Sir John Davidson Beazley (/ˈbiːzli/; 13 September 1885 – 6 May 1970) was a British classical archaeologist and art historian, known for his classification of Attic vases by artistic style.

[5] Beazley was a keen poet in his youth but abandoned it (and ceased even to speak of it) as his scholarly pursuits begun to take up all his time.

[2] Flecker addressed a poem to Beazley, an "invitation to a young but learned friend to abandon archaeology for the moment, and play once more with his neglected Muse".

[3] For most of the war he worked in Room 40 (Cryptanalysis) of the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division,[2] where his colleagues included his fellow-archaeologist Winifred Lamb.

The first English edition of his book, Attic Red-figure Vase-painters, appeared in 1942 (in German as Attische Vasenmaler des rotfigurigen Stils, 1925).

[15] In 1919, Beazley married a widow, Marie Ezra (née Bloomfield), whose first husband had been killed in World War I.

[2] The classical scholar Martin Robertson described Beazley as follows: He had great charm, and could be an amusing and delightful companion; but as he grew older his total deafness and his increasing absorption in his work combined to cut him off to some degree from other people.

He was never professionally painted, but his wife, a talented untaught artist, drew several heads of him in coloured chalks which are preserved in Oxford, at Balliol, Christ Church, and Lincoln.

e. 1390), containing his notes on Greek literature and sculpture and on Roman history, and also his illustrations of classical statuary and his sketched caricatures of some contemporaries.