Reed, Henry Hope.

Henry Hope Reed Jr. was born in New York City on September 25, 1915 and grew up a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side, the eldest of his two brothers, Walter Webb Reed and Joseph Reed. After the death in 1925 of their mother Elizabeth Digby Leeds Reed, Reed’s father Henry Hope Reed Sr., a marine-insurance executive and art and architecture patron, remarried Eleanor Beers Reed. In the late 1950s, the couple moved to Greece, where they became trustees-in-residence at the American Farm School in Thessaloniki. Reed would later describe his curiosity in America’s past of “wood, brick and stone” as being initially “nurtured by generous parents.”

Reed graduated in history from Harvard in 1938, where he befriended architectural photographer Wayne Andrews. His friendships with Andrews, historical preservationist Alan Burnham, and architect John Barrington Bailey (who would design the Frick addition in the 1970s), helped develop Reed’s keen interest in old buildings, especially those with classical elements. Reed subsequently studied in Europe, at the École du Louvre in Paris and the American Academy in Rome. By the 1950s, Reed was publishing articles and mounting exhibitions in New York and at Yale, where he also taught from 1950-53.

...