Edmund Thomas Parris

Edmund Thomas Parris (3 June 1793 – 27 November 1873) was an English history, portrait, subject, and panorama painter, book illustrator, designer and art restorer.

In that year, when the proposal was first made to undertake the restoration of James Thornhill's paintings in the cupola of St. Paul's Cathedral, Parris devised an ingenious apparatus for gaining access to them which attracted much attention, and led to his engagement by Thomas Hornor to assist him in the production of his panorama of London at the Colosseum, for which he had been making sketches since 1820.

Upon this immense work, which covered nearly an acre of canvas and presented formidable artistic and mechanical challenges, Parris laboured incessantly for four years, completing it in November 1829.

A wholly different class of art, in which Parris gained a great temporary reputation, was the portrayal of female beauty, and he was for some years a fashionable portrait painter.

[1][3] On Queen Victoria's first state visit to Drury Lane Theatre in November 1837, Parris, from a seat in the orchestra, made a sketch of her as she stood in her box, and from this painted a portrait, of which an engraving, by Charles Edward Wagstaff, was published by Hodgson & Graves in the following April.

Throughout his career his untiring industry and great facility of invention led him to engage in almost every description of artistic work, and he made innumerable designs for stained-glass windows, carpets, screens, etc.