Humfry Payne

Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne (19 February 1902 – 9 May 1936) was an English archaeologist, director of the British School at Athens from 1929 to his death.

Personal Born at Wendover, Buckinghamshire, Payne was one of three children, the only son, of the historian Edward John Payne, fellow of University College Oxford, and Emma Leonora Helena ( Pertz).

He attended Westminster School and afterwards Christ Church, Oxford where he was awarded first class honours in classical Mods (1922) and Greats (1924). In 1926, he married the journalist Dilys Powell.

Payne was the younger brother of the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979).

Career A research studentship at Christ Church (1926 to 1931) and an assistantship in the department of antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum (1926 to 1928) followed, during which he researched in Mediterranean archaeology. Payne received the Conington Prize for classical learning in 1927 for work on painted Greek pottery. He was a student of John Beazley, known for his work on classical vase-painting, and worked with Alan Blakeway, and they published joint papers on black-figured Attic pottery excavated at Naucratis. There were large collections of vase material from Corinthia, Payne took up the challenge of studying and collating the information which he published in 1931 as Necrocorinthia,

He is buried in the cemetery of Agios Georgios (St George) at Mycenae where his tombstone bears the words Mourn not for Adonais, a quotation from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Adonais, an elegy for John Keats.

Written works Necrocorinthia: a study of Corinthian art in the archaic period. (1931), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Archaic marble sculpture from the Acropolis, (1936), Manchester: Cresset Press (with Gerard Mackworth Young). Perachora: the sanctuaries of Hera Akraia and Limenia, (1940), Oxford: Clarendon Press (ed T J Dunbabin). Protokorinthische Vasenmalerei, (1974), Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, (reprint).