Wrote memoirs of artists; first published in 1905.

Artist, author and Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Sussex from 1967 to 1975. Son of Clive Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf. His papers are housed at the University of Sussex.

Poet, composer and author of a major symbol dictionary and co-author of Ars Hispaniae. Cirlot was the son of Juan Cirlot and Maria Laporta. After graduating from the College of the Jesuits, Barcelona, he worked as a customs agent and at the Banco Hispanoamericano. His initial interest was in music, which he studied until called as a soldier to fight against Franco in the Second Spanish Republic, 1937. With their defeat he was again mobilized by the Franco regime in 1940.

French playwright, poet, essayist and art writer. Claudel was born in Villeneuve-sur-Fère in the north of France in 1868. His father, Louis Prosper Claudel, was a petit-bourgeois registrar. His mother, Louise-Athanaïse Cerveaux (Claudel) came from a local farming family in Champagne. Claudel’s sister Camille, four years his senior, would go on to achieve widespread acclaim as sculptor. Although the family was Roman Catholic, they were not particularly devout. Claudel was educated privately in Champagne before the family moved to Paris around 1882.

Curator; professor of art history; novelist. Delen attended the Koninklijk Atheneum (high school) in Antwerp, where he befriended Alfons de Ridder (1882-1960), later known as the Flemish writer Willem Elsschot. Delen continued his education in economics at the Antwerp Hoger Handelsinstituut, and in art history at the Hoger Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis en Oudheidkunde in Brussels. He also attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. He was interested in the contemporary art scene and visited the studios of the painters Walter Vaes (1882-1958) and Richard Baseleer (1867-1951).

British amateur author and art historian, popular writer on art, particularly French. Emilia Strong was the daughter of Henry Strong, a bank manager and amateur painter and Emily Weedon (Strong). Her father knew the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (1829-1896). Strong grew up in affluence and religious devotion; throughout her life she experienced religious hallucinations. Until she was forty-five, she used her middle and gender-ambiguous name "Francis." Educated by a capable governess, Strong moved to London at eighteen to study painting at the South Kensington School of Art.

Curator, art critic, art historian, and educator. Enwezor was born as the youngest son of an Igbo family in Calabar, Nigeria. During the Biafran war of 1967-1970, he and his family were forced to move to the city of Enugu, Nigeria. In 1982, after finishing a semester at the University of Nigeria, Enwezor moved to the Bronx, in New York. In 1987 he earned a B.A. in political sciences at Jersey City State College, now New Jersey City University.

Artist and arts editor for Harry N. Abrams publishers, wrote a 1972 volume on Renoir for the Great Ages of Art series. He trained as a painter at the Cleveland School of Art and later at the Adadémie Julian in Paris. He was invited to become "élève École des Beaux-arts" in 1926. Fox married fellow Adadémie Julian student Ruby Canfield in 1928. He returned to his alma mater in Cleveland to teach, then the Cleveland School of Architecture and Western Reserve University, where he received an M.A.

Artist, art critic and art historian. Born the son of a graphic designer and chromolithographer, Gaunt dabbled in drawing and writing as a youth. In 1914, after winning a literary contest in the Connoisseur for an essay on Shakespeare's The Tempest, his thoughts seriously turned to criticism. He served briefly in World War I, fighting in the Durham Light Infantry, 1918, until the war ended that year. The following year he attended Worcester College, Oxford, where he read modern history and participated in the Art Society.

Sculptor and architect; his Book II of his memoirs forms an important account of 14th-century artists. Ghibert's parents were Cione Paltami Ghiberti (d. 1406), somewhat of a n'er-do-well, and Mona Fiore. Shortly after his birth his mother left Cione to live with the goldsmith Bartolo di Michele (d 1422), known as Bartoluccio, marring him after Cione's death. Ghiberti learned goldsmithing from Bartoluccio. He left Florence in 1400 along with another artist to serve the ruling Malatesta of Pesaro.

Writer, painter, museum director, and historian of Russian art and architecture. Grabar studied at the Academy of Arts at the University of St. Petersburg in 1894, and moved to Munich two years later. As an art student, he was affiliated with the Jugendstil movement, but returned to St. Petersburg in 1901. In 1913, he was appointed professor at the Academy of Arts and Director of the Tret'yakov Gallery in Moscow. Grabar supervised the restoration of Russian architecture and painting, publishing several articles on Russian art.

Travel writer and art historian of the Italian renaissance era. His first articles on art history appeared while he was making a study of Italy among the British expatriate scholars studying the Italian renaissance, Charles Fairfax Murray, Frederick Mason Perkins, and R. Langton Douglas. In 1898 he married. He is buried in Buckfast abbey.

Writer of a dictionary of Dutch and Flemish artists; art and book dealer; publisher and poet. Immerzeel was the third son of Johannes Immerzeel, a merchant in food, and Elizabet Steenbus. In his youth, Immerzeel studied drawing and painting with Pieter Hofman (1755-1837), but he had to give up this vocation because of his weak eyes. A self-educated man, he spoke several languages and dedicated himself to music and poetry. In 1795, he served as secretary to the court martial of Dordrecht.

Poet, art critic and prolific art-book writer. Lucie-Smith was the son of a British civil servant assigned to Jamaica, John Dudley Lucie-Smith (d. 1941) and Mary Frances Lushington (Lucie-Smith). His forbears had been some of the first white settlers in colonizing the island in 1627. Raised in the privileged environment of the white colonial class, his father died when he was eight years old. He and his mother moved to England in 1946. In 1949 Lucie-Smith received a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University, still only seventeen.

Novelist and art historian/theorist; French Minister of Culture, 1960-1969. Malraux was the son of Fernand-Georges Malraux (1879-1930) and Berthe Félicie Lamy (Malraux) (d. 1933). His father, an investment banker, divorced his wife when Malraux was fifteen; Malraux was raised by his mother and grandmother, Adrienne Lamy (d. 1940) in the small town of Bondy (Paris outskirts).

Author of the first American survey of ancient sculpture, archaeologist, and historian of Classical Antiquity. Mitchell, then Myers, was the daughter of Christian missionaries working in Persia. Mitchell is one of two historians of Classical Antiquity in her family. Her brother, Johny Henry Wright studied the language, culture, and art of ancient Greece.

Writer and art critic whose essays Modern Painting brought Impressionist sensibilities to acceptance among the British public. Moore's father was the wealthy landowner George Henry Moore (1810-1870), a Liberal MP for county Mayo and horse breeder, and his mother Mary Blake (Moore) (1830-1895). Moore attended St. Mary's College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Oscott, near Birmingham. In 1868 while the family lived in London, he enrolled in drawing classes at the South Kensington School of Art and elsewhere.

African-American author, lecturer, and civil rights activist; first author to publish a book on African-American art. Freeman Henry Morris Murray was born in 1859 in Cleveland, Ohio to John M. Murray (d. 1862), a tailor, and Martha [Mary] Bentley (Murray). Murray’s ethnic background was diverse; his father was a white man of Scottish descent and his mother had Irish, Native American, and African roots.

Writer and first American art critic. He was born in Falmouth, ME, USA, which is present-day Portland, Oregon. Neal was born to a Quaker family, his father was also named John Neal (d. 1793) and his mother was Rachel Hall (Neal). His father died almost immediately after his son's birth. The younger Neal went to school at the Portland Academy until 1805. In 1808 he left to become a schoolmaster. Together with John Pierpont (1785 - 1866) (the future grandfather of J. P. Morgan) and Joseph L.

Times (London) and Guardian art critic and book author. Newton was the son of L. J. Oppenheimer (d. 1917) and Edith Newton. His father owned an architectural decoration firm in Manchester. As Eric Oppenheimer, he was educated at Manchester University, receiving a B.A. in 1914. After schooling, he joined his family company, L. Oppenheimer Ltd., as a mosaic craftsman, contributing mostly ecclesiastic designs. Newton served in World War I in the British Army, 29th Manchester Regiment, 1914-1918, rising to captain.

Novelist and author of a biography of Salvator Rosa. Owenson was named for her paternal grandmother, Sydney Crofton Bell, disowned by her family after eloping with a farmer. Owenson's father, Robert MacOwen (1744 - 1812), an actor, Anglicized his name to Owenson and married Jane Hill (d.1789). Their daughter, Sydney Owenson, learned narrative, language, folklore, and music from her actor father. After her mother died in 1789, she and her younger sister were sent to Madame Terson's boarding school in Dublin, a Huguenot (Protestant) academy, and Mrs. Anderson's finishing school.

Writer on art and literature. Paget's mother, Matilda Paget (1815-1896), came from a West-Indies fortune. Paget's father, Henry Ferguson Paget (1820-1894), was reputedly the son of a French émigré noble, who met Matilda (then Matilda Adams), a widow, when he was a tutor for her son Eugene in Paris. Violet was their only child together. Because of her family's frequent moves in Europe, Violet learned continental languages fluently. Her half-brother, now Oxford educated and in the Foreign Office in Paris, continued to tutor her French and writing skills.

Chief curator of the Brussels Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium); professor of art history; poet and novelist. Roberts-Jones belonged to a family of British descent. His father, Robert Roberts-Jones, was a lawyer. The young Philippe attended high school in Uccle (near Brussels) at the Athénée communal. In 1943, after his graduation, his father, who had joined the Resistance during World War II, was executed by the Nazis. Philippe entered the British army as liaison officer.

Novelist; first biographer of an art historian and one of the first art historians to write a monograph on Jan van Eyck. She was born in Danzig, Prussia which is present-day Gdańsk, Poland. Schopenhauer was born Johanna Henrietta Trosiener into a wealthy Danzig merchant family. Her father was Christian Heinrich Trosiener (b. 1730), a Danzig city councilor (senator) and her mother Elizabeth Lehmann (Trosiener). In an arranged marriage of 1785 Trosiener was married to a wealthy merchant friend of her father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, she 18 and he 37.

Painter, poet and writer on art. Bell was the seventh child of Robert Scott and Ross Bell (Scott). His four eldest brothers died in an 1807 epidemic. Bell himself was educated at the Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh, learning engraving, and publishing Views of Loch Katrine and Adjacent Scenery before he was twenty. Though he never attended college, Bell convinced the Board of Trade in 1837 to offer him the founding headmastership in the Government School of Design in London.