James "Athenian" Stuart FRS FSA (1713 – 2 February 1788) was a Scottish archaeologist, architect and artist, best known for his central role in pioneering Neoclassicism.

There he produced his first major work, his illustrated treatise on the Egyptian obelisk of Psammetichus II within A. M. Bandini's De obelisco Caesaris Augusti, and met Nicholas Revett, a young Suffolk gentleman and amateur architect on his Grand Tour.

In 1748 Stuart joined Revett, Gavin Hamilton and the architect Matthew Brettingham the Younger[2] on a trip to Naples to study the ancient ruins and, from there, they travelled through the Balkans (stopping at Pula) to Greece.

Stuart's more and more chaotic business practices (possibly to be explained by his chronic gout and deteriorating health, and to his coming into a private fortune – a contemporary report on his death in The World stated that "unexpectedly to most people, [he] has died possessed of much property, chiefly on mortgage on new buildings in Marybone") attracted adverse comment from the late 1760s.

The Antiquities of Athens allowed architects, sculptors and designers in Europe and America for the first time to use Neo-Classicism without having to go to Greece themselves and acted as a sourcebook for them for the next two centuries.