Ernest H. Gombrich

Austrian-British · 1909 to 2001

Born Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich on March 30, 1909, in Vienna, the son of a lawyer who had once been a schoolmate of the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and a concert pianist trained at the Vienna Conservatoire, Gombrich grew up in a household steeped in music and ideas. He earned his doctorate in art history from the University of Vienna in 1933, writing his dissertation under Julius von Schlosser on Mannerist architecture. In 1935, unemployed and only twenty six, he wrote a short history of the world for young readers in six weeks, drafting a chapter a day and reading each one aloud on Sundays to his fiancee, Ilse Heller. Published in German the following year as Eine kurze Weltgeschichte fur junge Leser, it was banned by the Nazis for being too pacifistic and did not appear in English, translated by his own family, until 2005. In 1936 he left Vienna for London to take up a research post at the Warburg Institute, the same year he married Ilse. During the Second World War he monitored German radio broadcasts for the BBC, and in May 1945 he recognised a change in the music on German state radio as the signal of a leader's death, correctly guessing that Hitler had died hours before the official announcement reached London. The Story of Art, his sweeping and plainly written survey published in 1950, went on to sell millions of copies in more than thirty languages. He delivered the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1956, publishing them in 1960 as Art and Illusion, the most demanding and influential book of his career. He directed the Warburg Institute from 1959 to 1976, was knighted in 1972, and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1988. Gombrich died in London on November 3, 2001, at the age of ninety two.