Augustus Lunn was a key figure in the revival of tempera painting in Britain between the two World Wars. He was born in Preston, Lancashire before moving to Surbiton in 1918. He studied at Kingston College of Art while William Rothenstein was the principal and won the Abbey Mural Scholarship to the Royal College of Art.
Lunn later joined the staff at Kingston and also continued his interest in murals, as well as carrying out new commissions he was also involved in their restoration, repairing those at Marlborough House. He showed at the NEAC, the Cooling Galleries, London Group, the Royal Academy (between 1946 and 1960) and in 1985 at the Michael Parkin Gallery in London where they held a retrospective of his work. Lunn greatly admired the work of the Surrealist painters in particular the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger. There is a strong surrealist element to much of Lunn's work as well as a tendency towards abstraction.