Having acquired a taste for exploring Byzantine art and architecture on a student motorcycle road trip across Europe to Istanbul via Mount Athos, Winfield, upon the advice of two of the leading academics of the time, Gervase Mathew and David Talbot Rice, applied for and won a British Council Scholarship.
[2][4] This award enabled him to spend two years at Belgrade University where he worked with major Serbian art historians and, in the summer holidays, he acquired valuable wall painting conservation techniques at the 13th century monastery in Sopoćani; an UN-sponsored project run by an Italian team.
[4] Winfield’s experience in the Balkans led him to write his first paper, Four Historical Compositions from the Medieval Kingdom of Serbia, which was published in the journal Byzantinoslavica 19, no.2 in 1958.
Winfield’s 1985 publication, with Professor Anthony Bryer, on the Byzantine monuments and topography of the Pontus is described, in one review, as the most detailed work on the subject written in English and unlikely to be surpassed.
The project, under the sponsorship of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara and funded by the Walker Trust of St Andrew, was considered ground-breaking as Talbot Rice was able to secure a permit from the Turkish government to uncover Christian paintings in a building that was, at the time, a working mosque.
After obtaining a grant from the Russell Trust, they, and a team of workers, including June Winfield and Mary Gough, undertook cleaning and restoration work on the Byzantine wall-paintings in the rock-cut church over the next few years.
[16] Prior to that work, Winfield, alongside Ernest Hawkins, cleaned the wall-paintings of The Church of Our Lady (the Panagia Phorbiotissa) in Asinou of the soot from candles which had been pressed into the plaster by worshippers.
[4] During the 1970s the funding for field research provided by Dumbarton Oaks decreased significantly[20] and, when the work at Lagoudera came to an end in 1973, the Winfields moved back to England, initially resettling in Oxford.
[21] Although Winfield no longer held an official post, after he and his wife moved to the Isle of Mull, they continued their academic work, as David’s LinkedIn profile attested “I maintain an Highland hill farm and spend my other time writing on conservation in the world of Byzantine wall paintings and mosaics”.
[4] In 2016, an exhibition Byzantium’s Other Empire: Trebizond curated by Antony Eastmond, AG Leventis Professor of Byzantine Art History at the Courtauld, opened at Koç University's ANAMED Gallery in Istanbul.
The exhibition focused on the church of Hagia Sophia in Trebizond and drew extensively on the photograph and drawing archives of David and June Winfield, held by the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
[27] Winfield married June Wainwright[28] and they had three children, Edward, Diana and Nancy, all of whom were born in the hospital in Nicosia during the time the couple lived in Lagoudera.