E H Gombrich

E. H. Gombrich (Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich), 1909-2001, British art historian and scholar, b. Vienna, grad. Univ. of Vienna (1933). From a culturally prominent Austrian-Jewish family, he fled Germany in 1936 for England, where he lived for the rest of his life. He taught at Oxford, the Univ. of London, and the Warburg Institute, which he directed from 1959 until his retirement in 1976. Enormously erudite, Gombrich is best known for his superb art-historical survey The Story of Art (1950), in which he distinguished between representational art based on seeing and that based based on understanding. His ideas on visual perception were further developed in Art and Illusion (1956), in which he applied work in psychology to the framework of art history, and The Image and the Eye (1982). His many essay collections dealing with art theory include Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963) and Ideals and Idols (1979). Among his other works are three studies of Renaissance art, Norm and Form (1966), Symbolic Images (1972), and The Heritage of Apelles (1976). His later books include New Light on Old Masters (1986), Shadows (1995), The Uses of Images (1999), and the posthumously published The Preference for the Primitive (2002).

Bibliography: See E. Gombrich and D. Eribon, Looking for Answers: Conversations on Art and Science (1993); R. Woodfield, ed., The Essential Gombrich (1996).

Gombrich, Sir Ernst (b Vienna, 30 Mar. 1909; d London, 3 Nov. 2001). Austrian-born British art historian. He settled in England in 1936 and began a long association with the Warburg Institute in the University of London, where he was director and professor of the history of the classical tradition from 1959 to 1976. He was also Slade professor at both Oxford and Cambridge. His scholarly work, which shows a remarkable ability to combine great breadth of learning with lucidity and wit, was devoted largely to the theory of art, the psychology of pictorial representation, and Renaissance symbolism, and won him a position of the highest esteem in his profession. His writings bore witness to his interest in scientific method and helped to promote interchange between art history and other disciplines. Gombrich's best-known book, however, is a popular work, The Story of Art, which was first published in 1950 and has ever since held its place as the most congenial introduction to the history of art. It reached its 16th English edition in 1995 and has been translated into twenty languages.

Among Gombrich's other books the best known is probably Art and Illusion (1960 and subsequent editions). This highly influential work deals with conventions of representation and examines how styles change and develop, challenging many orthodox views and received opinions about visual perception. The notion of the ‘innocent eye’—the idea of the artist simply representing what he sees—is shown to be untenable and the evolution of style (‘why different ages and different nations have represented the visible world in…different ways’) is explained in terms of the modification of schematic images to match the objective reality of the subject. Using the findings of experimental psychology, Gombrich examines the way the viewer looks at works of art and shows that we tend to see what we expect to see. In Thinkers of the Twentieth Century (ed. Elizabeth Devine et al., 1983) J. M. Massing wrote: ‘For his scholarly method, his theoretical approach and his defence of cultural values, Gombrich will be remembered as one of the leading art historians of this century. Through his study of the psychology of perception, he is also one of the very few to have widened our understanding of the visible world.’

Gombrich, Sir Ernst (1909–2001), distinguished British art historian, was long associated with the Warburg Institute in the University of London, as director and as professor of the history of the classical tradition. He wrote extensively on the theory of art and on the psychology of pictorial representation. His works include The Story of Art (1950) and Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (1966, 1972, 1976).