Art Historian and scholar of Sicilian art and decorative arts, Director, Museo Nazionale di Messina (1949-1966). Maria Accascina was born in Naples in 1898 to a family originally from Palermo. Accascina moved to her family’s city, Palermo, to study Literature. After graduation she went to the Regia Scuola di Perfezionamento in Storia dell’Arte Medievale e Moderna dell’Università di Roma. At this time, she studied under Adolfo Venturi who assisted her with her thesis on medieval goldsmithing.

Historian of Nigerian art and director, Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan. Adepegba attended graduate school at Indiana University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1976 in art history under the supervision of Roy Sieber. He pursued an active research agenda writing on a range of Nigerian art topics. His over 40 works include a paper on Nok terracottas, the Yoruba concept of art, and contemporary Nigerian art.

Archaeologist; wrote works on Column of Trajan and decorative art. Boni was orphaned early and attended a commercial school in Venice. At nineteen, he assisted in the Doge's Palace restoration, but quarreled with the superintendent of the project, Forcinelli, over the restoration. This led to a crusade against over-zealous restoration. In the course of these activities, he corresponded with John Ruskin and William Morris (1834-1896). He entered the Venice Academy, studying architecture.

Assistant Director of the Metropolitan Museum and curator of Decorative Arts during the installation of the Cloisters Museum. Breck was the son of Joseph Francis Breck (d. 1929) and Annie Hayes Breck (d.1933). His father owned an agricultural seed and implement company in Massachusetts. While a student at Harvard University, he met Herbert Eustis Winlock, a future director of the Metropolitan. The two became close associates during their time together at the museum. At Harvard, he worked on the Harvard Lampoon where talents in art emerged.

French iconographer of medieval sculpture and decorative arts. Cahier studied at the College of Saint-Acheul. He joined the Jesuit order, ordained as priest, in 1824. Cahier lectured at the Jesuit colleges in Paris, Brieg (in the Swiss Canton of Wallis), Turin, and in Belgium at Brugalette. In the pre-photography days, Cahier began "collecting" medieval monuments, noting their location and iconography with the idea of documenting the Christian (i. e., Roman Catholic) faith via art of the middle ages.

Curator of ancient decorative arts at the Royal Museums of Art and History in Brussels. Crick studied art history and archaeology with Marcel Laurent at the university of Liège. In 1919, she obtained her doctoral degree with a dissertation on Romanesque art in the valley of the Meuse river. After her studies, she created the catalogs of the drawings (1919) and the engravings (1920) in the collections of the city of Liège. In 1920, she published a monograph on the drawings of Lambert Lombard, who lived in Liège between 1505 and 1566.

Mannerism; integration of the figure in a decorative system

Curator of Decorative Arts, Art Insititute of Chicago, 1940-51.

American woman of letters; wrote art history; teacher; poet. R'lene LaFleur Howell was born in Michigan in 1926. She attended the University of Chicago for her doctorate; her dissertation was titled American Art in the Stream of Realism. She worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant, penning and article, "Craftsmanship in Wrought Iron" in 1950. As she published, the aspiring novelist Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977) courted her—calling her daily and dedicating works such as "The Parables" and The Flea of Sodom to her.

Professor of art history and decorative arts museum curator. Hudig was born in Rotterdam where his father and his brother were members of the shipping firm Hudig and Veder. The young Hudig apprenticed at the firm of Ryley and Company in London. Between 1907 and 1913 he served the Hudig and Veder firm in Amsterdam as proxy holder. Fascinated by art and literature, he left the firm at age 30 to study art history in Berlin. For two years he studied under Adolph Goldschmidt, August Grisebach, and Georg Loeschcke.

Scholar of eighteenth-century English furniture and decorative arts. Jourdain was the daughter of an impoverished cleric, Reverend Francis Jourdain of Ashburne, Derbyshire. She and her sister, Eleanor, were required to be independent and on their own early in life. Eleanor became principal of a girl's school and then St. Hugh's College, Oxford. Margaret supported herself throughout her life by writing on art. In 1908, Jourdain came to the rescue of a former pupil of her sister's boarding school, Joan Evans.

Private scholar; specialist in textile and medieval art; trained under the "Vienna School" scholars. Kurth was born in Vienna in 1878 to Samuel Kris, a court and judicial advocate (Hof- und Gerichtsadvokat), and Hermine Morawetz. She was the cousin of art historian Ernst Kris. Kurth attended school at a lyceum in Vienna, following which she took a teacher’s examination and spent several years working as a language teacher.

Art collector and curator of the decorative arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, from 1935 to 1963. McIlhenny was the son of a former president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, John D. McIlhenny (1866-1925) and the Frances G. Plumer (McIlhenny). His grandfather had been an Irish immigrant who invented the gas meter, bringing the family an immense fortune. The younger McIlhenny attended the Episcopal Academy in Philadelphia and Milton Academy in Boston, before graduating from Harvard as a Phi Beta Kappa in 1933, where he studied under A. Kingsley Porter.

Useful arts and modernist art historian. Elisabeth Moses was born in 1893 in Cologne, Germany.  Her father, Dr. Salli Moses was an otolaryngologist in private hospital practice in Cologne. Her mother,  Luise “Lucie"  Rothschild (Moses), worked on board of the Cologne Association of Jewish nurses. Elizabeth Moses began her studies at the unique  Humanistisches Mädchengymnasium am Marienplatz (humanistic girls' high school) in Cologne, a manifestation of the women’s movement there. A classmate was the later art historian Luise Straus.

Archaeologist who wrote primarily on architecture and decorative arts; specialist in ancient Greek and Minoan architecture. Noack received his Ph.D. from Giessen, writing a dissertation on Euripides. He was appointed professor of archaeology at the University of Jena in 1897. He moved to Kiel as professor in 1904 and Tübingen in 1908. His final appointment was Berlin where he taught between 1916 and his death in 1931. At his death he was succeeded in Berlin by Gerhart Rodenwaldt.

Interdisciplinary arts writer, literary critic and art historian (particularly of decorative arts). Praz was the son of Luciano Praz, a clerk in a bank and Giulia Testa di Marsciano (Praz). He attended the University of Rome, gaining a law degree in 1918. Moving to the University of Florence, he was granted a bachelor of letters degree in 1920. Praz earaned a scholarship and left Italy for England in 1923 to earn his libero docente (Ph.D). He worked at the British Museum, which gained him entrance as a professor of Italian Studies at the University in Liverpool in 1924.

Early American historian of African art, founder of the discipline of African art history in the United States; Rudy Professor of Fine Arts, Indiana University, 1974-. As a child, Sieber accompanied his parents on trips to Chicago visiting the Art Institute of Chicago and, most importantly for him, the Field Museum where many African artifacts were displayed. He graduated from the New School for Social Research in New York in 1949 guided in his studies by Meyer Schapiro, Rudolf Arnheim, and the artist Mauricio Lasansky.

Medievalist; Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,1956-1973. Swarzenski grew up in Frankfurt, Germany, where his father, Georg Swarzenski was the director of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut (museum) and the Liebieghaus sculpture museum. His mother was Ella Perec-Wilcynska, [name sometimes appearing as Pertz-Wilcynska]. As a young man he met the German Expressionist artist Max Beckmann who taught at the Städelsches school. He studied art history at Freiburg under Walter F.

Interior designer and Italian Renaissance and Baroque specialist; wife of art historian Rudolf Wittkower. Holzmann met her future husband in Berlin in 1918 when she was just sixteen and he seventeen, but because of their young ages waited until 1923 to marry. Principally an artist, she established herself as an interior designer in Berlin. The couple, both Jewish, fled Nazi Germany in 1933 for London, where her husband was a British citizen by birthright. She continued her work there as a designer, specializing in apartment interiors and furniture design.