Maxwell Armfield was a young man in 1908, 26 years old, when he held a successful exhibition at the Carfax Gallery in London.  The show included our painting, Truth, and another titled Love that was also circular, the same size and dated August/September of the same year, made just after ours. Although the picture has been known as Spring Banishing Summer, its correct title is Truth. 

The subject derives from Hebrews 4:12: 

For the Word of God is living and powerful and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

In Armfield’s painting, the allegorical figure of Truth banishes the barren cold and the dark to usher in light and beauty. Armfield has used a rainbow device above his signature, a Biblical symbol of hope or, in Norse legend, the bridge between the world of men and the world of the gods. It was this original romantic vision, this fusion of the biblical and pagan, romantic and allegorical, which appealed to reviewers at the time. In a perceptive article, the reviewer of the Morning Post wrote: 

The personal note in art, however small in force, is welcome in these days when the various modes of national expression, like the germ-soul in the Buddhist creed, are losing their individuality; their egoism is becoming extinct, is being absorbed in cosmopolitan formula which has its origin in Paris. Mr. Maxwell Armfield does not always depend on his own vision. In his work at 24 Bury Street [The Carfax Gallery] are glimpses of the thought and methods of other men, but in the main his paintings have aloofness, austere passion, mingling of head and heart characteristic of the Celtic temperament, which remove them from the ordinary level of present-time pictorial art. The pallid bodies of his figures masquerading as pagans reveal their identity … Grief, muted passions, the sadness of barren land, the solitude of hills that never seem to have echoed a human voice, and the tragedy of deserted homes are the moods crystallised in the pictures of Mr. Armfield. …. It is very gratifying to find work of this unusual character and quality meeting with the public favour shown by the number of red "stars." [marking sales of pictures]

There was clearly an appreciation in Edwardian England for a new kind of painting. The critic of the Saturday Review also saw the exhibition:

A young artist, new to London shows, has been exhibiting at the Carfax Gallery. This is Mr. Maxwell Armfield, who with a good deal of immaturity and tentativeness shows that interest in design which is, after all, the root of the matter. Thus his landscape drawings show real resource, instead of the sad sameness of horizon line and proportion between earth and sky which besets the naturalistic painter; and yet they are not freakish or laboured. The method is that of the frank drawing, lightly washed, which used to be called old-fashioned, though it is only a return to a fashion that ought never to have been dropped. Some of the pictures are in tempera, a medium usually associated with archaistic exercises. Mr. Armfield uses it, no doubt, for the sake of the clean lucidity of colour which it gives.

Today, Armfield offers us pictures with a lightness of touch and freedom of expression encompassing gender fluidity and whimsy with brightness of colour which are a long way from some fossilised and pompous pictures then shown at the Royal Academy. He was raised a Quaker, and his father Joseph was a particularly brilliant engineer who made him financially secure, giving him the freedom to paint as he wished.