John Murray Barton, painter, printmaker, muralist, sculptor, and lecturer, was born on 8 February 1921 in New York City. He studied in New York City at the Art Students League under George Bridgman, Frank Vincent DuMond, and Gustav William Von Schlegell, and also at the Nahum Tschacbasov School.

Barton incorporated sand and other materials into his oil paintings and murals and he sculpted with copper wire. He worked on two mural projects with noted ceramic muralist, Lumin Martin Winter. The first was a ceramic mural and the second was a sand and oil mural; both were public art commissions via the New York Board of Education. Barton also created small scale paintings and blocks prints and solo exhibitions of his work were mounted at the Mack Gallery in Philadelphia in 1957, the Fantasy Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 1958 and 1960, and the Hudson Guild in New York in 1959.

Barton was a member of the Woodstock Art Association and the International Association of Artists. He taught private studio classes in creative expression and lectured on techniques and creative expression at university art departments on the East Coast between 1960 and 1965. His work is represented in the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, Haifa, Israel; the Newark Public Library, New Jersey; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; and the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.

John Murray Barton died on 17 December 2000 in New York City.