Eric Henri Kennington was born in Chelsea on 12 March 1888, son of the painter Thomas Benjamin Kennington. He was educated at St Paul’s School, the Lambeth School of Art and the City and Guilds School, Kennington. He initially commenced his artistic career as painter, being strongly influenced by the Italian Primitives and Sandro Botticelli. He first exhibited at the RA in 1908. His Costermongers (1913) was purchased by Sir William Nicholson and presented to the Musée de Luxembourg in Paris. ‘At the outbreak of the First World War, Kennington volunteered, on 6 August 1914, to serve as a private in the 13th (Territorial) Battalion, the London Regiment, an outfit colloquially known as the ‘The Kensingtons’. Private Kennington first entered front line trenches in the valley of the River Lys in north-eastern France on 21 November 1914. He spent just over two months at the front, frequently under fire from German snipers, trench mortars and artillery. On 19 January he was wounded and evacuated to a hospital in England.’ His left foot was saved, but he lost a toe and was discharged in June 1915. In April 1916 he exhibited his painting The Kensingtons at Laventie: Winter 1914 at the Goupil Galleries and his depiction of exhausted ‘Tommies’ caused a sensation. In August 1917 he returned to France as a war artist employed by the Department of Information. Lord Tweedsmuir scathingly wrote of him: ‘I am very doubtful about Eric Kennington, his whole style of work is utterly remote from and undescriptive of the Western Front, and is no use for purposes of record. He might just as well paint his pictures at home.’ Notwithstanding, Kennington’s remarkable oil painting The Conquerors (1920) hangs to this day in the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa. Although a carver, not a sculptor, Kennington executed some of the most original war memorials produced in both World Wars. In the period November 1917 – January 1918 Eric Kennington had been attached to the 24th Infantry Division in France, as an official war artist for the Department of Information and, whilst undertaking this role, he befriended Lieutenant Colonel M V D Hill, DSO, MC of the 9th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. In 1921 Colonel Hill approached Kennington and asked him if he could recommend a sculptor to produce a war memorial to commemorate the 24th Infantry Division’s 10,865 war dead. Kennington volunteered himself for the task, suggested that it be sculpted from Portland stone and asked only for money for materials, the mason’s fee and the cost of transporting the finished work from his workshop at Chiswick Mall, Hammersmith to Battersea Park, London. In May 1922 he presented his maquette for inspection by the Division’s Memorial Committee and gained their approval. Despite one expert’s theory that the origin of Kennington’s design was probably Kipling’s Soldiers Three, the design was probably based on the three figures on the 37th Division Memorial at Monchy-le-Preux (1921) sculpted by Lady Feodora Gleichen. The only difference between the two being, Kennington rendered the figures in his trade-mark totemic style, rather than in the literal manner (see picture above). According to Colonel Hill, the left-hand figure was based on Trooper Morris Clifford Thomas of the Machine Gun Corps, the central figure on Sergeant J Woods of the 9th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment and the right-hand figure on the author Robert Graves of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Kennington believed: ‘all three men have boundless strength, courage and resolve and their progress is unimpeded by the common danger at their feet. They are British soldiers in uniform and also men journeying through life – the enemies which they overcome are not so much German soldiers as the internal, inner, enemies of all of us’. It took Kennington from November 1922 to July 1924 to carve the three six-feet nine-inch figures, with the 14-inch high preparatory maquette as his guide. The figures were then placed on a circular base, measuring just over five feet in height. Kennington accepted an engraved silver cigarette case in payment. The memorial was inaugurated by Field Marshal Sir Herbert Plumer on 4 October 1924. It moved Major-General Lord Edward Gleichen (who had commanded the 37th Division) to fulminate: ‘That limited group of people who admire ‘futuristic’ art will doubtless highly approve of this monument. It represents in stone three tin-hatted figures – a sergeant, corporal, and lance corporal – crunched together and looking straight to their front, while a serpent disports itself among their legs – which by the way, are held together with stone billets. The fore-end of one man’s rifle has had to be cut away in order to get it under his hat; and there are no folds in their clothes anywhere.’ There exists a photograph of Robert Graves in old age standing beside it. The discolouration and erosion on the memorial after 80 years in the park is a good indicator of the unsuitability of porous stone for outdoor memorialisation purposes. Major-General Lord Gleichen must have had Eric Kennington in his mind’s eye when he condemned the modernists as: ‘the Easter Island school of sculpture’ and he was spot on. In a 1929 lecture, Kennington cited an Easter Island ‘Moai’ as an important influence on his work. Kennington was art editor of T E Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). He was approached by the architects Gordon Holt and Verner Owen Rees to collaborate in their entry for the competition for the IWGC’s Soissons Memorial to the Missing. The central sculpture of their winning design was executed in 1927-28 from 22 tons of Euville stone in Kennington’s trademark totemic style. It commemorated by name the 3,987 men of the British IX and XXII Corps missing in action and was inaugurated on 22 July 1928 by Lieutenant-General Sir Alexander Hamilton Gordon. ‘In 1939 he made the recumbent effigy of Lawrence for St Martin’s, Wareham, of which the Tate Gallery and the Aberdeen Art Gallery later acquired versions in ciment fondu. Also in the Tate is a bronze head of Lawrence modelled partly from life and partly from drawings; another cast is in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral.’ His sculpture Earth Child (1936) is in the Tate. He produced the carvings in the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in Gower St, London, the bronze memorial head Thomas Hardy (1929) and the carved decorations on the façade of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford on Avon. During the Second World War, Kennington was again employed as an artist and much of his work is in the collection of the Imperial War Museum. The Director of Naval Intelligence described him as ‘a man of restless energy, who is only happy when working at full blast.’ He produced the books Drawing the RAF (1942), Tanks and Tank Folk (1943) and illustrated John Brophy’s Britain’s Home Guard (1945). Kennington drew substantial number of pencil sketches of leading RAF pilots and sculpted the highly unusual 1940, his personal memorial to ‘The Few’  After being installed at Glasgow Airport, it was removed in 1987 on the grounds that it was too heavy for the concourse floor – and to the shame of Paisley Art Gallery, the memorial remains in storage. Kennington’s plaster maquette of the Royal Armoured Corps Memorial (1950) may be seen at the Tank Museum, Bovington. He was elected ARA in 1951 and RA in 1959. Kennington died at Reading on 13 April 1960 at the age of 72 and was buried at Checkendon. A drawing of him by Sir William Rothenstein may be found in Manchester City Art Gallery.