Edward Armitage was born in London on 20 May 1817. He was the eldest of the seven sons of James Armitage and Anne Elizabeth Armitage née Rhodes, of Farnley Hall, Leeds, Yorkshire. The Armitage family were wealthy Yorkshire industrialists. Armitage’s art training was undertaken in Paris, where he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in October 1837. He studied under the history painter, Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), who was then at the height of his powers. Armitage was one of four students selected to assist Delaroche with the fresco Hemicycle in the amphitheatre of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, where he reputedly modelled for the head of Masaccio. Whilst still in Paris, Armitage exhibited Prometheus Bound in 1842, which a contemporary critic described as ‘well drawn but brutally energetic’. In 1843 he returned to London and he entered the competition for the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster, the old Houses of Parliament having been destroyed by fire in 1834. The Royal Commission overseeing the project determined that decorations were to be executed in fresco and illustrate subjects from British history or from the works of the English poets Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare or John Milton. Competitions were held for appropriate designs (cartoons), with a number of leading artists commissioned to take part. The first entries were unveiled in Westminster Hall in the summer of 1843 and attracted considerable public attention. Armitage’s entry The Landing of Julius Caesar in Britain, secured one of the three first prizes of £300. He won a further prize in 1845 in a subsequent Westminster competition for his cartoon The Spirit of Religion. Although neither of these cartoons was executed in fresco, Armitage did execute two frescoes in the Poets’ Gallery, off the Upper Waiting Hall: The Thames and its Tributaries (also referred to as The Personification of the Thames) (1852), from the poetry of Alexander Pope; and The Death of Marmion (1854), from a poem by Sir Walter Scott. Unfortunately fresco was ill-suited to the atmosphere of 19th-century London, and they began to disintegrate almost as soon as they were completed. Armitage won another first prize in 1847 for his oil painting The Battle of Meanee, which was subsequently purchased by Queen Victoria (in the Royal Collection). Armitage is known to have carefully researched the painting. Major General Sir Charles Napier, who routed an enemy force of 22,000 with a force of 2,800 men at Meanee, lent Armitage his own sketches of the locality. In 1848 Armitage exhibited for the first time at the RA when he showed Henry VIII and Catherine Parr and Trafalgar. On 3 February 1853 he married the artist Catherine Laurie Barber. He was one of the first artists to settle in the St John’s Wood area of London. The art dealer Ernest Gambart despatched Armitage to the Crimea in Russia in 1855 to make on-the-spot sketches for The Stand of the Guards at Inkerman and The Heavy Cavalry Charge at Balaclava, which were shown at his gallery in 1856. Armitage exhibited Souvenir of Scutari at the RA in 1857 (Tyne and Wear Museums). Armitage was elected ARA in 1867 and RA in 1872. His Diploma Work was his dramatic The Festival of Esther (1865). In 1875 he was appointed Professor of Painting by the RA. Notable examples of his work include the strikingly large Retribution (1858; Leeds City Art Gallery) an allegory depicting the suppression of the Indian Mutiny of 1857; St Francis before Pope Innocent III (1859) (fresco originally in Church of St John the Evangelist, Islington, later replaced by the painting Institution of the Franciscan Order, 1887); The Cities of the Plain (Tyne and Wear Museums); The Remorse of Judas (1866) (Tate London); Herod’s Birthday Feast (1868; Guildhall, London); Julian the Apostate Presiding at a Conference of Sectarians (1875; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Sea Urchins (1882; Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand). His lectures to the RA were published as Lectures on Painting in 1883 and placed history painting at the summit of art. This ideal he followed in his own full-scale compositions, correctly drawn, with a fine sense of colouring. He was well placed to paint scenes of Empire but is adjudged to have never quite realised his early promise. He retired in May 1894, spending some time at Tunbridge Wells in Kent, where he died on 24 May 1896 of apoplexy and exhaustion following a bout of pneumonia. He was buried in Hove Cemetery.