John Noble

John "Wichita Bill" Noble (March 15, 1874 – January 6, 1934) was an American painter. He was a noted post-impressionist painter of sunrises and seascapes. His painting, The Big Herd, won the Carnegie Prize in 1928. Following his death, his works appeared in the private collection of William Randolph Hearst, and he became the subject of Irving Stone's 1949 biographical work The Passionate Journey.

Biography Born to an upper-middle-class family that emigrated from England, Noble grew up on the prairie. He claimed to be the "first white child" born in Wichita, Kansas. As a young boy, he helped his father, also named John Noble, drive Texas Longhorn cattle along the Chisholm Trail and learned several Native American languages. He took his first painting lessons from Native American artists.

In the late 1890s, Noble worked as a photographer and artist in Wichita. He painted a saloon nude titled "Cleopatra at the Roman Bath" that came to be notoriously condemned and defaced by Carrie Nation, and a portrait of Albert Pike that still hangs in the reception room of the Wichita Consistory.

He went to France in 1903 at age 29. While abroad in France, he assumed the fictionalized frontier persona of "Wichita Bill". He wore snakeskin vests, Windsor ties, and five-gallon hats. He studied at the Académie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens and befriended fellow American artists George Luks and Richard E. Miller. In 1909, he wed Amelia Peiche, formerly of Strasbourg, France.

At the outbreak of World War I, Noble and his wife moved to England. He exhibited his work at the Daniel Gallery (1920), the Rehn Galleries (1922), and the Milch Galleries (1925). He often advised prospective customers not to purchase his works. He bought back pictures he sold in order to mutilate them.

Returning from England, Noble briefly lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts. A chronic alcoholic, he died in New York City of paraldehyde poisoning on January 6, 1934.

He had two children, John and Towanda. His son, John A. Noble, was also a well-known artist and lithographer and is the namesake of the Noble Maritime Collection. In 1941, his widow found a landscape of a sunrise over Boulogne, France, that he had painted in the collection of press baron William Randolph Hearst. The landscape had been badly retouched, so she bought it, cut out and saved the sunrise from the center of the canvas that had not been retouched, and then took a carving knife and slashed the rest to ribbons.

Legacy In his 1940 autobiography Artist In Manhattan, Jerome Myers recalled his friendship with Noble:

Irving Stone's 1949 work, The Passionate Journey is a biographical novel of John Noble's life.

Some of his paintings can be seen at the Wichita Art Museum.