Sir Ernst (Hans Josef) Gombrich - Further reading

Art historian, born in Vienna, Austria. He studied at the University of Vienna before emigrating to Britain, where he joined the staff of the Warburg Institute, London (1936), becoming its director and professor of the history of the classical tradition (1959–76). During World War 2 he worked for the BBC Monitoring Service. His books include The Story of Art (1950), Art and Illusion (1960) - an influential study of the psychology of pictorial representation, The Sense of Order (1979), and New Light on Old Masters (1986). He was knighted in 1972.

Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) CBE, was an art historian, who spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom.

He was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, into an assimilated bourgeois family of Jewish origin. He was educated at Theresianum secondary school in Vienna and at Vienna University before coming to Britain in 1936 where he took up a post as a research assistant at the Warburg Institute, University of London.

During World War II, he worked for the BBC World Service, monitoring German radio broadcasts. He was the recipient of numerous additional honours

Gombrich's first book was Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser (the only book he did not write in English), published in Germany in 1936.

The Story of Art, first published in 1950 (currently in its 16th edition) is widely regarded as a seminal work of criticism and one of the most accessible introductions to the visual arts. Other major publications include Art and Illusion (1960), regarded by critics to be his most influential and far-reaching works, and the papers gathered in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963)and The Image and the Eye (1981). Other important books are Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (1970), The Sense of Order (1979) and The Preference for the Primitive (posthumously in 2002).

Further reading

Sheldon Richmond, Aesthetic Criteria: Gombrich and the Philosophies of Science of Popper and Polanyi.

Richard Woodfield, Gombrich on Art and Psychology.