John Alexander Pope

John Alexander Pope (4 August 1906 – 18 September 1982) was a prominent scholar of Asian art, particularly Chinese and Japanese blue-and-white ceramics.

He attended Phillips Exeter Academy until 1925, and then Yale College, where he attained a bachelor's degree in English literature 1930.

This allowed him to see China firsthand and also to meet Alan Priest, who would later become the curator of Far Eastern ceramics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Pope later attributed meeting Priest in Beijing as the most influential factor in determining his eventual, life-long field of study of blue-and-white Asian porcelains.

[8] Beginning in the 1960s, Pope took many trips to Japan, which resulted in his research slowly shifting to the study of Japanese ceramics.