Born in Liverpool in 1864 and raised in Manchester, Tom Mostyn, the son of the artist Edwin Mostyn, studied at the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. He had his first local exhibition in 1880, and was showing at the Royal Academy by the age of 29. 

Many of his earliest works were strongly influenced by the strong anti-“Victorian Materialist” sentiment of his teacher Sir Hubert Von Herkomer (whose school he entered in 1893).  In these works Mostyn depicted the poverty of the working classes in the style of the realists, an effective way of raising social consciousness.