John Stewart Kennedy (January 4, 1830 – October 30, 1909) was a Scottish-born American businessman, financier and philanthropist.

[4] He arrived in the New York on June 29, 1850, and spent the next two years traveling to all the major cities in Canada and the United States, including Quebec and New Orleans.

Jesup & Company that began with a focus on railroad iron and materials but eventually shifted to banking.

Kennedy & Company, a banking firm, and spent the next fifteen years devoting himself to "financial affairs of magnitude and importance.

[4] In 1872, Kennedy and Sir William John Menzies of Edinburgh organized the Scottish American Investment Company in Scotland.

[4] In 1878 Kennedy was instructed as USA liquidator on behalf of the shareholders of the City of Glasgow Bank to recover, primarily railroad assets, American securities of $5 million.

[13][14] She died at their summer home, Kenarden Lodge in Bar Harbor, Maine in July 1930 at the age of 96.

In his later life Kennedy donated many pieces to the Metropolitan Museum of Art including the second painting of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's famous Washington Crossing the Delaware, a full-sized replica of the first, in 1897.