John Carroll was born while his parents were en route to take up residence in California, where purchased a ranch and set up a meat packing plant. He early showed artistic talent and began his studies in adolescence at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art in San Francisco. From 1913 to 1915 he was an engineering student at the University of California, but having been much impressed by the paintings of Frank Duveneck shown at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915, left college to study for the next year under Duveneck at the Cincinnati Academy of Art.
At the outbreak of World War I, Carroll enlisted in the Navy. He settled in Woodstock, New York in 1922 and in the same year had his first one-man show at the Daniel Gallery in New York. In 1925 he won first prize at the Pan American Exhibition in Los Angeles. Carroll taught at New York's Art Students League for the 1926-27 season (as he did again many years later, in 1944-45). In 1930 he became head of the painting department of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts; the same year he purchased a farm in East Chatham, New York, where he pursued his painting and fox hunting.
Carroll's special subject concentration was delicate, ethereal images of women. His wife, Georgia Finckel, whom he had met when she was an art student in Woodstock, and married in 1936, posed for many of his paintings. Among awards given his work shown in Academy annual exhibitions are Altman prizes for figure paintings in 1948 (for Clare Luce as Camille) and in 1954. Carroll was represented in New York by the Rehn Gallery.
