Peter Kinley was born in Vienna, his father was Jewish and the family was forced to leave after the Anschluss in 1938. He was sent to Lytham St Anne’s and was fostered by a Catholic family; his parents were interned in France. He studied at Düsseldorf Academy and later at St Martin’s School of Art, where he also taught. His knowledge of Islamic art and architecture led, in the early 1960s, to an interest in other Eastern cultures, especially Indian. He began to collect Indian paintings and artefacts, and Indian systems of colour and composition bore a correspondence to his own search for a language in which objects (people, houses, aeroplanes) could be expressed with all the clarity of an image, but with no loss of subtlety.
He exhibited in the 'Six Young Contemporaries' exhibition at Gimpel Fils in 1951 and 1953 and was influenced by the de Staël exhibition in London in 1953. Kinley's first one-man show was in London at Gimpel Fils in 1954 and in New York at Paul Rosenberg & Co. in January 1961.
He left London in 1970 to teach at Bath Academy, and his work began to reflect his more rural existence. He saw his own work as being figurative, not in the 19th Century sense of realism or naturalism, but as based on observation of the subject. Kinley died in September 1988.