John Bunyan Bristol was an American landscape painter born in Hillsdale, New York.
Self-taught, Bristol studied from nature and originally painted figure and portrait paintings. He abandoned these genres in order to devote his skillful hand to landscape painting. Bristol studied briefly with the painter Henry Ary. He painted from his home in Massachusetts and created highly detailed images which typically combined water and land views. He traveled to Florida in 1859 and produced several tropical pictures which attracted attention to his work. In the 1880s he began to exhibit oil paintings of the norther Adirondacks around Whiteface Mountain and Lake Placid.