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John Greenhill (c. 1644 – 19 May 1676) was an English portrait painter, a pupil of Peter Lely, who approached his teacher in artistic excellence, but whose life was cut short by a dissolute lifestyle.
Greenhill was educated at Salisbury Cathedral School. His first attempt at a portrait was one of his paternal uncle James Abbott of Salisbury, whom he is said to have sketched surreptitiously, as the old man would not sit for him. In 1662, he moved to London and became a pupil of Peter Lely. His progress was rapid, and he acquired some of Lely's skill and method. He carefully studied Vandyck's portraits. George Vertue commented that he copied Vandyck's portrait of "Thomas Killigrew and his dog" so closely that it was difficult to know which was the original. Vertue also says that his progress excited Lely's jealousy.
Greenhill was at first industrious and married early. But a taste for poetry and drama, and living in Covent Garden near the theatres, led him to associate with many members of the free-living theatrical world, and he fell into "irregular habits." On 19 May 1676, while returning from the Vine Tavern (in Holborn) in a state of intoxication, he fell into the gutter in Long Acre and was carried to his lodgings in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he died the same night. He was buried in St Giles in the Fields church. He left a widow and family, to whom Lely gave an annuity.
Among Greenhill's admirers was dramatist Aphra Behn, who kept up an amorous correspondence with him and lamented his early death in a fulsome panegyric.
Greenhill painted a self-portrait, now hanging in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London John Greenhill - Self portrait (Dulwich Picture Gallery). (engraved in Wornum's edition of Horace Walpole's "Anecdotes of Painting"). He also drew a portrait of himself, as did Lely.
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