John Carroll

John Carroll was an American painter, printmaker and teacher, raised in San Francisco, California. Best known for his portraits of women, Carroll studied at the Mark Hopkins Art Academy, which burned to the ground after the devastating 1906 earthquake, the University of California, Berkeley and for a short period under the tutelage of painter Frank Duveneck in Cincinnati, Ohio. Like many of his time, Carroll's career was put on hold because of World War I. He settled in New York City afterward and became associated with the Ashcan School, and an Artist Colony in Woodstock. In 1927 he received a Guggenheim fellowship, allowing him to study in Europe.

As an instructor, Carroll taught at both the Art Students' League in New York and the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he was the head of the painting department for about a decade. It was during his time in Detroit that he developed a new style for which he would become so well known for, romanticizing the female figure.