Thomas Benjamin Kennington was born on 7 April 1856 at Grimsby in  Lincolnshire. He studied at the Liverpool School of Art, at the Royal College of Art and at the Académie Julian in Paris. He then settled at Chelsea in London, where he enjoyed a successful career and taught his son Eric, who would turn out to be both a talented painter and carver. Kennington was a superb exponent of oils and water colours, infusing his portraits and genre scenes with a rare liveliness and sense of colour. His works were well received and he was invited to exhibit at the Royal Academy from 1880. He was a regular exhibitor at Suffolk Street from 1880 onwards. He was one of the founder members of the New English Art Club and its first Secretary. That body was founded in 1886, specifically to counter the traditional approach of the Royal Academy. It was essentially an English version of the Salon des Refuses in Paris. The paintings for their exhibitions were selected by the artists themselves, not by a committee, and the society became a centre for French influence and Impressionism. Among their earliest recruits were Thomas Cooper Gotch, John Singer Sargent, Philip Wilson Steer, George Clausen and Stanhope Forbes. The society’s earliest exhibitions were held in the Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly in London. Kennington was best known in the early part of his career for his social realist subjects executed in a French-style, with square brushwork and a muted tonal range.  In Victorian painting, the theme of family life featured strongly and lessons were to be drawn from art works. They were visual puzzles to be worked out. Domestic scenes provided models of how adults and children should behave. Some of Kennington’s work took the genre of ‘pathetic realism’ to a level not achieved by his predecessors and frankly, can be considered harrowing. His Orphans (1885; shown above) hangs in the Tate in London. Widowed and Fatherless (1888) was one of his most ambitious compositions. It featured a seated woman with refined features, suggestive of a respectable background reduced by circumstance, perhaps in a bid to elicit sympathy from a predominantly middle-class academy-going public. One daughter kneels by a bed and another lays in it, clearly suffering from some kind of illness. Julian Treuherz has suggested that Kennington’s subject may have been inspired by Octave Tassert’s The Unfortunate Family (1851) then on display at the Musée du Luxembourg and which he may have seen during his time in Paris. The fine detail of the still life on the left and the taut thread held by the woman, an indication of her state of anxiety, reveals Kennington to have been a master not only of painterly illusionism but of tense, psychological drama. Homeless (1890) depicts a ragged boy who can go no further. He has collapsed on the wet pavement and his hat has tumbled into the gutter. His young mother has dropped her bag and cuddles him on the pavement, clasping his limp wrist and supporting his head with her arm. However, the boy is fading: his face looks at the viewer with a vague openness; he is unable even to raise his head to acknowledge the final caresses of his despairing mother. Kennington’s painting The Mother (1895; Aigantighe Art Gallery, New Zealand) depicts a woman as the cornerstone of the family and its composition is worthy of study. It is most unusual to encounter a painting in which the central figure has their back to the viewer and whose face cannot be seen entirely. The mother shields her children from harm and also from the viewer. She tends to two of her young children, while an older daughter helps. She is being trained for her future role in life. The dramatic and darker silhouette of the mother on the right is contrasted with the brighter area of sleeping children on the left, bathed in the glow of the lamp she is carrying. The entire composition literally centres on the wedding ring on the fourth finger of the mother’s left hand. It has been suggested by experts that Kennington’s rich colouring, smooth handling of paint, and subject was inspired by the work of the Spanish artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1618-1682), who also painted poor children. Kennington was a founder member of the Imperial Arts League and earned a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. He taught at St John’s Wood Art School during the mid 1890’s. Kennington died in London on 10 December 1916. His works may be found at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, and in many other public and private collections.