Once upon a time there was . . .

E. H. Gombrich was born in Vienna in 1909. As a boy he had seen the Emperor Franz Joseph walking in his garden. As a young man, himself a Jew, he had watched Jewish students being beaten up in the streets by Nazi thugs. In January 1936, two years before Hitler’s troops marched into Vienna in triumph, he arrived as an exile in London, to work as a research fellow at the Warburg Institute of which he became director in 1959. When he died, loaded with honours in 2001, the huge sales of his book The Story of Art, published in 1950, had made him the best known and most acclaimed art historian in the world.

But he had done more than write a bestselling blockbuster. Art history in Austria and Germany had developed on different lines from the professional connoisseurship of Berenson. Gombrich’s immense and wide-ranging scholarly output brought to Britain the wider cultural concerns of Abe Warburg, founder of the Institute which bears his name.