Painter, draughtsman and writer, born in Tisbury, Wiltshire, who prided himself on being largely self-taught and who was a sporadic worker. After childhood years on a Kent fruit farm and briefly, disastrously attending a boarding school, at 15 Samuelson moved to the south of France to live with relations for two years. Relocated in Paris he made desultory studies at the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts which was based there, supporting himself as an errand boy. In 1935 Samuelson married a beautiful Dutch woman, by whom he had three children, returned to his English childhood home and began intensive painting. After war service in bomb disposal he lived as an illustrator in the Netherlands, music – a lifelong passion – being a major subject, but after his marriage broke up moved to England to help his stepmother run an hotel in Torquay, eventually running a lodging house in Kensington.