In Costermongers Eric Kennington painted an honest representation of London street life. He captured the individual characters of the hawkers using a hard-edge realism.

Shown in 1914 alongside George Lambert’s Important people, the reviewer for the Daily Mail, 24 April 1914, described these paintings as ‘huge staring groups of life-size people, represented in a brutal airless way, though with a great deal of technical cleverness’, and acknowledged that they were protests against the ‘namby-pambiness’ of the usual group compositions.