James "Athenian" Stuart
James "Athenian" Stuart (1713 – 2 February 1788) was a Scottish archaeologist, architect and artist, best known for his central role in pioneering Neoclassicism. Life Early life Stuart was born in 1713 in Creed Lane, Ludgate Street, London, to a Scottish sailor who died when he was young. Proving a talented artist while his family was in poverty, he was apprenticed to a fan painter to support the family financially. However, in around 1742, he was able to travel to Italy (albeit on foot) for his artistic improvement, working there as a cicerone and a painter, learning Latin, Italian and Greek, and studying Italian and Roman art and architecture. There he produced his first major work, his illustrated treatise on the Egyptian obelisk of Psammetichus II within A. M. Bandini's De obelisco Caesaris Augusti, and met Nicholas Revett, a young Suffolk gentleman and amateur architect on his Grand Tour. Naples and Greece In 1748 Stuart joined Revett, Gavin Hamilton and the architect Matthew Brettingham the younger on a trip to Naples to study the ancient ruins and, from there,they travelled through the Balkans (stopping at Pula) to Greece. Visiting Salonica, Athens, and an Ionic temple on the River Ilissus among