Full Name: Pope, John Alexander
Gender: male
Date Born: 1906
Date Died: 1982
Place Born: Detroit, Wayne, MI, USA
Place Died: Washington, DC, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): ceramic ware (visual works), Chinese (culture or style), Early Modern Japanese, East Asian, Edo (Japanese period), Japanese (culture or style), Japanese ceramics styles, Ming (culture, period, and styles), porcelain (visual works), pottery (visual works), vase, vase paintings (visual works), and Yüan (dynastic styles and period)
Overview
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 Washgington, D. C., 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.
Sources
The Dictionary of Art
Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker