John Christian, who died on 10th March 2016 at the age of seventy-three, was a leading authority on nineteenth-century British art with an unrivalled knowledge of the life and work of Sir Edward Burne-Jones. As an independent scholar he moved easily between the worlds of academe and the art trade. His slim, elegant figure, enlivened by the sartorial touch of a lemon or lilac jumper was a familiar and welcome sight at private views. He was held in great affection and respect by a wide range of scholars and friends from galleries and auction houses, who recognized the keen eye and underlying curiosity and enthusiasm that lay behind his somewhat diffident and courteously old-world manners.

John Gordon Christian was born on 15th December 1942; his father, of the same name, was a naval officer originally from Scotland, but the family lived at Woodford in Essex. John was educated initially in Colchester, but on winning a scholarship moved to Gresham’s School at Holt in Norfolk. Even at this time, his interest in art developed through precocious reading and visits to museums and galleries and he was also a keen and gifted draughtsman. He recalled the excitement of first finding the volumes of Georgiana Burne-Jones’s Memorials of her husband in the school library and lying reading them, ‘oblivious’, on the edge of the cricket-pitch.

A defining moment of John Christian’s life came when, still in his schooldays, he discovered that the nonagenerian, distinguished former Director of the Fitzwillian Museum Sir Sydney Cockerell, who in his own early years had been a trusted friend of both Burne-Jones and Ruskin and assistant to William Morris, was still living in Kew. Cockerell, whom he saw often up until his death in 1962, encouraged the young Christian in his interest in the lives of the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates. Opening up a world of first-hand recollection, Cockerell introduced his new protégé both to ‘survivors’ from an earlier era such as the painter Dorothy Hawksley and to the circle that included the first scholars to take the previously neglected Victorians seriously: figures such as Lady [Rosalie] Mander and, in particular, Virginia Surtees, then engaged on her monumental catalogue raisonné of Rossetti.

At the beginning of the sixties, Christian went up to Cambridge to read history at Selwyn College, but after two years transferred to study art history under the often intimidating eye of Michael Jaffé. After university he spent some time ‘trying to teach little boys to paint at Dulwich and then cutting my art-historical teeth in the picture gallery at Christ Church, Oxford’. There, cataloguing old-master drawings, another mentor, James Byam-Shaw, helped inculcate the meticulous scholarship that would characterise Christian’s entire career.

His great break came when he was asked to select and catalogue a major Arts Council exhibition devoted to the work of Burne-Jones. The show, staged in 1975 in the less than sympathetic concrete spaces of the Hayward Gallery, was a highly memorable achievement. Following in the sequence of reevaluations of Beardsley (1966), Millais (1967), Holman Hunt (1969) and Rossetti (1972), Christian’s exhibition spread awareness of Burne-Jones’s distinctive decorative style of mystical and literary symbolism far beyond the small coterie of devotees of Aesthetic and fin-de-siècle art. Suddenly, and somewhat to Christian’s surprise, these neglected and derided Victorians were appropriated by a new generation of hippy students and fashion designers for whom their Bohemian lives as much as their imagery had an irresistible appeal.

Following the success of the 1975 show John Christian curated a remarkable succession of exhibitions both here and for Japan, where the demand for travelling exhibitions of British art became for a while insatiable, as well as for America. His magisterial survey The Last Romantics (Barbican Art Gallery, 1989) which drew together late Pre-Raphaelites and Neo-Romantic painters and illustrators ‘from Burne-Jones to Spencer’, revealed the continuity of the British romantic tradition; this groundbreaking show was one of Christian’s greatest achievements.

Almost all his exhibitions were accompanied by substantial catalogues which displayed both a wide frame of reference and formidable erudition leavened with a touch of humour. As he himself put it, ‘determined to show their academic credentials, aficionados sometimes forgot that lightness of touch and a sense of proportion can also be components of scholarship’. He never forgot. Indeed, a small book that Christian wrote for the British Museum in 2011, Edward Burne-Jones, the Hidden Humorist, reveals an essential element of the character of both subject and author.

While keeping up a steady stream of small but significant books on subjects such as Burne-Jones’s drawings and contributing articles to journals including The Burlington Magazine, in more recent years John Christian found the most congenial outlet for his vast store of knowledge in the highly-detailed catalogue notes which he researched and wrote in his capacity as a consultant to the Victorian Pictures department of Christie’s. Because of the importance of so many of the works described and the richness of information in these entries, taken as a whole this enormous body of work, for the most part unsigned, constitutes a major contribution to studies of the period and a monument to Christian’s own unflagging enthusiasm for his heroes.

As was to be expected, Christian’s knowledge also informed his own collecting, about which he displayed a characteristic modesty. He had gathered an eclectic mix of paintings and drawings, centred on the work of his favourite nineteenth-century figures, but by no means exclusively so. Many of these works, always elegantly framed, he arranged with great taste on the walls of the various houses that over the years he shared with his sister Margie. But in addition to the groupings on the walls, John also delighted in producing for inspection portfolios of choice things, often by overlooked masters, such as that doyen of silverpoint drawing, Alphonse Legros.

Another of John Christian’s great enthusiasms was for ceramics, of which he was a passionate and adventurous collector and considerable connoisseur. In particular, he formed over many years an outstanding collection of the work of British ‘studio potters’. All the major figures from the pioneers of the movement in the 1870s and 1880s through to the best contemporary practitioners such as Philip Eglin were represented by well-chosen examples. His taste was remarkably catholic; ranging in stylistic mood from the earnestness of the Arts and Crafts to the austere and contemplative aesthetic of the mid-century modernists and also embracing the more robust experiments of contemporary artist–craftsmen. Arranging his beloved ‘pots’ with fastidious care on specially built plain wooden shelves, Christian delighted in creating telling juxtapositions. To hear him discuss his treasured pieces and draw parallels and contrasts between them opened up whole new ways of looking at ceramics; that many of his favorite pieces, those that formed a sort of wild skyline on the upper shelves, were among the most recent and some of the largest and most exuberant in the collection was as revealing as it was surprising.

Always fascinated by the ways in which pictures and drawings circulate through the trade, coming to rest for a time in one collection, only to be thrown back onto the market – ‘the great slow-moving carousel’, as he described it – John Christian had begun more recently to think and write perceptively about the early years of the ‘Victorian revival’. He described the rediscovery and reappraisal of the Pre-Raphaelites and other even more derided circles of Victorian artists as a ‘critical somersault’. The recent dispersal of several distinguished collections of nineteenth-century British art originally formed in the 1960s and 70s prompted him to write catalogue notes and memoirs recalling, with perhaps a certain sense of wistfulness, the heady combination of high seriousness and real excitement that a generation of pioneering enthusiasts had felt. John Christian was himself a key figure in that remarkable episode of British taste.