John Koch (August 18, 1909 — April 19, 1978), (pronounced "KŌK") was an American painter and teacher, and an important figure in 20th century Realism.

[3] He was born in Toledo, Ohio, to Marian Joan and Edward John Koch, and grew up mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

[4] He moved to New York City in 1928, where he met and became friends with Dora Zaslavsky, a talented piano teacher, four years his senior.

[6] The Koch marriage was childless, which may have been a cause of regret—his 1955 painting Father and Son depicts him turning from his easel to see himself as a boy lying on the floor and sketching.

[10][a] In 1953, John and Dora Koch bought a 14-room apartment on the tenth floor of The El Dorado, a building at 300 Central Park West.

[15] Koch has developed a soft and luminous style of underpainting in egg tempera and glazing with misty oils to create a cool and ingratiating effect vaguely reminiscent of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Vermeer.

[16]His Portraits Inc. commissions included Family Group (1951, Smithsonian American Art Museum), John and Barbara Wood and their two sons;[17] Roosevelt Ladies at Oyster Bay (1953, private collection), Mrs. Quentin Roosevelt II, her three young daughters, and a friend;[b] and a c.1954 double portrait of composer Richard Rodgers and his wife, designer Dorothy Rodgers.

Each was painted from life at separate sittings, and placed by Koch into his immaculate new living room at the El Dorado, with the painter and his wife as the consummate hosts.

John stands at the bar, self-consciously reflected in a mirror as he pours one of his famous martinis; Dora bends forward to attend to the seated music critic Noel Strauss.

[5] Reflected in the large mirror behind Ulmer is the opposite end of the room, where piano student Don Edmans and Koch's father are engaged in conversation before the glare of a window.

[25] A full-length standing male nude seen from behind, Ulmer towers over the seated Koch and holds a cigarette lighter at hip level, while the artist leans in to get a light.

The lighter illuminates Koch's face and its flame is vividly reflected in his glasses, "a sexually loaded reference to Prometheus's gift of fire to mankind".

[29] While living in Paris, Koch exhibited at the 1929 Salon de Printemps of the Société des Artists Français, and received an honorable mention.

[33] The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted American Painting Today, A National Competitive Exhibition in 1950, at which The Monument was shown.

[4] The US Senate authorized Leon Kroll, Julian E. Levi, and Koch to select American art to be exhibited in the Hall of Education at the 1964 New York World's Fair.

The show traveled to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2023, and works by John Koch were included alongside artworks by 50 other modern and contemporary international artists such as Félix González-Torres, Ana Mendieta, Betye Saar, Maren Hassinger, Silke Otto-Knapp, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir, among others.

[45] Koch was one of six American Realist painters depicted in Raphael Soyer's 1962 group portrait, Homage to Thomas Eakins.