Philosopher and historian of ideas scholar; wrote early social histories of art. Boas was born in Providence, Rhode Island, the fifth of seven children of Herman Boas and Sarah Eisenberg (Boas). He attended Classical High School in Providence, RI, where his early interest in Greek and Latin grew. After graduation, Boas studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design under Henry Hunt Clark (b. 1875) and transferred to study English at Brown University, where he completed his B.A. and M.A. in 1913. He studied under the philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916) and received his second M.A.

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.

French and American Impressionist painting scholar; Brown University Professor of Art and Architecture, 1970-2004. Champa was initially interested in music. He studied the trombone in grade school and toured Europe as part of Yale's marching band. In his academic classes at Yale, Champa studied art history. He graduated from Yale with a BA in 1960, continuing at Harvard where he studied with the art critic Clement Greenberg, and wrote his doctoral degree in 1965 under Frederick B. Deknatel in Impressionism.

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.

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.

Architectural historian, principally of Venice. Schulz’s parents were Johannes Martin Askan Schulz, an engineer and and Ilse Lebenbaum Hiller. When the Nazi Reich assumed power in Germany the six-year-old Schulz, whose maternal grandparents were Jewish, was prevented from ever attending a Gymnasium because of the racial laws, which was the route to a university education. In 1938 his mother moved with Schulz and his brother to Berkeley, California, where the art historian Walter W. Horn, a friend of hers, helped them settle.