Postcard History

Family legends are essential pieces in the history of everyone. This essay is about a fellow named John Noble, a true “character” in life who has become a research challenge. Unlike other recent stories reported here I have devoted only a few hours to the search for information, but those efforts have produced very little knowledge of Mr. Noble. Frankly, the results are limited to a few U.S. federal records and two obituaries. From the newspaper issue dates both obits are authentic, but unfortunately, when the information is analyzed, an idea creeps in that John Noble was not quite the same in public as he was in private or with family. Could he have been that different? I think the answer is, “Yes!”

John Noble was born on March 15, 1874, to an upper-middle-class family that had emigrated from England and settled in mid-town Wichita, Kansas. 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.” Neither the reason nor the origin of his claim of birth has been discovered, but one possible explanation could be that he lived some of his childhood on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. His first formal training was earned at the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts and by the early 1890s he had become a competent illustrator and cartoonist for newspapers from Texas to Chicago.

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 from his home in Wichita. Two of his paintings earned national attention soon after their unveilings. One was his concept painting of a nude Cleopatra in a Roman bath that came to be notoriously condemned and defaced by Carrie Nation. Another was a larger-than-life-sized portrait of Albert Pike, a Confederate General and notorious jurist, that 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, neither of whom achieved a reputation equal to Noble’s.

Noble married Amelia Peiche, of Strasbourg, France, in 1909. She was twelve years younger than John. They had plans to settle in the Alsace-Lorraine region, but one source claims that they moved to England at the outbreak of World War I. The claim is factually proven by a United States Passport document that states the family left the U.S. in May 1912 and planned to return when the “war was over.” The Fourteenth Census of the United States (1920) enumerates the Noble family at 12 Carver Street, Provincetown, Massachusetts, which was a rental property with an attached studio.

During the family’s residence in Massachusetts their second child was born. The newspaper’s account of their son as Towanda William Clark caused a “quiet riot.”

The announcement came on November 10^th, but his birth was on October 8, 1919. The rather wordy account suggested that the boy was named “Towanda” after the town where his father once lived on a ranch – approximately 25 miles northeast of Wichita. The good folk of town didn’t know if they were being insulted or honored.

In the first half of the 1920s Noble moved his family to New York City and had three exhibitions of his work, one in mid-town and two in galleries near his Greenwich Village apartment on East 10^th Street. Other noteworthy exhibits were curated in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut.

When Noble died in 1934 from Paraldehyde poisoning (Paraldehyde is a medication with sedative, hypnotic, and anticonvulsant properties) he was survived by his widow and two sons – John and Towanda. His son, John A. Noble (1913–1983), was also a well-known artist and lithographer and is the namesake of the Noble Maritime Collection at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, New York.

In 1941, his widow found a landscape painting of a sunrise her husband did over Boulogne, France, in the collection of William Randolph Hearst. It had been badly retouched, so she bought it, then 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.

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Very few of John Noble’s paintings have made their way to postcards. The images here are among the very few in my collection and I know of only two others. One of the others is his 1915 landscape of a prairie town along a river entitled Magic City at the Smithsonian Museum of American art.