Oswald Birley

Sir Oswald Birley was a New Zealand-born British portrait painter who became one of the most prominent society portraitists of the interwar period in Britain. Trained in Dresden, Florence, and Paris, he developed a confident, refined style rooted in European academic tradition, and his sitters included Winston Churchill, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and numerous military and political figures. A founder member of the National Portrait Society, Birley was knighted in 1949 and left a distinguished legacy as a recorder of the British establishment during the first half of the twentieth century.