Arnold George Mountfort [also known as Arnold G. Mountfort] was born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, England on 21 January 1873 and studied at Birmingham School of Art in the early 1890s. The 1911 census records him as living in Fulham, London working as a portrait painter. He appears to have emigrated to the United States of America in 1916 but without his wife and children and enlisted in the armed forces in New York in 1917. Mountfort made several trans-Atlantic voyages always it appears unaccompanied. He exhibited several times at the Royal Academy and Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London; Royal Birmingham Society of Artists; and at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. He also exhibited at the De Saisset Gallery in Santa Clara, Cakifornia.