A mother with a child on her back

Finding the curriculum of the South Kensington Schools stifling, Lee-Hankey undertook his artistic education in Paris. Thus began a life-long attachment to France. He took much of his inspiration from the life led in the villages of Normandy and Brittany, and what the critic A.L. Baldry termed 'the picturesqueness, and the pathos of the peasants' struggle for existence'. The poetic depiction of mothers with their children found particular favour with contemporary audiences, and Lee-Hankey treated the subject often.