While Forbes’s mother worried that Elizabeth might become a distraction for her son, he sought to win her artistic allegiances to the new ‘democratic’ naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage - ‘the greatest artist of our age’ - in his early letters. A gifted etcher, Miss Armstrong had to go to London for access to printers and presses, and while living with her uncle in Chelsea she was taken up by Ellen Sickert, whose husband, Walter, consorted with James McNeill Whistler and his followers – painters for whom her prospective husband had scant regard. Although the case for the more informal methods of the Whistler coterie can be made, it is clear that when she left her pastel experiments and moved to major oils, Armstrong was keen to position herself alongside the painters of Newlyn and St Ives.
Early ‘Newlyn’ canvases such as Critics and The forge, although they may have been painted in Percy Craft’s borrowed studio at nearby St Ives, reveal ‘square brush’ mannerisms similar to those found in the work of her future husband.[4] She would not take shortcuts, or be satisfied with the quick impression. What clearly won the argument for Armstrong was the earnestness and commitment to the faithful recording of visual fact, the ‘truth’, in contemporary Cornish painting. In pre-Newlyn days she had already established what would become the subject matter for which she would become renowned and captured in the title of her first solo exhibition in 1900 – ‘Children and Child Lore’. At first her single figure studies such as First love, 1887 and April, 1888 (both private collections) represented boys – one petting a rabbit, the other off to the fields with his hoe. It was however, with two ambitious compositions – School is out and the present work - completed over the winter of 1888-9, that Armstrong’s allegiances were publicly declared.
In the first of these, children, newly corralled into schools by recent government legislation, are leaving for home, while a boy, on the naughty seat, is taunted by his sisters. Praised at the Academy for its scale and the management of light falling into the room, it tended unfairly to overshadow its plein air companion, The skipping rope, shown at the same time at the New Gallery.
This important recent rediscovery is set in the fields where a group of girls and boys take their turns in a skipping game. They will chant a rhyme as they do so. Despite the fact that this is a group activity, it is made up of individuals, all of whom have been separately studied and brought together into a coherent whole. It is mid-summer, the hay harvest has been cut, and the children, some going barefoot, are liberated from their books and chalkboards. Regulations stipulated that children could not attend school with bare feet. Smaller fry, two infants, one of whom has been picking wildflowers that abound in this meadow, look on from a low mound of hay. The foreground figures are so carefully observed that even in back-view the fair-haired boy on the extreme right has a distinct individuality in the way he stands. He patiently waits his turn; the others are older than he; he must not make a mistake; he wishes to be accepted by the older members of the group. For the great critic of Naturalism in France, Edmond Duranty, a back-view can convey age, social status and personality, and for Armstrong, this simple childhood game, is a manifesto.
Other games would follow – ‘Old maid’, Hide and seek, Hop-o’-my thumb – each a new revelation of the work, recreations and inner life of children. The painter’s commitment to a strand of subject matter that she would make her own, was however first established with this group of girls and boys, and a simple skipping-rope, in a field in Cornwall.