Cundall was born in Lancashire and studied at the Manchester School of Art. He was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1912. His studies were interrupted by the First World War, during which he served with the Royal Fusiliers, 1914-1917, before being badly wounded. On his recovery he returned to study at the RCA and then at the Slade School of art, 1919-1920, before further studies in Paris. He held his first one man exhibition in 1927 at Colnaghi.
Cundall travelled and exhibited widely: at the Royal Academy from 1918, at the New English Arts Club to which he was elected a member in 1924, at the Royal Watercolour Society to which he was elected an associate in 1936 and a member in 1941, at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, elected a member in 1933, and in provincial galleries. Cundall was elected a Royal Academician in 1944.
Cundall had travelled widely from the 1920s, frequently to France, Normandy, Brittany, and the south of France, in the 1930s to Sweden and Russia and in the 1940s to the United States, France, and Italy. Cundall, both pre and post-war, was very much an establishment artist of record. He portrayed Royal occasions, visits to Paris, the Royal family’s departure for South Africa in 1947, major sporting events, a test match at Lords, the Derby, and Chelsea vs. Arsenal. He painted The Coronation of 1954, civic building projects and portraits. He was also a prolific and highly successful painter of town scenes and landscapes, views in London, throughout England, Ireland, and much of Europe and views in New York, Boston and Quebec.
Cundall lived in Chelsea from 1918 until his death in 1971, an inveterate traveller, and a highly successful painter in oils and watercolour.