Lt. Col. Simon Edmund Vincent Paul Elwes, RP, RA, KM (29 June 1902 – 6 August 1975) was a British war artist and society portrait painter whose patrons included presidents, kings, queens, statesmen, sportsmen, prominent social figures and many members of the British Royal Family.

[2] Elwes (pronounced "El-wez")[3] was born on 29 June 1902 at Hothorpe Hall in Northamptonshire (also near Theddingworth, Leicestershire), the sixth and youngest son (two daughters were born later) of famed tenor Gervase Cary Elwes (1866–1921), and his wife, Lady Winifride Mary Elizabeth Feilding, daughter of the 8th Earl of Denbigh.

In 1918, at the age of sixteen, he was taken out of the Oratory and installed in the Slade School of Fine Art where Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer taught.

After his return from New York a period of undistinguished hard work followed until his portrait of Mrs. James Montgomery Beck Jr. (née Mary Ridgely Carter) was hung at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1930.

The following year Elwes showed another portrait at the Academy of Lady Lettice Lygon, the first of many aristocratic sitters that would include many of Britain's royal family.

After fighting in the battles of Benghazi, Mersa Matruh and Knightsbridge, he was made an official war artist by the local army command.

[16] In Delhi, Elwes also gave art lessons sponsored by Lady Wavell (wife of the Viceroy) at the Viceregal Palace.

He spent two years in hospital recuperating and after receiving treatment from renowned physiotherapist Berta Bobath, was soon able to stand with the aid of a cane.

Elwes became convinced that God had ruined him physically because he had wasted his talent and that he had been chosen to restore the abbey and rededicate it as a monastery.

Although he never accomplished his dream, Elwes enlisted the aid of the Duke of Norfolk, Cardinal Spellman, the Marchioness of Lothian, novelist Evelyn Waugh, Lord Lovat and many of Britain's leading Roman Catholic laymen.

[3] He never regained the use of his right hand, but taught himself to paint with his left surmounting his disability enough to become president of the Guild of Catholic Artists, and vice-president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters from 1953 to 1957.

He had become enough of a celebrity himself that in 1949, whilst bedridden in the South of France after suffering a stroke, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told Lord Beaverbrook:[19] I think I shall stay here for four or five days.

[20] The next year he would paint a full-length portrait of the Queen, which remains part of the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.

The sitters were Lord Birkenhead, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., David Stirling, Evelyn Waugh and the Duke of Devonshire set in the coffee room of the club.

One observer, who witnessed him there in his later years, recalled: "Handsome, fresh of complexion, finely dressed, with a scarlet flower in his buttonhole, he enriched the proceedings with his smile, no less than with his air of being a visitor from a world more carefree and elegant than the one in which deficits and disappointments were certain to be discussed.

Some of his early sketches form part of Mark Birley's private collection at Annabel's nightclub in Berkeley Square.