Justin Davies is an art historian specialising in seventeenth-century Flemish Art. He was the co-founder of the multinational, multidisciplinary Jordaens Van Dyck Panel Paintings Project 2016–2022. JVDPPP published the results of its research online and through a free to access Jordaens Van Dyck Journal – see www.jordaensvandyck.org. JVDPPP studied Van Dyck and Jordaens’s paintings on panel, including panel makers and making and standard sizing. In 2018 he identified the portrait of the of the Dutch Golden Age painter Pieter Soutman by Van Dyck in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna and co-authored the KHM focus exhibition catalogue, Ein Maler als Modell: Van Dycks Porträt von Pieter Soutman. He has published four articles related to Van Dyck in The Burlington Magazine, two in collaboration with James Innes-Mulraine. In 2026 he wrote an essay and 10 of the 60 entries for the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Van Dyck. Il Europeo – Van Dyck. The European’ at the Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, co-curated by Anna Orlando and Katlijne Van der Stighelen.
A graduate of the University of Cambridge in History, Justin was a soldier and diplomat before becoming an art historian. He was an Affiliated Lecturer and Knowledge Exchange Fellow in the History of Art Department at Cambridge 2023–2026, where he was a Fellow-Commoner at Trinity Hall, also a Visiting Fellow of the Rubenshuis, Antwerp. He is soon to defend his PhD dissertation on Van Dyck’s panel paintings at the University of Amsterdam, the culmination of 10 years research, for which he was awarded a Bourse de Doctorat by the Fondation Périer-D’Ieteren.