Maxwell Armfield was one the most original artists to emerge out of the cultural milieu of late Victorian Birmingham since Burne-Jones. From a Quaker family, Armfield's imagination took flight from his earthy education under ER Taylor at the Birmingham School of Art, where he adopted the medium of tempera, under the influence of Henry Payne and Arthur Gaskin. He had been brought up in a Quaker family. After leaving Birmingham, he travelled to Italy and then enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, sharing a studio (which had been Edmund Dulac's) with Norman Wilkinson, Keith Henderson and the sculptor Gaston Lachaise. Armfield's subjects were fantastic, whimsical and decorative. His portraits were intense studies of character, but in this, of the poet Tennyson's great grandson Frederick Penrose Tennyson at only three years old, the artist concentrated on the sweet innocence of a child. 'Pen' had inherited his great grandfather's famous good looks. He would grow up to become England's youngest filmmaker, working with Alfred Hitchcock as assistant director in the 1930s before entering the Royal Navy's instructional film unit. He was killed in an air crash in 1941, aged only 28.