Alfred Kingsley Lawrence was a leading British figure and portrait painter of the interwar generation, an academic draughtsman whose murals contributed to some of the most prominent civic interiors of twentieth-century Britain.
Alfred Kingsley Lawrence (1893–1975) was an English painter, draughtsman, and muralist born in Lewes, Sussex. He studied at the King Edward VII School of Art in Newcastle upon Tyne under Richard Hatton and at the Royal College of Art in London under William Rothenstein, an education interrupted by service in the First World War with the Tyneside Pioneers attached to the Northumberland Fusiliers. He was mentioned in despatches in January 1917, returned to the Royal College after his discharge in 1919, and won the Prix de Rome in 1923, which carried him to further study at the British School at Rome.
He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1930 and a full Royal Academician in 1938, and he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1929 until 1973. His standing as a portraitist was recognized by the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, which elected him to membership in 1947.