John Beazley

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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 College, 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 is now at the Ashmolean Museum.