William Sergeant Kendall (1869-1938) was one of the most refined American figurative painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, celebrated above all for his tender and psychologically penetrating portraits of his three daughters. Born in Spuyten Duyvil, New York, he pursued his artistic training within the most rigorous American and European academic traditions of his day. He studied at the Brooklyn Art Association and the Art Students League in New York under Thomas Wilmer Dewing and Kenyon Cox, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, and finally at the Académie Julian in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme, an unusually comprehensive education that gave him a deep foundation in draftsmanship, composition, and figural painting.

Kendall is best remembered for the extended body of paintings he devoted to his three daughters, Alison, Elizabeth, and Beatrice. These pictures, produced over many years and in many settings, are among the most affecting American paintings of childhood ever made. Kendall's daughters appear reading, playing, sleeping, standing at the window, or absorbed in the small rituals of daily life, and each portrait is marked by exquisite draftsmanship, warm intimate light, and a quietly penetrating attention to the inner life of the sitter. Alongside his family pictures, Kendall produced accomplished portraits of intellectuals, university figures, and cultivated members of American society, and his sensitive treatment of character established him as one of the leading portrait painters of his generation.

Kendall served as Dean of the Yale School of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1922, one of the most influential academic positions in American art, and he was elected to the National Academy of Design. He received numerous prizes and honors, including the Legion of Honor from France. His paintings are held today in the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, and other major American collections, where they continue to be appreciated as some of the most sensitive American figurative pictures of their era.