Biography provided by the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
 
Tennent was connected to the Tennent brewing family of Glasgow, and like his brother Hugh Tennent he became a member of the Edinburgh Calotype Club in the 1840s. He had land holdings in Tasmania and appears to have spent most of the 1840s and early 1850s there. However, in volume 1 of the club’s albums (now at the National Library of Scotland) the photographs initialed T are by Hugh and Robert working together. By the late 1850s Robert had returned to Scotland, marrying and living in Fife, but no photographs by him are known from this period.