Sir John Beazley's Notebooks: A New Resource for the Study of Athenian Figure-Decorated Pottery

Abstract:Sir John Beazley used notebooks to record the vases he saw in European and American museums. Of these notebooks, 154 are kept in the Beazley Archive in Oxford. Most of these are undated, but they are known to span Beazley's career from 1907 until he abandoned them for a system of loose-leaf notes some 30 years later. The notebooks shed light on Beazley's formative period and on the development of the methodologies he used in his research. They are a good source of information about individual painters and works, as well as about the history of many art collections. The present article publishes this material and offers a reasoned chronology of the notebooks with the aim to foster further research on the subject.