Dickon Hall considers the work of Northern Irish artist Arthur Armstrong on the centenary of his birth
There are arguably few significant figures in modern Irish art who remain as subtly elusive as Arthur Armstrong. In some ways, it is difficult to establish exactly why this is. Armstrong was a quiet but witty and comparatively sociable man, popular in art circles, with a number of close friends. He painted prolifically, once estimating that he completed ‘about three hundred pictures a year’, and exhibited regularly from his early twenties until his seventies. His work is in many public collections across Ireland and in the 1960s he was described in the Irish Times as ‘one of the half-dozen best living Irish painters’, yet it remains difficult to clearly identify his place within the canon of Irish art.
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