, but they gradually resolve themselves into two figures, one associated with a sheaf of corn or grasses and entwined with ivy or some creeping plant. Armstrong delights in the ambiguity between the human figure and biomorphic form.
The tiny stylised head of the central figure, its projecting nose and great draped body recall both Cycladic sculpture and the increasingly abstract human figures Henry Moore was making during the 1930s. Moore and Armstrong were brought together in Unit One, formed by Paul Nash in 1933, and it is easy to see why Nash recognised in Armstrong an artist equally committed to a new modern art.
Yet the painting also looks backwards. The vegetation, corn and monumental earth-like forms suggest ancient ideas of fertility and the continuity of human and natural life without illustrating any particular myth. The scrubbed and modulated tempera surface gives the painting a wonderfully lively texture. Classical antiquity, the natural world and the new biomorphic language of European modernism are already becoming inseparable.
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