Edward Armitage
Armitage was one of four students selected to assist Delaroche with the fresco Hémicycle in the amphitheatre of the Palais des Beaux-Arts, when he reputedly modelled for the head of Masaccio.
The 1847 The Art Union review concluded with the following: "Notwithstanding the great ability displayed by Mr. Armitage in this production, which of its class, has never been excelled in England, we cannot but regret that he did not select a theme more purely historical - one more honourable to our nation than the slaughter of thousands - of whom, after all, we were the oppressors".
Thackeray, writing in Punch under the pseudonym of Professor Byles, also disapproved of the subject-matter: "With respect to the third prize - a Battle of Meeanee - in this extraordinary piece they are stabbing, kicking, cutting, slashing, and poking each other about all over the picture.
In 1848 Armitage exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy when he showed two paintings, Henry VIII and Catherine Parr, and Trafalgar (also known as The Death of Nelson).
The Illustrated London News of 1859 described Retribution thus: "Britannia, represented of colossal proportions, has seized the assassin tiger by the throat, and is about to plunge her sword into its heart ...
The melancholy results of the mutiny, which have spread mourning through so many homes, are typified in the figures of prostrate victims, with debris of books, etc., scattered around."
The art dealer Ernest Gambart sent Armitage to the Crimea in 1855 to make on-the-spot sketches for battle pictures including The Stand of the Guards at Inkerman and The Heavy Cavalry Charge at Balaclava, which were shown at Gambart's French gallery in London in the spring of 1856, along with a drawing The Bottom of the Ravine at Inkerman which was also exhibited at the Royal Academy.
It shows the corpses of soldiers revealed by the melting snow, still lying where they fell the previous November but now surrounded by spring flowers.
Armitage returned home from the Crimea in September 1855, having taken an extended tour that included stops at Scutari and Bursa, where he made a number of sketches.
From one of these, he painted Souvenir of Scutari which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1857 (now in Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle) and which shows a group of veiled Turkish women at leisure in public gardens on the Asian side of the Bosporus.
During the summer of 1858 he spent several weeks' research at Assisi, prior to executing frescos (since painted over) in the Catholic Church of St John the Evangelist, Islington, when his friend the artist George Frederic Watts modelled for the head of an apostle.
