Roland Penrose

Roland Penrose
Roland Penrose
Born	14 October 1900 London
Died	23 April 1984 Chiddingly, East Sussex
Nationality	English
Education	Architecture
Known for	Home Guard Manual of Camouflage Institute of Contemporary Arts
Movement	Surrealism
Spouse(s)	Valentine Boué, Lee Miller

Sir Roland Algernon Penrose CBE (14 October 1900 – 23 April 1984) was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.

Penrose married the poet Valentine Boué and then the photographer Lee Miller.

Penrose was the son of James Doyle Penrose (1862–1932), a successful portrait painter, and Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, the daughter of Baron Peckover, a wealthy Quaker banker. He was the third of four brothers; his older brother was the medical geneticist Lionel Penrose. Roland grew up in a strict Quaker family in Watford and attended the Downs School, Colwall, Herefordshire, and then Leighton Park School, Reading, Berkshire. In August 1918, as a conscientious objector, he joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, serving from September 1918 with the British Red Cross in Italy. After studying architecture at Queens' College, Cambridge, Penrose switched to painting and moved to France, where he lived from 1922 and where in 1925 married his first wife the poet Valentine Boué. During this period he became friends with Pablo Picasso, Wolfgang Paalen and Max Ernst, who would have the strongest influence on his work and most of the leading Surrealists.

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