John Noble

Who was John Noble?

John Noble was born in 1874 to an upper-middle-class family that had emigrated from England. He was a noted post-impressionist painter of cowboys, sunrises and seascapes. He wore a five-gallon hat, called himself the "first white child born in Wichita."

He often advised prospective customers not to buy his paintings. He often slashed them up and sometimes even bought back pictures he had sold, just to mutilate them.

Noble worked in the late 1890s as a photographer and artist in Wichita, Kansas. While there, he painted a saloon nude that came to be notoriously condemned and defaced by Carrie Nation.

He went to France in 1903 at age 29. where he took on the fictionalized persona of "Wichita Bill." He studied at the Académie Julien under Jean-Paul Laurens and befriended fellow American artists George Luks and Richard E. Miller.

He married Amelia Peiche, of Strasbourg, France, in 1909. At the outbreak of World War I, they moved to England.

Noble had exhibitions of his work at the Daniel Gallery, the Rehn Galleries, and the Milch Galleries.

He was survived by his widow, two children, John and Towanda, two sisters, Mrs.