E. H. Gombrich

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalized British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom. Gombrich was the author of many works of cultural history and art history, most notably The Story of Art, a book widely regarded as one of the most accessible introductions to the visual arts, and Art and Illusion, a major work in the psychology of perception that influenced thinkers as diverse as Carlo Ginzburg, Nelson Goodman, Umberto Eco, and Thomas Kuhn.

The son of Karl Gombrich and Leonie Hock, Gombrich was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, into an assimilated bourgeois family of Jewish origin who were part of a sophisticated social and musical milieu. His father was a lawyer and former classmate of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and his mother was a distinguished pianist who graduated from the Vienna Conservatoire with the School's Medal of Distinction.

At the Conservatoire, she was a pupil of, amongst others, Anton Bruckner. However, rather than follow a career as a concert pianist (which would have been difficult to combine with her family life in this period), she became an assistant to Theodor Leschetizky. She also knew Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf and Johannes Brahms.

Rudolf Serkin was a close family friend. Adolf Busch and members of the Busch Quartet regularly met and played in the family home. Gombrich maintained a deep love and knowledge of classical music throughout his life. He was a competent cellist and, in later life at home in London, regularly played the chamber music of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and others with his wife and his elder sister Dea Forsdyke, a concert violinist.

Gombrich was educated at the Theresianum and at the University of Vienna, where he studied art history under Hans Tietze, Karl Maria Swoboda, Julius von Schlosser, and Josef Strzygowski, completing a Ph.D. thesis on the Mannerist architecture of Giulio Romano, supervised by Von Schlosser. Specialized in caricature, he was invited to help Ernst Kris, who was then keeper of decorative arts at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, on his graduating in 1933.

In 1936, he married Ilse Heller (1910–2006), a pupil of his mother and an accomplished pianist. Their only child, the Indologist Richard Gombrich, was born in 1937. They had two grandchildren: the educationalist Carl Gombrich (b. 1965) and Leonie Gombrich (b. 1966), who is his literary executor.

After publishing his first book, A Little History of the World in German in 1936, written for children and adolescents, and seeing it become a hit only to be banned by the Nazis for pacifism, he fled to Britain in 1936 to take up a post as a research assistant at the Warburg Institute, University of London.

Gombrich worked for the BBC World Service during World War II, monitoring German radio broadcasts. When in 1945, an upcoming announcement was prefaced by the Adagio of Bruckner's seventh symphony, written for Richard Wagner's death. Gombrich correctly guessed that Adolf Hitler was dead and promptly broke the news to Churchill.

Gombrich returned to the Warburg Institute in November 1945, where he became Senior Research Fellow (1946), Lecturer (1948), Reader (1954), and eventually Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition and director of the institute (1959–76). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, made CBE in 1966, knighted in 1972, and appointed a member of the Order of Merit in 1988. He continued his work at the University of London until close to his death in 2001. He was the recipient of numerous additional honors, including the Goethe Prize in 1994 and the Balzan Prize in 1985 for the History of Western Art.

Gombrich was close to a number of Austrian émigrés who fled to the West prior to the Anschluss, among them Karl Popper (to whom he was especially close), Friedrich Hayek, and Max Perutz. He was instrumental in bringing to publication Popper's magnum opus, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Each had known the other only fleetingly in Vienna, as Gombrich's father served his law apprenticeship with Popper's father. They became lifelong friends in exile.