Pope, John Alexander

Date born: 1906

Place Born: Detroit, USA

Date died: 1982

Place died: Washington, DC

Museum director and historian of Chinese and Japanese art. Pope received a Ph.D. in Chinese studies and Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1955. He also studied European collections of Chinese art at the Courtald Institute of Art in London, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute. After spending three years as a lecturer of Chinese art at Columbia University, Pope was hired as a research associate at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and was appointed its director in 1962. He published several books, articles, and exhibition catalogs on Chinese blue- and-white vase painting, and worked to develop the museum's collections of blue-and-white porcelain from the Yuan (1279-1368) and Ming (1368-1644) periods. Pope also expanded the Freer's collection of Japanese porcelain produced during the Edo (1600-1868) period. In the last decade of his life, Pope worked as a research curator of Far Eastern art from 1971 until his death in 1982. LMW

Home Country: United States

Sources: The Dictionary of Art

Bibliography: