Social historian, novelist; author of a book on medieval architecture. Adams' parents were the diplomat and congressman Charles Francis Adams, Sr. (1807-1886) and shipping heiress Abigail Brooks Adams (1808-1889); he was the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams. Adams attended Dixwell School before Harvard College--an experience he valued little--graduating in 1858. Among his life-long friends he met at Harvard was the future architect Henry Hobson Richardson.

Americanist art historian and architect. Belknap came to art history comparatively late in his career. His father, of the same name (1873-1943), was a vice president of Bankers Trust. His mother was Rey Sealy Hutchings Belknap (1885-1960). Belknap graduated magna cum laude at St. Paul's School, Concord, NH, in 1916 and attended Harvard University. Although his college years were interrupted by war service, he nevertheless graduated with his class in 1920. Following his father's profession, he worked in various finance and investment firms in New York and London until 1928.

Scholar of Roman art; Anna S. Garbedian Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University (1970- ). Brilliant was born to Frank Brilliant and Pauline Apt (Brilliant); his father a businessman and his mother a social worker. He attended Yale University receiving a B. A. in 1951. The same year he married Eleanor Luria (later a professor of social work at Rutgers University). Brilliant next attended Harvard Law School, receiving an LL.B. in 1954 and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1954 as well.

First director of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Brimmer was the son of Martin Brimmer, a former mayor of Boston. He entered Harvard University at age 16, graduating in the class of 1849. Although he obtained a law degree, Brimmer never practiced and was exempted from military service because of lameness. Instead, he served politics as a representative for the Massachusetts legislature in 1859-61 and in the state senate in 1864. Brimmer served the Boston Museum at the same time as Luigi Palma di Cesnola did the rival Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Classicist and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1942-1967. Levine was the daughter of Samuel Levine and Bertha Nanes (Levine). She attended Wayne University (the modern Wayne State University) between 1932 and 1934 before switching to New York University. She graduated with a B. F. A in 1936, continuing for her master's degree at the university's Institute of Fine Arts with a thesis on Greek painted grave stelai, written under Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann in 1938. She married the art historian Milton W. Brown the same year.

Third director of the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C. Brown was descended from a long, distinguished family line beginning in 1638 in Rhode Island and for whose family Brown University is named. Brown's father, John Nicholas Brown (1900-1979), was one of the wealthiest men in America and his mother, Anne Kinsolving, a musician and music critic. John Nicholas Brown attended the famous connoisseurship classes of Paul J. Sachs at Harvard classes with John Walker III, another future National Gallery of Art director and J.

Anti-modernist art critic and art historian. Craven was born to Richard Price and Virginia Bates (Craven). Craven graduated from Kansas Wesleyan University in 1908, moving to Paris for a time to study art. In France, Craven attempted to be as French as possible, according to himself, in order to be an artist. However, Craven returned to the United States settled in Greenwich Village and became acquainted with the American realist artists working there.

Modernist and Medievalist art historian at Harvard. Deknatel attended the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, N. J., before graduating from Princeton in History in 1928 where the lectures of Charles Rufus Morey greatly impressed him. He entered Harvard Law School but changed his mind, switching to the Graduate school of Arts and Sciences. At Harvard, Deknatel studied under both A. Kingsley Porter and Chandler R. Post who suggested his dissertation topic on Spanish art to him.

Professor of Architectural History at Tufts University, expert on Boston architecture. In 1953, Floyd graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in Art Studies. Four years later, she graduated from the University of New Mexico with a master’s degree in art history. In 1974, she earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University. Soon after, Floyd became involved in historic preservation, attempting to prevent the destruction of several old buildings, often with the Boston Architectural Center. Floyd would often give walking tours of Boston.

Harvard professor and scholar of the Italian Renaissance. Freedberg attended the Boston Latin School and then Harvard University where he graduated summa cum laude in 1936. He continued to pursue his Ph.D. there studying under Bernard Berenson at Villa I Tatti in Florence. His 1940 dissertation topic was the painting of Parmigianino. When the United States entered World War II the following year, Freedberg commanded an intelligence unit for the United States Army that reported to the British war cabinet.

Archaeologist, editor and early art history professor at Princeton 1886-1906. Frothingham was born to a wealthy Boston family. He studied languages in Rome between 1868 and 1881. In 1882 he began teaching Semitic languages at Johns Hopkins University. In 1883 he received his Ph.D., from Leipzig. He married Helen Bulkley Post.

University of Virginia professor and Michelangelo and Italian Renaissance scholar. Hart was raised in Boston, the son of Rollin Lynde Hartt and Jessie Clark Knight (Hartt). He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1935. After spending a year at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, under Erwin Panofsky, 1935-1936, he took his M.A. from New York University in 1937. Between 1939 to 1941 Hartt was an instructor in the history of art at Bennett Junior College in Millbrook, New York and then an assistant and cataloger at the Yale Art Gallery (1941-1942).

Archaeologist of classical antiquity; first woman to lead an archaeological excavation in the Aegean. Born Harriett Boyd, her father was Alexander Boyd, a leather merchant, and her mother Harriet Wheeler (Boyd) in 1871, the final of five children and the only girl. Her mother died when she was 10 months old and was raised solely by her father. Boyd received her early education from Prospect Hill School in Massachusetts where she graduated in 1888. From 1892 to 1896 she taught Classics in various schools in both North Carolina and Delaware.

Art historian; author of biographies on artists Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky. Hayden Phillips was born in Boston, the daughter of Elizabeth and John Phillips and the grand niece of William Phillips (1878-1968) Ambassador of Italy from 1917-1941. She attended North Country School and Putney School in Vermont. During her senior year, she traveled abroad with her mother to France, attending American Community School of Paris. She entered Radcliffe college, but left to pursue painting. In 1958, Herrera was a member of the Junior Assembly, a group in charge of debutante balls in New York.

Architectural historian and Smith College professor; coined the term "International School" of modern architecture. Hitchcock attended the Middlesex School and Harvard University. At Harvard he wrote for the avant garde newspaper Hound & Horn which Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996) had founded. There he also met the group of young intellectuals who would launch modernism in the United States. Among them were A.

Archaeologist, historian of Greek classical vases, and collector. Hoppin graduated from Harvard University in 1893 and studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and the universities in Berlin and Munich, receiving his Ph. D., at the latter in 1896. Hoppin's interest was from the first and throughout his career in classical Greek vases; his dissertation was on the vase painter Euthymides. Between 1894-1896 he was a participant in the archaeological dig at Argive Heraeum, Athens, under Charles Waldstein whose finds Hoppin published in 1898.

Art writer and collector. Jarves was the son of Deming Jarves (1790-1869), an inventor and Anna Smith Stutson (Jarves). After attending Chauncy Hall School in Boston, Jarves was briefly disabled with a strange disease at age 15. Though recovering, he sought warmer climes. He traveled to South America and Hawaii in 1837. Returning to Boston, he married Elizabeth Russell Swain in 1838, returning to Hawaii in 1839. There he tried journalism and silkworm husbandry before returning to Boston in 1840.

Professor, scholar and historian of Italian Renaissance art. Kennedy was born in Providence, RI. Her father was Laurence L. Doggett (1864-1957), President of Springfield College. She initially pursued economics, studying at the University of California Berkeley, Radcliffe College, and Oxford University between the years of 1919 and 1922 where she also taught. While she was in London at Oxford in 1921, she met and married the sculpture historian Clarence Kennedy.

Landscape architectural historian at Dumbarton Oaks, 1972-1988. Blair was raised in Colorado Springs, CO. She earned her B.A. from Vassar College in 1946 and an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She married Gregory MacDougall, changing her name at that time (later divorced). Living in Boston during the 1960s and early 1970s, she served on the Cambridge Historical Commission, co-authoring volume two of the Cambridge Architectural Survey. She was later appointed chair of the newly formed Boston Landmarks Commission. In 1970 she earned her Ph.D.

Professor of baroque art at Vassar and Harvard Universities; wrote an early history of baroque art in English. McComb's father was the Reverend Samuel McComb (1864-1938), an Irish clergyman educated in Northern Ireland and at Oxford and Berlin. His mother (d. 1934) was Scottish. Samuel McComb was involved with an Episcopal movement known as the Emmanuel movement. The younger McComb attended a variety of middle and grammar schools: Hannover, Germany, private study of Latin in Paris, and the Rugby School (England) 1910 and 1912.

Peale family scholar and early researcher in American arts funding. Born to a Lithuanian immigrant family--her father worked as a butcher in Boston--Lillian Beresnack, graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe College--the first of her family to attend college--in 1943. She continued on to Columbia University as a graduate student. Having worked her way through college as a secretary, she spent her graduate years as one to Columbia's historian Jacques Barzun (b. 1907) and the literature professor Lionel Trilling (1905-1975).

Opdycke's father was Leonard Opdycke, Sr. (1856-1914), a New York lawyer and social philanthropist and his mother Edith Bell (Opdycke) (1857-1946). His grandfather was a Civil War brigadier general and hero of the Battle of Chickamauga, Samuel Emerson Opdycke (1830-1884). The younger Opdycke was raised in the privileged family circumstances of his independently-wealthy parents. He graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in 1917. He entered the navy in World War I rising to the rank of ensign.

Founder and first director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Plaut's parents were Jacob M. Plaut and Alice Sachs (Plaut). Plaut attended a variety of prestigious private grammar schools, including the Auteuil Day School, Paris, 1925-1926 and then the Taft School in Watertown, CT, between 1927 and 1928. He graduated from Harvard university with a B. A. in 1933, marrying Mary E. Friedlander. Plaut continued at Harvard for an A.M., in 1935 teaching art history there while a graduate student. In 1935 he joined the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as an assistant curator.

Scholar of classical art and director of both the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1902-05) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1910-31). Robinson was the son of Edward A. Robinson and Ellen Coburn (Robinson). After graduating from Harvard in 1879, he pursued additional study in archaeology at the university of Berlin, spending time in Greece. After returning to the United States, he married Elizabeth Gould in Boston in 1881, and assembled a study collection of classical and renaissance casts for the Slater Memorial Museum in Norwich, CT.

Literati; advocate of neoclassicism. In 1867 Tuckerman published his American Artist Life, an account of American art, sometimes scholarly although filled the typical Victorian sentiment (Rowland). Tuckerman was not particularly discriminating. He praised all good artists and honored the rest mostly for being American. In contrast to the work of James Jackson Jarves, his works lacks the acumen and perhaps the intellectual honesty of later writers.