Painted in an exaggerated expressionistic style, The Poor Supper depicts a lone woman sitting in a wooden high-backed chair at a tiled table. Her disproportionately large hands and arms coil around the empty soup bowl on the table in front of her. Gnarled from overwork, her hands become magnified symbols of pain and torment. A small spoon rests in the bowl, suggesting that the meager meal has been finished but two tiny morsels of what appears to be bread remain on the table in front of her bowl. These meager portions could not possibly have satisfied the appetite of the impoverished diner. The wall behind her, painted in shades of blue and gray, shows signs of wear and age, with layers chipped away to reveal the brick beneath. Her garments, too, are gossamer tatters that float off her shoulders without providing adequate warmth. Kingman has employed the techniques of cubism, tipping the table upward toward the picture plane to crowd and condense the space, creating a sense of entrapment in this penurious setting. The angular corner of the table echoes the woman’s sharp chin, linking her visually to her desperate circumstances. Kingman’s loose gestural brushwork further emphasizes the crudeness of the scene and the conditions of poverty. Whereas Kingman’s emphasis on human suffering stems from his alignment with pictorial Indigenism in the 1930s, after World War II he broadened his themes to address the universal humanity of his subjects and denounce all human deprivation. Born in the southern province of Loja, Ecuador to a North American father and an Ecuadoran mother, Eduardo Kingman Riofrío later moved to Quito to study at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. Kingman distinguished himself in the 1930s through his powerful renditions of indigenous workers depicted in a monumental style. His controversial submission to Ecuador’s prestigious Mariano Aguilera Prize in 1935 scandalized the conservative jury and was rejected from the competition. An outcry by Kingman’s peers ensued and the next year a new jury awarded the piece first place in the same competition. The event served to promote Indigenism as the predominant style of visual expression in Ecuador. In 1940 Kingman founded the Galería Caspicara in Quito. In addition to painting, Kingman produced woodcuts and lithographs and painted several murals throughout Quito. He made his first trip outside South America in 1938 to assist Camilo Egas with his mural for the Ecuadoran pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. In the 1940s Kingman traveled to the United States to work and exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Art and in 1947 he participated in an exhibition sponsored by the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C. Upon his return to Quito in 1948, he was appointed director of the Museo de Arte Colonial, where he worked for the next 20 years while also teaching at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. Kingman experimented with abstract painting during the 1950s, but soon returned to figuration. In the 1970s Kingman’s palette changed dramatically. He infused his paintings with brilliant washes of translucent color, creating a sense of transparency akin to stained glass. Through his easel paintings and murals Kingman addressed both local and international social issues. Kingman died in Quito in 1997.