Helen Thornycroft grew up in a family of sculptors. Her grandfather and both of her parents were sculptors, whilst her brother Hamo became the most famous sculptor of them all. Two of her sisters were painters. Helen enrolled at the Academy schools, training to be a sculptor, but instead became a painter, and by the late 1880s had her own studio and apartment. She was gifted with what Hamo called 'wonderful' natural energy, and never married. She was Vice-President of the Society of Women Artists from 1899 to 1909.

Brothers are free and easily coerced models. This painting, exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1869, shows Hamo, with his distinctive red hair, clad in a breastplate as 'The Good Knight', representing the real-life and much celebrated 16th-century Chevalier de Bayard. A model of chivalry and courage, Bayard was said to be 'without fear or reproach'. The year before this picture was exhibited, Edith Walford (1847-1926), a remarkable scholar, published her translation of Jacques de Maille's 16th century biography, Spotless and fearless; the story of the Chevalier Bayard (Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1868). In the language of flowers, the honeysuckle in the background signifies love and devotion. Edmund Gosse described Hamo as tall, 'extremely powerful in frame' with 'curly, golden-red' hair.