Director of the National Gallery of Ireland (1927-1935) and first director of the Barber Institute (museum). Bodkin was the son of Matthias McDonnell Bodkin (1849-1933) and Arabella Norman (Bodkin) (d. 1931). His father was a journalist and later judge for County Clare, Ireland, and then Member of Parliament for North Roscommon. Bodkin attended Belvedere College and Clongowes Wood College before graduating from the Royal University of Ireland in 1908. He began practicing law in 1911.

Director of the National Gallery in Dublin. Furlong was orphaned at nine years old and educated by Jesuits at Clongowes Wood. He attended University College, Dublin and his graduate studies were at Grenoble, Paris (the Sorbonne), Munich. He received his Ph.D. in Vienna writing on the topic of 10^th and 11^th century Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination. As a student in Munich he observed Hitler's 1923 abortive putsch. A homosexual, Furlong developed strong antipathies to Nazism.

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.

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.

Church minister and author of Pilkington's Dictionary of Painters, a standard work for most of the nineteenth century. Pilkington was the son of a watchmaker, William Pilkington. He attended grammar school in Dublin, Ireland, where his family had resettled. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1718 graduating with a BA in 1722 in preparation for church work. He married Laetitia Van Lewen (1712-1750) in 1725 and after receiving a master's degree, promoted with the help of his father-in-law to to curate at St. Andrew's the same year.

Botticelli biographer and director of the Science and Arts Museum of Ireland, 1907-16. Plunkett was the son of Patrick Joseph Plunkett (1817-1918), a builder, and Elizabeth Noble (Plunkett). The family income, derived from the Rathmines, Dublin, allowed Plunkett to attend school at Nice and Dublin (1863-7), Clongowes Wood College, county Kildare (1867-9), and beginning in 1872, Dublin University. At Dublin he studied Renaissance and medieval art among other topics, ultimately graduating in 1884. That year he married Josephine Cranny (1858-1944).

Roe was born on December 18, 1895, the only child of Anne Lambert Shields and William Ernest Roe in the town of Mountrath, Ireland. Her mother’s side came from Birr, Co. Offaly and her father’s had lived in Mountrath since the seventeenth century, working at the family owned mill. Roe attended primary school in Mountrath and secondary school in the nearby Abbeyleix, the private school of Mrs. Robert Wild. During WWI, Roe joined the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade, serving as a volunteer at the Cambridge Military Hospital and as a cook at Aldershot Barracks in England.

Early scholar and illustrator of medieval Celtic art. Stokes was the daughter of William Stokes (1804-1878), a physician, and Mary Black (Stokes). Her paternal grandfather was Whitley Stokes (1763-1845) a physician and author of an English-Irish dictionary. Her father's friends included the archaeologists and scholars James Henthorn Todd (1805-1869), George Petrie (1790-1866), William Reeves (1815-1892), Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-1886), and Edwin R. W. Quin (1812-1871), third earl of Dunraven; these family friends inspired an interested in archaeology.