John Noble
American, 1874-1934
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John ('Wichita Bill') 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 (Cleopatra at the Roman Bath) that came to be notoriously condemned and defaced by Carrie Nation, and a larger-than-life-sized portrait of Albert Pike which still hangs in the reception room of the Wichita Consistory.
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 (1920), the Rehn Galleries (1922), and the Milch Galleries (1925).
He was survived by his widow, two children, John and Towanda, two sisters, Mrs. Bert McCausland and Elizabeth Noble, and one brother, Arthur, all of Wichita. His son, John A. Noble (1913–1983), 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 William Randolph Hearst. It 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.