Private
institutional
Eric Kennington
(1888 - 1960)
The Searchlight, 1943
Private Collection
Eric Kennington (1888 - 1960)
Plaster, with a green patina, height: 12 in. (32 cm.), base 9 x 4 in. (23.5 x 12 cm.)
Size:
Height – 23.5cm
Width – 12cm
Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.181.
Julia Rhys, Jean Clark’s daughter, recalls that Kennington, who lived on Chiswick Mall, near to the Clarks in St Peter’s Square, was drawn to Jean as a sitter because her forehead was similar to that of T.E. Lawrence: Eric was planning a head of Lawrence of Arabia. Eric needed some ‚Äúpractice‚Äù (or this is what I remember being told) and my mother’s brow reminded him of Lawrence’s. I suppose this was about the time when my father made some illustrations for the Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I do now wonder how [the plaster] survived all the moves of my Second World War childhood ‚Äì I remember it being in my parents’ studios pre- and post-war; it was not on view 1940‚Äì4: some things were stored in Eric Kennington’s barn during the war. Anyway my parents really treasured it’ (Julia Rhys, letter to Paul Liss, 20 April 2004).
The painters Jean and Cosmo Clark were life-long friends of Eric Kennington (Cosmo and Eric were childhood neighbours and during the First World War both served with the Middlesex Regiment, to which Kennington was attached as an Official War Artist).
Of this striking and powerful portrait head’, Kennington expert Dr Jonathan Black writes:Justly famed for his incisive pastel portraits of British soldiers, in the early 1920s Kennington produced a number of portrait heads of female sitters in plaster (for example of his wife Edith Celandine Cecil, 1922‚Äì3) and in bronze (for example Aubretia Ouvaroff, 1923‚Äì4).The portrait head of Jean Clark, who married Cosmo in 1924, suggests Kennington’s continuing interest in the distinctive ‚Äúdoor-knocker‚Äù hairstyle of the early 1920s which he had explored three years previously in two pastel portraits of Gwendolyn Herbert. Shortly after completing the head of Jean Clark, Kennington began work on one of his finest pieces of portrait sculpture ‚Äì a bronze head of T.E. Lawrence’ (Dr Jonathan Black, letter to Paul Liss, 9 February 2007).
We are grateful to Dr Jonathan Black and Julia Rhys for assistance.
Sculptor, draughtsman and painter. Born in London, son of the artist
Thomas Benjamin Kennington, he studied at Lambeth School of Art
(1906-08) and afterwards at the City and Guild School. He exhibited at
the RA from 1920; and also showed at Leicester Galleries, Fine Art
Society, Goupil Gallery, ROI and RP. Kennington was an Official War
Artist, 1916-19, after being invalided out of the army in June 1915.
The experience was to have a marked influence on his work: his first
one-man show at the Goupil Gallery, April-October 1916, of the
Kensingtons at Laventie, created a great impression and identified him
in the public mind with depictions of men of action. Soon after the war
he travelled in Jordan and Syria (March-May 1921) to illustrate T. E.
Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. During World War II he produced two
books: Drawing the RAF, 1942, and Britain’s Home Guard, 1945. He was
elected RA in 1959 and died at Reading, Berkshire the following year.
His work is represented in the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate.
His public sculptural commissions include the Great War memorial at
Soissons, France, five relief panels for the Shakespeare Memorial
Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, and a stone relief for the Harold Cohen
Memorial Library, University of Liverpool. Between 1936 and 1939
Kennington carved his masterpiece: a recumbent effigy of his great
friend T. E. Lawrence. During the last fifteen years of his life, he
concentrated on producing sculptures for church interiors. He signed
his work ‘Eric H. Kennington’ (1907 – circa 1915) and ‘EHK’,
(1916-1959).
Selected literature
Jonathan Black, The Sculpture of Eric Kennington, Lund Humphries, 2002
With thanks to artbiogs.co.uk
