Eric Kennington (?)

Born 1888 – Died 1960
Kennington was born in Chelsea in 1888. The son of Thomas, a portrait painter and a member of the New English Art Club, he was educated at St. Paul’s School and Lambeth School of Art. During World War One he fought on the Western Front, where he was seriously wounded. His early portraits (1916) of exhausted soldiers are among the most successful expressions of the tragic conditions endured by the military during the Great War, and gained him a job as official war artist in 1917. In 1922 he travelled to Arabia with T. E. Lawrence, whose ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ he illustrated. Kennington was also an official artist during World War Two.