Ernst Gombrich was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1909, to Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity. Having completed his studies in art history at the University of Vienna, in 1936 Gombrich was employed as a fellow at the Warburg Institute, relocated to London in 1934 due to fears of rising Nazism. Settling in London in 1936, Gombrich taught and published prolifically on a range of art-historical topics.
Art historian Ernst Gombrich was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1909, the third child of Karl B. Gombrich, a lawyer, and his wife Leonie (née Hock), a pianist; both were Jewish but had converted to Christianity. Gombrich demonstrated an early interest in art history, encouraged by extensive reading and regular visits with his father to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, writing an essay on the development of art appreciation from Johann Joachim Winckelmann's era to the 1920s, while attending Theresianum secondary school. He studied art history at the University of Vienna, writing his thesis on Giulio Romano under the supervision of Julius von Schlosser, graduating in 1933. He was commissioned by Walter Neurath (future founder of the London publishing house Thames and Hudson), to write a short history of the world for children, published in 1936 in Germany (later published in English in 2005 as A Little History of the World). After co-authoring a short book on caricature with the curator and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris (published in 1940), Kris introduced him to Fritz Saxl, director of the Warburg Institute, which had been founded in Hamburg by Aby Warburg in 1926 but relocated to London in 1934 due to the rise of Nazism. In 1936, Gombrich received a two-year fellowship to assist German art historian (and later director of the Warburg Institute in London), Gertrud Bing, in editing and publishing Warburg’s papers, and relocated to London; he returned to Vienna later the same year to marry Czech-born concert pianist Ilse Heller, before the couple settled permanently in Britain (his parents joined them in 1938, settling in Oxford).
In London, Gombrich continued his work at the Warburg Institute and lectured weekly on Giorgio Vasari at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Following the outbreak of the Second World War, with Kris' help, he escaped the internment of so-called 'enemy aliens' in 1940, and was employed by the BBC at Eversham to intercept and translate German radio broadcasts. Later, he recalled the poor-quality transmissions: ‘You had to know what might be said in order to hear what was said'. This concept, which he called 'making and matching', was crucial, he claimed, to how people perceived images (cited E. Gombrich’s obituary, The Guardian, 5 November 2001). After the war Gombrich returned to the Warburg Institute in 1946 as a senior research fellow, working on Warburg's papers and later his biography (1970). In 1947 he was naturalised British. He was appointed lecturer at the Warburg Institute (1948), then reader (1954); in 1949 he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to visit the USA. In 1950 he received a visiting appointment as Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford (1950–53), and later at Cambridge (1961–66), acquiring a house at No. 19, Briardale Gardens, Hampstead, in 1950, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Gombrich’s celebrated The Story of Art, published in 1950, commissioned by fellow Viennese émigré Béla Horovitz, co-founder of Phaidon Press, firmly established Gombrich's public profile, and was followed by Art and Illusion (1960); his writing focused on iconography and innovations in technique, taste, and form as demonstrated in specific works by individual artists. He wrote prolifically on a wide range of art-historical topics, often published by Phaidon Press. As one of his students, art historian Michael Podro observed, 'Gombrich engaged for fifty years in a polemic against invoking the collective mind – whether of an age or a nation or a class – as explanatory of changes in art or politics … he saw such explanations as not only circular but as failing to recognise the essentially rational nature of the way artists experimented and learned from each other' (The Guardian obituary). He was appointed Durning-Lawrence Professor at University College, London, in 1956, returning to the Warburg Institute in 1959 as Director and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition, a post he held until 1976. In the 1960s–70s he held numerous prestigious posts including Lethaby Professor at the Royal College of Art (1967–68), British Museum trustee (1974–79), and a member of the Museums and Galleries Commission (1976–82). He was also a Visiting Professor at Harvard (1959), honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964), and Andrew D. White Professor At Large, Cornell University (1970–77). His success brought him a CBE in 1966, a knighthood in 1972, and the Order of Merit in 1988, as well as the Erasmus prize, Amsterdam (1975), the Hegel prize, Stuttgart (1976), the medal of the Collège de France (1977), the Wittgenstein Award, Austria (1988), the Goethe prize, Frankfurt (1994) and the citizenship of Mantua (1998). Ernst Gombrich died of bronchopneumonia and heart failure at his Hampstead home on 3 November 2001.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ernst Gombrich]
Publications related to [Ernst Gombrich] in the Ben Uri Library