Beazley, Sir John Davidson

Basic Biographical Information

Sir John Davidson Beazley (1885–1970) was a founding figure in the modern study of Greek ceramics. Building on (then innovative) nineteenth-century modes of stylistic analysis, he refined a system of attribution and identification, for Attic pottery with black- and red-figure decoration from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, to Mark John Murray Beazley and Mary Catherine Davidson. He attended King Edward VI School in Southampton and Christ’s Hospital before enrolling in Balliol College, Oxford University. There he excelled and was tutored by the well-known classicists Cyril Bailey and A.W. Pickard-Cambridge. In 1908 he was elected as student and tutor at Christ Church, a position he held until 1925, when he became the Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology at Oxford, a position he would hold for the next 30 years. He was knighted in 1949. He met Marie Bloomfield in 1913 and married her on August 13, 1919. They lived...