The Workshop and the Circle, the Painter and his School

Abstract Apart from those painters whom Beazley identified very early on, such as the Kleophrades Painter and the Berlin Painter, Beazley took little trouble to explain the reasons for his attributions. We therefore need to examine his work on those two painters; this will help us not only to analyse his method, but also to identify clearly the radical changes that he introduced to the study of pottery from the very beginning of his research. On the Berlin Painter he published one of the few articles in which he explained his ideas about the connoisseurship of vases in detail. His conclusion was a sharp reaction against erroneous interpretations, which he saw as distorting any overall picture one might have of the production of painted vases in Athens, and also any sense of the status of the painters.