Peter Samuelson (1912-1996) was a painter of portraits and a diarist, who as an artist had a rather varied career. This probably arose due to his extensive travelling and spending much of his early years abroad. He was born in Tisbury, Wiltshire and is known to have studied for some time at the Art Students League in New York and also for some time in Paris. During World War II he saw service with a bomb disposal unit and after the cessation of hostilities, he went to live in Holland with his Dutch wife, working there as a newspaper and magazine illustrator.
Multi-faceted, he became an expert on oriental carpets and even worked as an accomplished picture restorer. In the late 1980s he showed at Leighton House Museum and at St Jude's Gallery and in 1991 with Roy Miles. Largely forgotten by the art world, he was given a posthumous exhibition by Brian Sinfield in Burford in 1998 and another in 2003. His early work is signed Pierre, and later Peter, often in reverse mirror writing. An example of his work is in the National Football Museum.
