India Jane Birley

India Jane Birley (born 14 January 1961) is a British artist and businesswoman. Her father, Mark Birley, opened the private member's club Annabel's, named after her mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, in the early 1960s and Birley ran the club with her brother, Robin Birley, during her father's ill health in the 2000s. She later became estranged from her brother, and her father's estate was left to her to be placed in trust for her son.

Birley is an established portrait artist and has illustrated her mother's books. In 2011 she bought Charleston Manor, the Sussex estate of her paternal grandfather, the portrait artist Oswald Birley.

Biography Early life Birley was born in 1961 in London, England, the daughter of Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart and Mark Birley. Her paternal grandfather was the society and royal portrait painter Oswald Birley. Birley was aged 24 at the time of her brother's disappearance and said that "It changed everything forever ... I don't think any of us will ever get over it". George was established by Robin and India Jane, who ran their father's clubs during his ill health.

Mark Birley suffered a decline in his health and mobility in the late 1990s and early 2000s and invited India Jane and Robin to help him run his clubs for the first time.

Estrangement from brother and death of father

Birley became pregnant in 2004 and her brother Robin paid former London police officers who claimed to be private detectives more than £400,000 from the accounts of Annabel's in exchange for false information about her then partner, and the father of her child, Robert Macdonald. The investigation was to establish whether Macdonald had a financial motive behind his relationship with India Jane. Mark Birley fell out with Robin following the revelation.

Mark Birley sold his clubs to the entrepreneur Richard Caring for £95 million shortly before his death in 2007. Charleston Manor was the estate of her paternal grandfather, the painter Sir Oswald Birley. Birley owns a large estate near Marrakech that her father had planned to develop shortly before his death.

Art Birley has painted since her youth, and attended several art schools. Birley illustrated her mother's 2009 book, Copper: A Dog's Life. Her portrait of the businessman and writer Conrad Black and his wife, the writer Barbara Amiel, is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. In 2001, The Economist described Birley as a "modern portrait painter, in pursuit of honesty" who depicted Black and Amiel in her portrait as a "gangster and his moll". Birley accompanied Charles, Prince of Wales on his 1996 trip to Bangladesh as his official artist.

Birley and Janey Longman were depicted in Lucian Freud's 1992 painting Two Women. Freud's biographer William Feaver described Two Women as an "intriguing classical two hander" with "the two Janes lying there, playing indolent, arms and legs lolling and extending beyond the confines of the bed". Birley and Pike lived in Mumbai for four years.