John Wade Hampton

Born in New York City and then settling in Scottsdale, Arizona, John (Johnny) Hampton became a renowned painter and sculptor of cowboy life that he grew to know first hand from living much of his life in the Southwest.

He was raised in Brooklyn and developed a love for the West from seeing Tom Mix movies. Acting out his fantasy of becoming a cowboy, he used pretended he was roping cows by using his mother’s clothesline. He began illustration pulp magazines with western themes while he was in high school and at age sixteen, won a contest for sketch artists. When World War II began, he served in an Intelligence capacity in the South Pacific.