I used to do posts about the Warburg Institute to keep in touch with Daphne Warburg Astor, who called the great art historian Aby Warburg ‘Uncle Aby’, although strictly he was her great-uncle; but this is no longer possible.

Last night Paul Taylor, the Curator of the Warburg’s Photographic Collection, gave a brilliant short account of the Warburg’s history, including a photograph of Ernst Gombrich which I had never seen. It is of him, his wife, Ilse (left), and Otto Kurz (far right), his friend and intellectual ally, and Trude Weiss, not long after the Gombrichs had married and arrived in England:-

I found it interesting because it shows him as he was before the war, an Austrian intellectual who always described himself as a historian, not an art historian. He was given a short contract by Fritz Saxl to order the papers of Warburg, a task he found boring, but led ultimately to the publication of his intellectual biography of Warburg in 1970. I also came across the illuminating short blog post by his son, Richard, which I hadn’t seen before (https://www.carlgombrich.org/post/memoir-of-ernst-gombrich-guest-post-by-richard-gombrich) and strongly recommend.