John Teyral was one of Cleveland's most acclaimed artists. He exhibited in galleries across the country and was an award winner in the May Show of the Cleveland Museum of Art for decades. The museum has many of his paintings, and other museums in the country have collected his work. Mr. Teyral also painted portraits of many prominent Clevelanders.

He taught advanced painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art for 40 years.

He was born in Yaroslav, Russian, but his family moved to the United States when he was 1. While he was growing up on the near West Side, he took to art the way most boys take to sports. He was 12 when he submitted a drawing at a branch library that won him admission to Saturday classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Each year that he was a student at Lincoln High School, he won the Cleveland School of Art's high school competition. When he graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1934, he received an Agnes Gund traveling scholarship to study at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts.

In 1938 he attended Ecole de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. After World War II, he studied at Accademia di Belli Arti in Florence, Italy, through a Fulbright grant.