Peter Kinley was born in Vienna in 1926. He came to England in 1938, serving in the Army between 1944 and 1948 before studying art in Düsseldorf at Düsseldorf Academy 1948-9 and from 1949-53 under David Bomberg at St Martin's School of Art alongside Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff,

Peter Kinley had immediate acclaim early in his career, exhibiting in the seminal 'Six Young Contemporaries' exhibitions at Gimpel Fils in 1951 and 1953 and exhibiting in his first one man show at Gimpel Fils in 1954. Like his contemporaries, Patrick Heron & Peter Lanyon, it was the famous Nicolas De Staël exhibition held at Matthiessen in 1952 which was to be a great influence in his early career.

Kinley's thickly impastoed canvases were a perfect fit for the fashionable late 1950s, where his impastoed figurative work was exhibited and being collected internationally alongside Auerbach and Kossoff, and others from this golden era of British Abstraction - like Sandra Blow, Peter Lanyon, Paul Feiler, Harold Cohen and Robyn Denny.

In 1961 Kinley joined the important New York dealer Paul Rosenberg & Co (as his great influence Nicolas de Staël had in the early 1950s). However, like many, as the Sixties developed, his style changed and family priorities took over, leading to his market prominence fading.

The present work is from the same series and year as the 'Sleeping Figure' now in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York gifted by Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1958 and 'Seated Figure' in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection in Washington.

When asked about his thoughts on abstract painting, which was becoming fashionable at that time, Kinley replied: 'I do aim to find recognisable images in my painting; this does not imply a return to 'Realism' or 'Naturalism' in the 19th century sense, but of translating experience (largely but not exclusively of a visual kind) into paint... I begin with a clear idea of what I intend to paint, but in trying to realise this idea in paint it may be necessary to change the image quite a lot.'