High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Penrose's father, James Doyle Penrose (1862-1932), was a successful portrait painter and his mother, Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, was the daughter of Baron Peckover, a wealthy Quaker banker. He was the third of four brothers: his older brother was the medical geneticist Lionel Penrose. Roland grew up in a strict Quaker family in Watford and attended Leighton Park School, Reading, Berkshire. After studying Architecture at Queens' College, Cambridge, Penrose switched to painting and moved to France where he lived from 1922 and married his first wife the poet Valentine Boué. During this period he became friends with Picasso, Wolfgang Paalen and Max Ernst, who would have the strongest influence on his work and most of the leading Surrealists.