Jon Whiteley

Jon Whiteley was a Scottish child actor who spent his adult life as an art historian. Born in Monymusk in 1945, he made five films before leaving acting behind. The second, The Little Kidnappers (1953), earned him and co-star Vincent Winter an Academy Juvenile Award. Three more films followed, The Spanish Gardener (1956) among them, but his mother wanted him to pass the eleven-plus exam first, and after two television credits his screen work ended. After studying at Pembroke College, Oxford, he worked as an art historian at the Ashmolean Museum and cataloged its French drawings. His doctorate examined the return of antiquity-inspired subjects in French painting of the mid-nineteenth century. He wrote or co-wrote books on Ingres, Puvis de Chavannes and Claude Lorrain, produced a 2009 volume on the museum's stringed instruments, and in May 2009 he was named a chevalier in the French Order of Arts and Letters.