In 1970 I signed up to work for a PhD with Ernst Gombrich at the Warburg Institute on eighteenth century art theory. My co-supervisor was Richard Wollheim at University College. It wasn’t long before I realised that Gombrich’s intellectual assumptions were rather different from Wollheim’s, and Wollheim’s rather different from my philosophical mentors. Gombrich would never have thought what Wollheim thought he did, and my mentors would never have thought Gombrich philosophical. I gave up on the PhD and became a regular visitor to the Warburg Institute, published a number of articles in the British Journal of Aesthetics, which at that time was not dominated by philosophers, and edited a series of facsimiles of eighteenth-century English art theoretical texts, published by the Scolar Press.
In 1986, following a review of his book Tributes, which he liked, Gombrich invited me to visit him and its first outcome was the production of his Reflections on the History of Art (1987). We found our conversations congenial, and those became regular monthly events. Phaidon wanted to produce a collection of material illustrating the breadth of his work and, failing their own candidates, Gombrich nominated me to do the job: the result was The Essential Gombrich (1996). They had also asked me to produce a festschrift for his 85th birthday, but found my proposal too demanding for their readers. Instead, I gathered together a team of contributors and produced my own festschrift for him, which resulted in Gombrich on Art and Psychology (1996). This, in turn, led me into studying the work of the famous Viennese Professor of Psychology Karl Bühler, Heinrich Gomperz, Gombrich’s teacher Julius Schlosser, and the controversial Hans Sedlmayr. In 2005 I retired from my post as School Research Professor for the Nottingham Trent School of Art and Design, where I am now Emeritus Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory. In 2007 I was appointed Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Art History in the University of Glasgow. In 2008 I convened a conference on Viennese art historiography, which was then published in my newly created Journal of Art Historiography in December 2009, hosted by the University of Glasgow.
In 2010 I was Herald Research Fellow in the Australian Institute of Art History at Melbourne University and in 2011 I joined the University of Birmingham at the invitation of Professor Rampley, transferring the journal to Wordpress.com with the assistance of Birmingham’s IT staff. The 4th issue of the journal, published in 2011, was devoted to Australian art historiography.