The Fine Art Society first showed the work of Maxwell Armfield in 1907, and held several retrospective exhibitions of the artist’s oeuvre in the 1970s. He was a pioneer in the revival of tempera, publishing a technical guide, the ‘Manual of Tempera Painting’, in 1930. Armfield wrote that ‘tempera, because of the exigencies of material is specially suitable for smallish pictures, gay and rich in colour... the peculiarities of the medium itself render it most suitable for the preservation of flowers, fruit and small beasts naturally associated with them: for sky, pebbles, and generally the smaller details of nature’. This is never more so apparent than in the present still life of feathers, delicately conceived and set against a warm, rust-coloured background with implied organic textures and pebbles dispersed pleasingly around them. The picture is numbered by the artist as ‘Opus 253’, suggesting an approximate date of 1948, and indeed it was first exhibited the following year at The Kensington Art Gallery.

Armfield’s love of the medium was first kindled at the Birmingham School of Art, where he was greatly influenced by Arthur Gaskin and Henry Payne. It was there that he began experimenting with painting in tempera, taking up the medium seriously in around 1910, after a stint furthering his studies in Paris. His first significant one-man exhibition was held at the Carfax Gallery in London in 1908, and a review in The Times noted the artist as ‘a man of originality and promise... [he] is said to be very young: but he is also very versatile... his gifts are undoubted.’ The artist was particularly interested in oriental and Japanese art, and how to achieve a similar balance of colour in his own works. He became a regular exhibitor with the New English Arts Club, and being married to the novelist and playwright, Constance Smedley, was involved with various theatrical societies.