Perhaps the high point of his career, however, was his work on the seminal and popular Barbican 1989 exhibition The Last Romantics, which explored the legacy of Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist painters of the Victorian period, tracing the Romantic tradition from Burne-Jones to Stanley Spencer. In the early 1970s, he lived in Oxford where, with the Venetian art scholar James Byam Shaw, he catalogued the Old Master drawings in the picture gallery at Christ Church. After the success of the Hayward exhibition in 1975, he took his expertise to exhibitions across the globe. He organised shows of British Romantic paintings in Japan during the 1990s, catalogued, with Stephen Wildman, Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and in London worked on exhibitions at, among other galleries, Agnew’s and the Tate. In 2012, he reappraised a long-lost painting by Burne-Jones. The work from 1872 had slipped into obscurity after being sold at Christie’s under the title The Fountain of Youth, in the mid-1970s. The painting came to light after the Tate announced its 2012 PreRaphaelite retrospective. John uncovered a Burne-Jones sketch annotated with the names ‘Tristram’ and ‘Iseult’ in the archives of the Fitzwilliam and matched it to the rediscovered painting. John sat on the advisory panel at the Art Fund. His books include The Pre-Raphaelites in Oxford (1974); The Oxford Union Murals (1981); Edward Burne-Jones: The Hidden Humorist (2011), in which he explored the artist’s lesser known achievements as a caricaturist and comic sketch artist; and A Claim to Beauty: William Morris and the Kelmscott Press (2014). Away from his work John painted and built up an outstanding collection of British studio ceramics and pottery. Tall, soft-spoken, courteous and kind, he was a highly respected presence in the auction rooms and galleries of London and will be sadly missed. He was always generous in sharing his knowledge and encouraging younger scholars. He never married and is survived by his sister Margie, also an art historian. This obituary is based on one published in The Telegraph online on 22 March 2016.
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