Sir John Davidson Beazley (Glasgow, Scotland, 1885 - Oxford, England, 1970) was an English Classical scholar.

Beazley attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a close friend of the poet James Elroy Flecker. After graduating in 1907, Beazley was a student and tutor in Classics at Christ Church, and in 1925 he became Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology in Art. He specialised in Greek decorated pottery (particularly black-figure and red-figure), and became a world authority on the subject. He adapted the art-historical method initiated by Giovanni Morelli to attribute the specific "hands" (style) of specific workshops and artists, even where no signed piece offered a name, e.g. the Berlin Painter, whose production he first distinguished. He looked at the sweep of classical pottery—major and minor pieces—to construct a history of workshops and artists in ancient Athens. The first English edition of his book, Attic Red-figure Vase-painters, appeared in 1942 (in German as Attische Vasemaler des rotfigurigen Stils, 1925). He was knighted in 1949, and retired in 1956, but continued to work until his death. His personal archive was at the Ashmolean Museum, but in 2007 was renamed the "Classical Art Research Centre" and moved to the Oxford Faculty of Classics, with an extensive new website still called "The Beazley Archive" (link below). His stepdaughter Mary Ezra married the Irish poet Louis Macneice.

[edit] External links

• The Beazley Archive
• Dictionary of Art Historians

This biographical article about an art historian is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e

This article about a British historian or genealogist is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v • d • e