[1] Armfield was later to recall: Apart from invaluable benefit from guidance and advice from such masters as Henry Payne, Arthur Gaskin and Joseph Southall, I really taught myself, as must any one who hopes to do individual work...

I detested the Life Class, and rarely attended it: I refused to learn perspective or anatomy as they bored me, and generally, I could not have been a worse student.Leaving Birmingham in 1902, Armfield moved to Paris to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière under Gustave Courtois and René Menard, where he became an associate of Gaston Lachaise, Keith Henderson, and Norman Wilkinson.

[1] In 1909 he married the author and playwright Constance Smedley, who was the first cousin of his friend and fellow artist William Smedley-Aston and his wife Irene.

[4] A detail from Armfield's painting Self-Portrait (1901; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery), was used as the cover illustration of the Oxford World's Classics 2006 edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The painting used for the cover of the 1969 Fleetwood Mac album Then Play On is from a mural by Armfield that was originally designed for the dining room of a London mansion.