John Forbes' penultimate commission was the portraits of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra which were destroyed in the 1952 fire in the Parliamentary Library in Ottawa.

According to a Toronto newspaper report from April 1918, Forbes had recently received a commission from Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) to paint a series of official war pictures at the front.

[2] Forbes was also a successful amateur boxer, being light and middle weight champion of the University of London while attending the Slade School of Fine Art.

In late 1918, Forbes married his wife Jean Mary Edgell, another art student, in London.

In 1958, Forbes, Manley MacDonald, Victor Llewellyn Child, Gordon Roy Conn and others established the Ontario Institute of Painters as a body for traditional or "realist" artists.