Background

John Fleming was born on June 12, 1919, in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, England, United Kingdom. He was the son of a local solicitor.

Education

John Fleming was educated at Rugby School.

Career

John Fleming was an art historian and an avid scholar of art and architecture who wrote prolifically with coauthor Hugh Honour. As a young person with aspirations of becoming an artist, Fleming went to Italy, where he found work reading to a blind author by the name of Percy Lubbock.

During this time he began researching and writing for his first book, Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome. He and Honour met and worked as editors and series writers for Penguin Books while co-writing such works as The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts and The Visual Arts: A History.

Achievements

• John Fleming was best known as the author of Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome. This work won the Bannister Fletcher Prize and the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medal.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts

    (An exhaustive guide to the decorative arts of the West si...)

    1977
  • The Venetian Hours of Henry James, Whistler, and Sargent

    (This amazing book contains paintings, drawings, prints, p...)

    1991
  • Robert Adam and His Circle 1961
  • The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture 1966
  • A World History of Art 1982
  • The Visual Arts: A History 1995

Connections

life partner:

Hugh Honour

collaborator:

Nikolaus Pevsner

References

• Contemporary Authors
  2010