23 Facts About Ernst Gombrich

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.

The son of Karl Ernst Gombrich and Leonie Hock, Ernst 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.

Ernst Gombrich's 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.

Ernst Gombrich knew Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf and Johannes Brahms.

Ernst Gombrich 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.

Ernst 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 PhD thesis on the Mannerist architecture of Giulio Romano, supervised by Von Schlosser.

When in 1945 an upcoming announcement was prefaced by the Adagio of Bruckner's seventh symphony, written for Richard Wagner's death, Ernst Gombrich guessed correctly that Adolf Hitler was dead and promptly broke the news to Churchill.

Ernst Gombrich returned to the Warburg Institute in November 1945, where he became Senior Research Fellow, Lecturer, Reader, and eventually Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition and director of the institute.

Ernst Gombrich was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1966 New Year Honours, knighted in the 1972 Birthday Honours, and appointed a member of the Order of Merit in 1988.

Ernst Gombrich continued his work at the University of London until close to his death in 2001.

Ernst Gombrich was the recipient of numerous additional honours, including Goethe Prize 1994 and Balzan Prize in 1985 for History of Western Art.

Ernst Gombrich was close to a number of Austrian emigres who fled to the West prior to the Anschluss, among them Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek and Max Perutz.

Ernst Gombrich 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 Ernst Gombrich's father served his law apprenticeship with Popper's father.

Ernst Gombrich remarked that he had two very different publics: amongst scholars he was known particularly for his work on the Renaissance and the psychology of perception, but his thoughts on cultural history and tradition; to a wider, non-specialist audience he was known for the accessibility and immediacy of his writing and his ability to present scholarly work in a clear and unfussy manner.

Ernst Gombrich did most of this translation and revision himself, and it was completed by his long-time assistant and secretary Caroline Mustill and his granddaughter Leonie Gombrich after his death.

When Ernst Gombrich arrived in England in 1936, the discipline of art history was largely centred around connoisseurship.

Ernst Gombrich had been brought up in the Viennese culture of Bildung and was concerned with wider issues of cultural tradition and the relationship between science and art.

Ernst Gombrich had written his first major work The Story of Art in 1950, ten years before Art and Illusion.

Ernst Gombrich was a great admirer of Leonardo da Vinci and wrote extensively on him, both in these volumes and elsewhere.

Ernst Gombrich has been called 'the best known art historian in Britain, perhaps in the world' and 'one of the most influential scholars and thinkers of the 20th century'.

Ernst Gombrich was sensitive to the criticism that he did not like modern art and was obliged to defend his position on occasion.

Ernst Gombrich admired 20th-century female artists such as Bridget Riley, whose work was included in a revised edition of The Story of Art.