John Greenhill

John Greenhill (c. 1644 – 19 May 1676) was an English portrait painter, a pupil of Peter Lely, who approached his teacher in artistic excellence, but whose life was cut short by a dissolute lifestyle.

His first attempt at a portrait was one of his paternal uncle James Abbott of Salisbury, whom he is said to have sketched surreptitiously, as the old man would not sit for him.

But a taste for poetry and drama, and living in Covent Garden in the vicinity of the theatres, led him to associate with many members of the free-living theatrical world, and he fell into "irregular habits".

On 19 May 1676, while returning from the Vine Tavern (in Holborn) in a state of intoxication, he fell into the gutter in Long Acre, and was carried to his lodgings in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he died the same night.

Among Greenhill's personal admirers was dramatist Aphra Behn, who kept up an amorous correspondence with him, and lamented his early death in a fulsome panegyric.