This sketch model by Henry Hugh Armstead is the original plaster sketch-model for the central section of the east side of the podium of the Albert Memorial. Armstead made this one twelfth scale model in order to test the content and arrangement of the frieze. A full-size model was then made-up, from which Armstead worked on the marble base of the podium. The composition of the finished frieze on the memorial does not differ significantly from this model. The frieze was designed in 1864 and carried out on the monument, in Campanella marble, between 1866 and 1872. The north and west friezes, representing Architects and Sculptors, are by John Birnie-Philip.

Francis Haskell and Stephen Bayley have suggested that the two sculptors were allowed considerable freedom in selecting the figures to be represented and deciding how they should be arranged (Armstead arranged the figures on both his friezes in groups according to geographical schools, wheras Philip arranged the Architects and Sculptors chronologically). However, George Gilbert Scott, the architect of the memorial, must have given the sculptors some guidance, they worked under the control of the Memorial Committee and Sir Charles Eastlake was appointed to advise on all artistic matters relating to the treatment of the frieze by the Queen in 1864.

These friezes were probably influenced by Paul Delaroche's murals in the Amphithéâtre in the Hemicycle at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris (1836-41), which depicts sixty-six artists from Classical Greece up to the age of Louis XIV grouped around Ictinus, Phidias and Apelles. Armstead's notebooks, in the Royal Academy archive, show that undertook a great deal of detailed research in order to produce, as far as possible, physiognomically accurate portraits.