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

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