Sir Ernst Gombrich, who died on November 3rd aged 92, was probably the most eminent art historian of the last half-century, both for specialist scholars and for a wider public. The Story of Art (1950, 16th edition 1995) has been the introduction to the visual arts for innumerable people for more than 50 years, while his major theoretical books, Art and Illusion (1960), the papers gathered in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963) and other volumes, have been pivotal for professional art historians.
He was born into an extremely sophisticated family in Vienna, originally Jewish but converted at the turn of the 20th century to a rather mystical protestantism in an ambience close to that of Gustav Mahler. Throughout his life, he was anti-sectarian and unreligious. But it was impossible, in the wake of Austria's enthusiastic adoption of Nazism, to dissociate himself from Judaism, and he insisted on describing himself as born not as an Austrian, but as an Austrian Jew.
Educated at the Theresianum secondary school in Vienna and at Vienna University, he went to Britain in 1936 and joined the Warburg Institute, which had escaped from Hamburg two years previously with most of its library, as a research assistant.
His family was highly musical: his mother was a pianist whose teacher was only two generations away from pupils of Beethoven. His wife, Ilse, whom he married in 1936, was also a pianist, a pupil of Rudolf Serkin, giving up her concert career when she married, though continuing to teach; they had one son, Richard, who has been professor of Sanskrit at Oxford since 1976.
Ernst Gombrich was a fine cellist, and in Vienna, the Gombrich and Busch families played chamber music together (the violinist Adolf Busch and his brothers were among the great musicians of the age). The serious understanding of music formed a crucial factor in the development of Ernst Gombrich's thought.
The pursuit of a rational study of painting - however different from music - seems one of the goals of his work in Art and Illusion. He - although it was not a view he expressed in so many words - sought in the optical and psychological basis of painting some equivalence to the rationality of musical structures. It was not that he believed the expressive power of music was reducible to principles of harmony, or that of painting to the psychology of illusion, but that these formed the framework for understanding artistic achievement.
The work in which he set out to replace the formalisms of the turn of the century was Art and Illusion, first published in 1960 and based on his Mellon lectures given in Washington in 1956. It presented an account of the psychological factors which make it possible for us to see a three-dimensional moving subject - such as people in action - on a flat, still surface. The painter learned to do this by trial and error, checking whether his marks elicited recognition of his subject.
The book has remained, for 40 years, central to the discussion of the visual arts by philosophers, art historians and critics. It retained this position despite radical criticisms of parts of his argument because at its core it focused, as no art historian before had done, on the role of illusion, on the fact that in depiction, without our being deluded, we are caught up by the represented subject that we recognise within it - the expression of a face, the gesture of a figure, the spaces of a landscape.
His writing was always vivid and accessible. When he was a research student in Mantua writing a thesis on Giulio Romano at the Palazzo del Te, a 10-year-old daughter of some family friends wrote to ask him what he was doing. In his correspondence with her he described how, once upon a time, there was a prince, and in his court he had an artist who delighted in surprising people by his paintings. A little later he wrote a world history for children (Weltgeschichte fⁿr Kinder, 1936, revised and enlarged 1985, though not translated into English) and famously - at the prompting of his publisher Bela Horovitz of the Phaidon Press - he wrote The Story of Art (1950).
Among his most accessible and seminal papers dating from the same decade as Art and Illusion are those in the volume Meditations on a Hobby Horse. Here the fundamental questions of aesthetics are explored: how the imagination functions in painting, how it elicits or transforms our psychological urgencies and how aesthetic and moral awareness are related to each other.
Although he had written eloquently about Picasso and other artists of the first half of the century, they were not central to his sensibility.
He was critical of various modernisms: he was, for instance, sceptical about Schoenberg's 12-tone system as musically disabling and he was unimpressed by art which seemed to depend on making a rhetorical gesture (as opposed to art in which there was visible internal structure), however interesting the psychology of such gesturing might be.
He is survived by his wife Ilse and their son Richard.
Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich: born 1909; died, November 2001