Thomas Benjamin Kennington

A/S Wangs Kunst- og Antikvitetshandel, 3 April 1937, where purchased by Director Mjaaland and thence by descent to his wife in 1993 and by further descent to the present owner

Kennington was born in Grimsby in Lincolnshire and trained at the Liverpool School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. However his style was influenced by his time at the Académie Julian in Paris in the atelier of William Bouguereau. After moving permanently to London, he exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1880. His exhibits included portraits and occasionally Classical subjects but he was most celebrated when he painted contemporary scenes of strife and poverty which he would have seen on an almost daily basis on the streets of Chelsea and Kensington, close to his studio at Redcliffe Gardens. Waifs is in the same vein as Kennington’s Orphans painted a year later (Tate) and The Pinch of Poverty painted four years later and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1889 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide) which also depicted a girl selling daffodils. The weary young girl in Waifs has sold very few of her golden blooms and now the rain has driven away her customers who are sheltering under umbrellas and awnings in the background. She is sheltering under an archway with a matchbox-seller who is barefoot and has nothing to play with but a few nutshells and neither have much hope of buying the ‘Dinner’ that is advertised on an advertisement pasted to the wall above them.