John Luke (19 January 1906 – 4 February 1975) was an Irish artist. He was born in Belfast at 4 Lewis Street. The fifth of seven sons and one daughter of James Luke and his wife Sarah, originally from Ahoghill. He attended the Hillman Street National School and in 1920 went to work at the York Street Flax Spinning Company. He went on soon after to become a riveter at the Workman, Clark shipyard and whilst working there he enrolled in evening classes at the Belfast College of Art.
He excelled at the college under the tutelage of Seamus Stoupe and Newton Penpraze. His contemporaries included Romeo Toogood, Harry Cooke Knox, George MacCann, and Colin Middleton. In 1927 he won the coveted Dunville Scholarship which enabled him to attend the Slade School of Art in London, where he studied painting and sculpture under the celebrated Henry Tonks, who greatly influenced his development as a draughtsman.
Luke remained at the Slade School until 1930, in which year he won the Robert Ross Scholarship. On leaving the Slade he stayed in London, intent on establishing himself in the art world. For a time he shared a flat with fellow-Ulsterman F.E. McWilliam (1909–1992), and enrolled as a part-time student of Walter Bayes at the Westminster School of Art to study wood-engraving. He began to exhibit his work and in October 1930 showed two paintings, The Entombment and Carnival, in an exhibition of contemporary art held at Leger Galleries. The latter composition, depicting a group of masked merry-makers, was singled out by the influential critic, P.G. Konody of the Daily Mail (3 October 1930), as 'one of the most attractive features of the exhibition'. But the economic climate was deteriorating and a year later, at the end of 1933, he was driven back to Belfast by the recession. He remained in Belfast, apart from a time during the Second World War when he went to Killylea, County Armagh.
From the late 1930s until 1943, when he produced Pax, there was a gap in his output, occasioned, no doubt, by his move to County Armagh in order to escape Belfast after the Blitz. In 1946 he held his first one-man exhibition at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, and this was followed two years later by a similar show, held under the aegis of CEMA, nearby at number 55A Donegal Place. In 1950, to celebrate the Festival of Britain the following year, he was commissioned to paint in the City Hall, Belfast, a mural representing the history of the city, a work which brought his name to the attention of a wider audience. In later years, other commissions followed for murals in the Masonic Hall, Rosemary Street, 1956, and the College of Technology at Millfield in the 1960s. He also carved in relief coats of arms for the two Governors of Northern Ireland, Lords Wakehurst, 1959, and Erskine of Rerrick, 1965. He was, too, a member of the Royal Ulster Academy.
John Luke died in Belfast on 4 February 1975, just a month into his sixty-ninth year. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held, in association with the Arts Councils of Ireland, in the Ulster Museum in 1978, and was accompanied by a short monograph on his life and career written by John Hewitt.
The cache has been placed near to where he lived during the second world war.