John Ward Dunsmore studied with Thomas S. Noble at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was then in Paris from 1875 to 1879, studying at the Petite Ecole with Aimée Millet and privately with Thomas Couture. His first appearance in an Academy annual exhibition was in 1879. When he returned to America it was to settle in Boston. He apparently met with some professional recognition, as he received a medal from the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association in 1881. However, after about five years in Boston he returned to Europe, where he worked in Paris and England, executing a series of paintings on the life and times of the French King Louis IV.
In 1888 Dunsmore was in Detroit to assume the post of director of the new Detroit Museum of Art (now the Detroit Institute of Arts). Two years later he became director of the Detroit School of Arts, a position he retained until 1894. He then returned to Cincinnati. By 1902 Dunsmore had settled in New York and begun researching the American Revolutionary War, eventually becoming an authority on the subject. Of the paintings he executed based on this research, thirty-four were acquired by the Fraunces Tavern Museum, eleven by the Title Guarantee and Trust Company, both in New York; and forty went to the Wagnalls Memorial Universal Library in Lithopolis, Ohio. He also frequently exhibited these subjects in Academy annual exhibitions, in which he was consistently represented from 1902 until 1941.
Dunsmore was a member of the American Watercolor Society, the American Fine Arts Society, the Artists' Fund Society, New York, the Salmagundi Club, and the American Artists Professional League.
