John Shearman

Who was John Shearman?

John Kinder Gowran Shearman was an English art historian who also taught in America. He was a specialist in Italian Renaissance painting, regarded by many as "the outstanding figure" of his generation in this area, who published several influential works, but whose expected major books on Quattrocento painting, for the Penguin/Yale History of Art series, and on Raphael, never appeared.

He was born the son of an army officer in Aldershot, Hampshire, educated in Surrey at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, and Felsted School in Essex, and entered the Courtauld Institute in London in 1951, where he was appointed a lecturer as soon as he graduated with a BA in 1955 – followed by a PhD in 1957. He had a research fellowship at Princeton University from 1964, was Reader at the Courtauld from 1967, and Deputy Director 1974–79 before returning to Princeton, where he was chairman of the art history department from 1979 to 1985. He had hoped for the Directorship of the Courtauld at the retirement of Anthony Blunt in 1974 but was not successful; the medievalist Peter Lasko, who had administrative experience, got the appointment instead.