Details of Sculptor

Surname

Armstead

Alternative Surname

First Name

Henry Hugh

Initial of Surname

A

Year of Birth/Baptism

1828

Flourished

Year of Death

1905

Biographical Details

Henry Hugh Armstead was a talented and versatile sculptor who also worked as a metalworker and illustrator. He was born in Bloomsbury, London, on 18 June 1828, the fourth and youngest son of a heraldic chaser, John Armstead, and his wife Ann. He received little formal education but was a ‘wide-reader from youth’ (DNB). He started work in his father’s workshop at the age of eleven and about two years later was sent to the Government School of Design at Somerset House. He also attended classes at two well-known private art schools in London, run by Francis Stephen Cary and James Matthews Leigh. He then found employment with the silversmiths Hunt and Roskell and studied under Edward Hodges Baily. In 1847 he entered the Royal Academy Schools, giving his address as 37 Liquorpond Street (a small thoroughfare running out of Gray’s Inn Road which was later subsumed into Clerkenwell Road).
In 1849 Armstead was awarded a premium of £21 by the Art Union of London for a relief depicting the Death of Boadicea (73). This was cast by Elkington’s and casts were distributed by the Art Union in 1850 and 1851 but none has been traced. In 1851 he won the first prize in the Art Union sculpture competition with a statuette of Satan dismayed, which was published as a small edition of five bronzes the following year (23). It depicts the scene in Milton’s Paradise Lost when the fallen angels are turned into snakes and includes a writhing, half-serpentine figure coiled around the base. Armstead exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1851 onwards, from Percy Street, Grafton Street and St Paul’s Road, Camden Town, showing several reliefs, portrait busts and statuettes. During the early part of his career, however, he concentrated mainly on metalwork, designing, modelling and chasing sculptural trophies and exhibition pieces for Hunt and Roskell and C F Hancock & Co. The most important of these, the Outram Shield (VAM), was presented in 1862 to Sir James Outram, the celebrated soldier who served in India. It is decorated with scenes from his life, modelled in very low relief. Disappointed by the critical response to this masterpiece, Armstead adopted sculpture as his principal profession soon after its completion.
In the early 1860s Armstead worked with the architectural partnership of John Pritchard and John Pollard Seddon designing an ambitious series of 20 reliefs illustrating the history of the Shirley family for Ettington Hall (54). He was subsequently employed at the new Palace of Westminster, where he designed a series of relief panels of Arthurian subjects, executed in wood for the queen’s robing room (78). His ‘original and very un-Tennysonian’ interpretation of the subject was appreciated by contemporaries (Spielmann 1901, 13).
A long-lasting and fruitful association with the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott began during the same period when Armstead modelled the sculptural parts of Scott’s model for the Albert Memorial (53). He also worked on the memorial itself, providing four bronze statues of Rhetoric, Astronomy, Chemistry, and Medicine and carving friezes representing Poets and musicians and Painters for the south and east sides of the podium (64). This work did not go smoothly. There was ‘some little professional jealousy’ between Armstead and John Birnie Philip, who was responsible for the Architects and Sculptors friezes on the other faces of the podium, which made them ‘unwilling to consult one another and to work together’ (BM Add MS 38992, fols 246-9, cited by Brooks 2000, 182). Armstead later fell out with John Kelk, the building contractor, and the reliefs were completed several years late and exceeded the budget. Scott nonetheless considered Armstead’s work the most successful sculptural contribution to the memorial. He wrote in his memoirs ‘I doubt whether either the central figure or a single group, as executed, is superior to the miniature models furnished by Mr Armstead. They remain to speak for themselves, while the two sides of the podium and the four bronzes which he designed, give a fair idea of what his models would have proved if carried out at the real size’ (Scott 1879, 266). The architect employed Armstead again, together with John Birnie Philip, at his Italianate Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall, a building remarkable for the extent and quality of its sculptural decoration (60-63, 65). With so much large-scale architectural work in hand Armstead had moved by 1868 to a big studio in Bridge Place, Eccleston Bridge, at the back of Victoria Station.
Meanwhile he developed a thriving practice as a sculptor of funerary monuments. These range from modest examples, including a Renaissance-style wall tablet incorporating a portrait medallion (18) to full-size effigies, such as those erected in memory of Dean Howard, Bishop Wilberforce, Bishop Ollivant and Lord Winmarleigh (3, 5, 16, 21). These were admired for their naturalism. He secured several commissions for public statues, including a seated figure of the architect George Edmund Street for the Royal Courts of Justice. This has a relief on the pedestal depicting artists and craftsmen at work (31). He was also responsible for a lively portrait in Chatham of Lieutenant Thomas Waghorn, who had pioneered the overland route to India (33).
Armstead exhibited a few portrait busts and imaginative works at the RA such as My dainty Ariel, a nude statue of a young girl with a kitten called Playmates and a relief of Hero with the dead body of Leander (29, 34, 79). He also worked as an illustrator. He was elected an ARA on 16 January 1875 and became an RA on 18 December 1879, when he submitted a relief of Aphrodite drawn by dolphins entitled The ever-reigning queen as his diploma work (80). He taught in the Academy Schools from 1875 and Walter Armstrong noted that he ‘gave proof of unusually fine taste as an arranger of works of art’ when it was his turn to place the sculpture in the annual exhibitions (DNB). One of his last works, an expressive marble figure of Lady Macbeth entitled Remorse, was purchased for the nation by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest (35). Armstead died at his home, 52 Circus Road, St John’s Wood, on 4 December 1905 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.
His significance as a forerunner to the New Sculpture movement was recognised by contemporary critics, including Edmund Gosse and M L Spielmann. They argued that his training as a craftsman and the naturalism that is evident in many of his works distinguish him from the academic sculptors of his own generation and link him to the younger school.
EH
Literary References: The Graphic, XI, 20 Feb 1875, 171; Scott 1879, 265-7; Gosse 1883, 171-5; Spielmann 1901, 13-8; The Times, 6 Dec 1905, 6; 9 Dec 1905, 5; 11 Dec 1905, 6; Haskell 1975, 61–79, 104–10; Houfe 1978, 222; Read 1982, passim; Beattie 1983, passim; Avery and Marsh 1985, 332-3; Grove 2, 1996, 474 (Ward-Jackson); Brooks 2000, passim; ODNB (Hardy)
Archival References: RA admissions
Additional MS Sources: Armstead albums; Armstead archive; Armstead/Craik; Armstead/Cusins; Armstead death duty accounts; Armstead/Dilke; Armstead/Fildes; Armstead/Gosse; Armstead/Layard; Armstead letter; Armstead/Scott; Armstead/VAM; Armstead/Pascal; Armstead/Philip; Armstead/Spielmann (1); Armstead/Spielmann (2); Pearson/Armstead
Miscellaneous Drawings: study after the Antique, standing Discobolus, HMI 53/1992
Wills: PPR, will, 27 December 1905, fol 1520 (effects valued at £14,602 17s 10d)
Portraits of the Sculptor: J E Hodgson, oil on canvas, 1884, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Macdonald Collection (repr ODNB); Lock & Whitfield, photograph, Men of Mark VII, 1883, 26; A J Melhuish, photograph, nd, VAM P&D PH.362-1888; engraving (after photograph by Messrs Fradelle and Marshall) The Graphic, 20 Feb 1875, 172; engraving, after photograph, ILN, 1875, 66; woodcut, after photograph, Mag of Art, vol 3, 1880, 420; H T Wells, painting, exhib RA 1878, ex coll H W Armstead (untraced); T Blake Wingman, canvas, exhib Society of Portrait Painters, 1892; H von Herkomer, canvas, exhib Society of Portrait Painters, 1898; W Robert Colton, bust, exhib RA, 1903 and 1904, ex coll H W Armstead (repr RA Pictures, 1903, 17)