Diana Armfield, b.1921

What a remarkable woman is artist, Diana Armfield. It is not simply that, as a centenarian, she is still painting, but that, for so many decades, she has continued to paint with such joy, such an appreciation of the privilege of being alive – a privilege which she shares with us every time we look at her paintings.

Armfield was born in Ringwood, Hampshire and attended Bedales School, which must have provided a good foundation on which to build a lifetime of independence and creativity. She studied at Bournemouth School of Art, at the Central School of Art and Crafts and then at the Slade (during the War, evacuated to Oxford) and there, in 1949, she met and married fellow artist Bernard Dunstan. For many years, Armfield worked as a painter, designer and teacher, from the mid-1960s, increasingly focusing on her painting, especially landscapes and flower portraits. Thus, by the mid-80s, her reputation was well-established. Both Armfield and Dunstan exhibited widely, especially in Wales (where they had a home) and in London (where she lives in Kew). In 1985, Armfield was appointed artist-in-residence in Perth, Australia, followed, in 1989, by another period as artist-in-residence in Jackson, Wyoming; and she was elected a member of the RA in 1991. But, Armfield’s first allegiance was to the New English Art Club (NEAC), to which she was elected in 1970, and wherein - despite the struggles faced by the Club through the 70s - she has regularly shown her work ever since.

It is altogether too easy to criticise, even gently to mock, the NEAC - of which Armfield is now an Honorary Life Member - for its ‘spinsterish integrity’. The first show of this anti-establishment organisation was in 1886. Over the following decades, however, it has been dismissed as a ‘super sketch club’ for the Slade, middle class, unadventurous, safe: which, given the integrity and flexibility of the education available at the Slade - where women were given equal rights to men and where students learned from Henry Tonks and his colleagues to practise their drawing, from life, until it became a powerful and flexible tool which they could turn to many uses - seems a graceless slight. But it was a slight born of a frustration at the apparent comfortable, cosy ubiquity of the Slade’s influence; indeed, it was probably precisely because women were prominent amongst its pupils that the Slade and, therefore, the NEAC, was readily dismissed by artists wanting to establish a more overtly radical, politically engaged, process of painting. And, with the advent of Modernism, the figurative artists who treasured nature and explored the intrinsic quality of their media were easily disregarded. In October, 1933, in The Times’ critic remarked that there was little ‘fundamental brainwork’ in the NEAC exhibition he reviewed. In 1934, The Times once again featured an anonymous (but surely male) critic, who observed that there was a, ‘ripple of feminine gaiety’ in the show. In 1944, we learn from Kenneth McConkey’s book, The New English, that the NEAC was now distinguished by its, ‘patient but spinsterish integrity’. This set the pattern for a critical attack which continued through the 1970s and ‘80s. One needs hardly to make any further comment.

But, the NEAC carried on and, gradually, its artists were able to make the case for remaining attached to the figurative world – especially, for Armfield, the natural world of landscapes and blossoms. But, each of her subjects is selected not ‘just as a reflection of life’[1], but as a vehicle, an agent for creating a moment of harmony which enriches life, a balance of objective and subjective, an expression of perfect poise, a reiteration of cultural identity. Thus exploring the capacity of a painting to exert a powerful aesthetic impact (with the full weight of the philosophical, personal and societal burden this term embraces), embodied in the familiar, figurative world, has ensured that Armfield’s little pictures carry a vital and accessible significance. Her work (and that of other key figures associated with the NEAC) is now very widely appreciated. It is probably no coincidence that the NEAC particularly flourished once more in the years following the mid-1990s – a time of relative optimism. Armfield’s work, to this day, sings with the intimate delight and sensitivity of Vuillard, the sumptuous colour of Manet, the attachment to light and atmosphere of Constable, a love of the sun and life of southern Europe and (above all) of Venice, which Whistler would have shared, and an appreciation of the ‘good things in life that people make and do’. As historian and critic, Kenneth McConkey, noted, Armfield insisted that her, ‘painting and that of the New English should produce ‘some equivalent for the richness of life’. … Everyday objects sing.’[2]

And, Armfield herself, in recent years, has observed,

‘When painting landscape, I’m hoping to grasp and interpret the interaction of all the forces acting on a chosen scene, everything from benign growth to human-made improvement or pollution, everything that has brought it to this day of balance. I draw attention to landscape because we have this enormous responsibility to cherish nature, and that is just as true for my still-lifes of flowers – they seem as eloquent as people and needing as much care.’

© Dr. Hilary Taylor, 2025

[1] Diana Armfield, NEAC, ‘Artist Statement’.

[2] Kenneth McConkey, The New English, 2006, p.231