John Shearman

John Kinder Gowran Shearman (pronounced "Sherman"; 24 June 1931 – 11 August 2003) was an English art historian who also taught in America. He was a specialist in Italian Renaissance painting, described by his colleague James S. Ackerman as "the leading scholar of Italian Renaissance painting", who published several influential works, but whose expected major book on Quattrocento painting, for the Pelican History of Art (commissioned in 1984, and still a gap in the series in 2019), never appeared. However, what is widely acknowledged as his most influential book, on the concept of Mannerism, published in 1967, is still in print.

Early life and education

Born in 1931 to Charles E. G. Shearman, a British army brigadier, and Evelyn Shearman (née White) in Aldershot, Hampshire, John Shearman was educated in Surrey at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, and Felsted School in Essex. After completing his two year National Service in Germany, he took up a place at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 1951 at the invitation of Samuel Courtauld, who he had met while on a school trip to London; Shearman’s interest in art and architecture having been stimulated by his father, a keen amateur artist, and his grandfather, Ernest Charles Shearman, a respected British ecclesiastical architect. Shearman graduated from the Courtauld with a degree in art history in 1955 and completed his Ph.D. in 1957. His doctoral thesis, Developments in the Use of Colour in Tuscan Paintings of the Early 16th Century, was supervised by the eminent art historian Johannes Wilde, to whom Shearman later dedicated his book on Andrea del Sarto in 1965.

Career

Shearman remained at the Courtauld after completing his studies firstly as a lecturer, becoming Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1964, then Reader at the Courtauld from 1967, and Deputy Director 1974–1979. He had hoped for the Directorship of the Courtauld upon the retirement of Anthony Blunt in 1974 but his application was not successful; the position going to the medievalist Peter Lasko, who had administrative experience, although some believed it was Shearman’s close association with Blunt, already falling out of favour, that thwarted this aspiration. During his time at the Courtauld he contributed photographs to the Conway Library whose archive, of primarily architectural images, is being digitised under the wider Courtauld Connects project.