John Beazley

Sir John Davidson Beazley (; 13 September 1885 – 6 May 1970) was a British classical archaeologist and art historian, known for his classification of Attic vases by artistic style. He was professor of classical archaeology and art at the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1956.

Early life James Elroy Flecker (sitting) and Beazley (standing) in 1908. Beazley was born in Glasgow, Scotland on 13 September 1885, to Mark John Murray Beazley (died 1940) and Mary Catherine Beazley née Davidson (died 1918). He was educated at King Edward VI School, Southampton and Christ's Hospital, Sussex. certainly their relationship took place within what one biographer has described as "an aura of bisexuality". Among Beazley's other friends during this time were John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Rupert Brooke. He held the temporary rank of second lieutenant from March to October 1916 when he was on secondment to the British Army.

In 1925, he became Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, 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 Vasenmaler des rotfigurigen Stils, 1925).

Later life Beazley retired in 1956, but continued to work until his death in Oxford, on 6 May 1970.

Honours Beazley was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1927. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1943. In 1954, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Beazley was appointed a Knight Bachelor in 1949, and therefore granted the title Sir. He was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 1959 New Year Honours "for services to scholarship".

Personal life

In 1919, Beazley married a widow, Marie Ezra (née Bloomfield), whose first husband had been killed in World War I. Marie died in 1967.

The classical scholar Martin Robertson described Beazley as follows:

Archive

There is a notebook in Beazley's hand in Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts, the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MS. Eng. misc. e. 1390), containing his notes on Greek literature and sculpture and on Roman history, and also his illustrations of classical statuary and his sketched caricatures of some contemporaries.