Born in Salisbury, educated at Eton College and latterly New York School of Fine and Applied Arts in Paris, Peter Samuelson was a painter, draughtsman and writer. He spent much of the 1950s running boarding houses, with their cast of guests acting as his inspiration. Samuelson abandoned his artistic practice in the 1960s, and it was not until the late 1980s that he finally received recognition for his work, with several retrospectives taking place before his death in 1996.