Scottish author and art theorist and connoisseur.  Anstruther-Thomson was born into an aristocratic family; her father was John Anstruther-Thomson of Charleton and Carntyne (1818-1904), and mother Caroline Maria Agnes Robina Hamilton-Gray (Anstruher-Thomson) (1833-?). Independently wealthy, she pursued a career first as an artist studying at the Slade School of Art and that in Paris under Carolus Duran until 1889.

Collector of drawings and connoisseur; worked on a universal history of art. An annotated translation of his life of Bernini was annotated and translated into German by the eminent Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl, published in 1912.

Connoisseur and art critic, co-founder of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Bayersdorfer initially studied medicine before moving to Munich in 1853 and switching to the humanities. Beginning in 1862 he studied philosophy, art history as well as economics, never attaining a degree in any of these fields. In 1870 he became noted as a journalist and chess player. In the following years he wrote for the theatre reviews for the newspapers of Vienna and Munich, including Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger and Die Walküre, 1868/70.

Influential scholar of the Italian Renaissance employing connoisseurship; consultant to the major American museums and collectors in the early 20th century. Berenson was born to Albert (originally Alter) Valvrojenski and Julia (originally Eudice) Mickleshanski (Valvrojenski). His father emigrated to Boston from Lithuania with his family in 1875, changing their family name to "Berenson." Bernard Berenson was educated at the Latin School, Boston. A Jew by birth, he converted to Christianity and was baptized in 1885.

Director of the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet; connoisseur of drawings and prints. Boon studied art history at Amsterdam University, with professor Ferrand Whaley Hudig (1883-1937), and at the Sorbonne in Paris. He finished his studies at the école du Louvre with a thesis on the relationship between the School of Cologne and Netherlandish painting in the second half of the fifteenth century, Les rapports entre l'école de Cologne et la peinture néerlandaise dans la deuxième moitié du quinzième siècle.

Director of the Mauritshuis museum, 1889-1909, connoisseur and art collector. Bredius was raised in a wealthy family. His father was Johannes Jacobus Bredius a director of a powder factory in Amsterdam. His family collected Chinese porcelain and 17th-century Dutch paintings, which Bredius would build upon. His mother died when he was only ten. Early in his career, he intended to become a concert pianist, but realized after three years of study that he would never become an outstanding musician.

Art historian and collector, established "Cicognara" art bibliography. Cicognara was educated in Modena at the Collegio dei Nobili. As a young man he knew the sculptor Antonio Canova. In 1788 he moved to Rome where he was admitted to the Società dell'Arcadia. There he studied art with Domenico Corvi (1721-1803) and the German painter Jacob Philipp Hackert (1737-1807). In addition, he gained an enthusiasm for classical ruins and contemporary art theory.

Art connoisseur and director, Fitzwilliam Museum, 1937-1946. Clarke succeeded Sydney Cockerell as Director in 1937. For most of his tenure, Britain was at war. Clarke oversaw the move and collections to safekeeping (museums were possible targets of German bombing). Still, he organized temporary exhibitions in the Museum for the public. Astutely, he used museum funds to buy important work at when the war had depressed the market. An art collector, he donated 2,700 items in his lifetime.

Pupil of Morelli and correspondent with Bernard Berenson.

Connoisseur of illuminated manuscripts; assistant curator at the Department of Manuscripts of the Royal Library in Brussels. He was born in Herseaux, Belgium. which is present day Herzele. Delaissé attended high school at Tournai, Belgium, and studied Romance Philology at the Catholic University of Louvain. During World War II, when Belgium was under German occupation, Delaissé joined the resistance and later fled to Spain, where he was arrested. He subsequently escaped to England, where he trained in the tank corps for the Belgian Army of Liberation.

Architectural historian and connoisseur. Establish Foundation for book publishing. Ferree graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1884 and lectured there on architectural subjects in the recently founded School of Architecture. Although subsequently entering the world of business, he continued to lecture, achieving the presidency of the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. He was also the first American to be elected to honorary membership of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Beethoven scholar and esthetician. Wrote catalog of the collection at the Gemäldegalerie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 1901.

British Museum curator and connoisseur of sixteenth-century Italian drawings. Gere was born to Edward Arnold, a British patent examiner, and Catherina Giles (Gere). His artistic interests and passion as a collector were strongly influenced by his upbringing. His father’s half-brother Charles March Gere (1869-1957), and two sisters were artists at the Birmingham school and his mother was associated with the Vorticist circle of Wyndham Lewis.

British author, illustrator, and polymath; wrote the first book in English on Poussin; early exponent of the so-called "Italian primitives". Graham was born Maria Dundas as the eldest of four children to Rear-Admiral George Dundas, and Ann Thompson (Dundas) at Papcastle near Cockermouth in Cumberland (Cumbria). She attended the school at the Manor House in Drayton, near Oxford, where she cultivated her interests in ​​learning botany, history, geography, English literature, and drawing.

Connoisseur; specialist in Dutch seventeenth-century painting and iconography; Director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Gudlaugsson was born in Skagen as the son of the Icelandic poet Jonas Gudlaugsson (1887-1916). His mother, Maria Ingenohl, was a Dutch woman raised in Germany. After the death of her husband, she moved with Gudlaugsson, her only child, to Berlin. Gudlaugsson studied art history in Berlin and in Munich. His teachers in Berlin included Oskar Fischel and Wilhelm Pinder.

Connoisseur, esthetician and collector. Influential author during the Enlightenment for art historians (J. von Schlosser, 1924)

Columbia University professor of Italian Baroque art; documentary and psychoanalytic approach; connoisseur. Hibbard's father was the distinguished professor of agricultural economics at the University of Wisconsin, Benjamin H. Hibbard (1870-1955). The younger Hibbard graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1949, receiving an M. A. in 1952. Hibbard attended Harvard University where Rudolf Wittkower exerted a significant influence on him. Hibbard received his doctorate in 1958, writing his dissertation on the Palazzo Borghese. He married Shirley Griffith.

Art historian, art collector, expert and connoisseur; specialized in Dutch seventeenth-century painting. After finishing his Gymnasium education in Coburg, Germany, Hofstede de Groot briefly studied Art History in Leipzig. The death his father, a professor in Groningen, forced Hofstede de Groot to return to Groningen, where he altered his studies to Classics. Later he transferred to Leiden, where he obtained his bachelor's degree.

First director of the Amsterdam Rijksprentenkabinet; connoisseur of prints. In the footsteps of his father and grandfather, die-cutters at the National Mint in Utrecht, Van der Kellen joined the Mint as an apprentice at the age of fifteen, and worked there until 1876. In this period, he began collecting prints on a large scale. In 1859, Christiaan Kramm (1797-1875) listed him in his biography of artists and described his collection of 6,000 prints, including 4,500 prints of Jan and Casper Luyken.

Connoisseur art historian; critic of the Elgin marbles debate. Knight was the grandson of a Shropshire ironmaster, Richard Knight, whose fortune he inherited. His parents were Thomas Knight, a clergyman, and his mother, his father's onetime servant girl, Ursula Nash. Knight was educated at home. He made many trips to Italy during his youth, collecting coins and antique bronzes. In 1774 he inherited the Downton Castle property, on which he built a "castle" beginning in 1772, transforming the grounds into an important example of British landscape architecture of the time.

German baron and connoisseur; friend of museum director Gustav Friedrich Waagen. Liphart and Waagen introduced Wilhelm Bode, later director of the Berlin museums, to the writing of Karl Friedrich von Rumohr. Together, Bode and Liphart were responsible for may re-attributions. In 1871, they independently recognized the similarities between etchings of Hercules Segers (c. 1589-c.1638) and a painting in the Ufizzi, establishing for the first time that Segers was a painter as well.

Art collector, cataloger and connoisseur of Netherlandish drawings and prints. Lugt began his career at age twelve in 1899 when he constructed a catalog of the print collection in Rijksprentenkabinet in Amsterdam. By age fifteen, he had written a biography of Rembrandt, illustrated with photographic reproductions and with his own copies of etchings and drawings by Rembrandt (published 1997, Fondation Custodia). Lugt cut short his formal education to become an employee at the auction house Frederik Muller in Amsterdam in 1901.

Art historian, iconographer, and connoisseur; wrote early survey of Italian art. Van Marle studied in Paris at the école des Chartes and the école Pratique des Hautes études. In 1910, he took his degree of Docteur-ès-Lettres at the Sorbonne. His earliest writings are on Dutch medieval history. In 1908, he published Le Comté de Hollande sous Philippe le Bon (The County of Holland under Philippe le Bon), and in 1910 followed Hoorn au Moyen âge.

Italian patriot and art historian; developer of a method of connoisseurship which identified attribution via minute characteristics of artists. Morelli was born to a protestant family, a minority in Italy (originally of French Huguenot decent). Raised in Bergamo, he attended the (Swiss) Kantonschule at Aarau between 1826 and 1832. From 1833-1838 he studied medicine at the universities of Munich and Erlangen because of the Italian proscription against protestants in universities.

Connoisseur and advisor to major art collections, painter and art dealer. Murray's parents were James Dalton Murray (1808-1876), a linen-draper, and Elizabeth Scott (Draper) (1816-1853). He grew up in Sudbury, Suffolk. By age 13 he had already received art lessons, possibly from Richard Gainsborough Dupont, and had moved to London. Murray worked as an apprentice in the drawing office of Sir Samuel Morton Peto, the great Victorian railway builder.