John Kinder Gowran Shearman (pronounced "Sherman"; 24 June 1931 – 11 August 2003[1]) was an English art historian who also taught in America.
[9] 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.
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,[9] to whom Shearman later dedicated his book on Andrea del Sarto in 1965.
The dedication of the book to his teachers at the Courtauld, Anthony Blunt and Johannes Wilde, reflects, as Benjamin Paul said in his obituary for the British Academy, that Shearman “had come full circle and truly completed his life’s work”.
[16] Shortly after his first wife’s death, he married Sally Roskill, the first wife of the art historian Mark Roskill, although they divorced in 1997, and, in 1998, he married fellow art historian Kathryn Brush, Distinguished University Professor Emerita at the University of Western Ontario.