May 21, 2020 - Sale 2537

Sale 2537 - Lot 90

Price Realized: $ 688
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 1,500
MAXWELL ASHBY ARMFIELD
(Ringwood 1881-1972 Warminster)
An Elegantly Dressed Woman in Profile, Seated on a Terrace, New York.

Pencil on cream wove paper, squared in pencil, 1916. 275x470 mm; 11x18 1/2 inches.

Armfield studied at the Birmingham School of Art in the late 1880s at the time when it was a major center of the English Arts and Crafts movement. He left Birmingham in 1920 and moved to Paris to continue his training, where he became associated with the artists Gaston Lachaise, Keith Henderson and Norman Wilkinson; he exhibited at the Paris Salon during the early 1900s. In 1909 he married the author and playwright Constance Smedley, who was the first cousin of his friend and fellow artist William Smedley-Aston. The couple settled in the Cotswolds in 1911, though they left England in 1915 for seven years to live in the United States.

The current work appears to be a portrait drawing of the artist's wife during a sojourn in New York while the young couple was living abroad.