John Noble

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 and 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.