Henry Hugh Armstead was born in London on 18 June 1828. At the age of eleven, he entered the workshop of his father, a heraldic chaser. At the age of 13, at the instigation of Holman Hunt, he entered the School of Design at Somerset House, under Leigh. He next worked at Hunt & Roskell’s gold and silverwork factory, eventually becoming their chief designer. He received occasional tuition from the sculptor Edward Hodges Baily and attended the Royal Academy Schools in the evenings. He entered the RA Schools full-time in April 1847, where he studied under Baily and Cary. He exhibited at the RA and in the principal London galleries from 1851. He achieved the highest excellence with his St Georges Vase, the Pakington Shield and the Outram Shield (1862). However, the reception for that last piece of silverwork disappointed him and his attention was turned to designing and drawing upon wood. He produced illustrations to a poem by Dora Greenwell, in Good Words, to Tennyson’s Lazarus, in an illustrated annual, and some blocks for Dalziel’s Bible. He gave up silversmithing and left Hunt & Roskell to produce monumental sculpture on a full-time basis. He had already achieved some success in this field, having won Art Union prizes for Satan Dismayed and The Temptation of Eve. He established his own studio, from which issued, in succession, reliefs for St Mary’s, Cambridge, of a Crucifixion, Samuel and the Prophets, and St Paul at Athens; the figures for the reredos of Westminster Abbey, of Moses, St Peter, St Paul, and King David (in marble). For the Palace of Westminster he sculpted a series of 18 reliefs, illustrating the history of King Arthur and Sir Galahad. These designs suffer nothing by contrast with Dyce’s frescoes, under which they stand, carved in oak, and make rich the walls of the Sovereign’s Robing-Room.  In 1862 he produced the Eatington Designs, made for Philip Evelyn Shirley, of Eatington Park, Warwickshire, and executed as an exterior mural decoration. Following a trip to Italy in 1863-64, Armstead was introduced to the architect (Sir) George Gilbert Scott who commissioned to work on the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, carving reliefs of painters and musicians of the main European schools for the podium and also modelling bronze figures of Chemistry, Astronomy, Medicine and Rhetoric for the eastern side, standing two against the granite columns and two in the niches above (1863-72). The podium reliefs, in ‘campanella’ Carrera marble, were carved in situ. Second only to this was his architectural sculpture for the Foreign and Colonial Office in Whitehall, where he is responsible for allegorical figures of the Continents and others, and 8 Colonial Secretaries up above. In both these works, he shared the figural sculptures with John Birnie Philip. He produced the designs illustrative of Applied Mechanics (executed in mosaic, and forming part of the frieze of the Albert Hall), representing the Lever, the Wedge, and the Screw, with figures of Archimedes and Watt. Armstead’s seated statue of the Law Courts’ architect, George Edmund Street (1886) is located inside the Law Courts in The Strand in London. His bronze of Thomas Fletcher Waghorn (founder of the overland route to India in 1829) is located in Railway Street, Chatham. Waghorn is depicted with a chart spread across his knee and with a bronze-etched globe on a pedestal. Armstead also sculpted the large fountain at King’s College, Cambridge, and numerous effigies, such as Bishop Wilberforce at Winchester, and Lord John Thynne at Westminster. For the Inner Temple, in 1875 Armstead produced four bronze statutes of Knights Templar and Hospitaller, (destroyed by enemy action, 1941). His church monuments, whether effigies such as Dean Howard (1868, Lichfield) and Bishop Ollivant (1887, Llandaff) or Renaissance-derived wall tablets such as Mrs Craik in Tewkesbury Abbey (1889), were admired for their naturalism. That quality, dominated by a taut sense of design, as well as his abilities as a craftsman in a variety of media, led to his being hailed as a forerunner of the New Sculpture movement. Armstead was elected ARA in 1875 and RA in 1879. He then taught the next generation of sculptors in the RA Schools. Among his pupils were T Nelson Maclean and A C Lucchesi. In 1900 he arranged the British sculpture for the Paris Exhibition. He died at his house in St John’s Wood, London on 4 December 1905 and was interred in Highgate Cemetery.