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John H. Johnston

Painter

Centurion, 1889–1941

Full Name John Humphreys Johnston

Born 2 November 1857 in New York (Manhattan), New York

Died 17 April 1941 in Cannes, France

Proposed by John La Farge and Daniel Huntington

Elected 7 December 1889 at age thirty-two

Century Memorial

A native of New York, John Humphreys Johnstone, Johnston—genre, landscape, and portrait painter—had since 1905 made his home in Venice. There he assembled a notable art collection. In his youth he was a pupil of Lefebvre and Doucet in Paris. Here he studied under John LaFarge (for fifty years an honored Centurion). Johnstone won medals for his painting at Paris in 1900, Buffalo in 1901, Munich in 1902, and St. Louis in 1904; he is represented in the Wilstach Gallery, Philadelphia, the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and in the Luxembourg. He became a British subject about twenty-five years ago, and in 1940 sent £15,000 to Winston Churchill “as a slight token of friendship for the British people.”

Geoffrey Parsons
1941 Century Memorials