Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) was an art historian who also produced a body of theoretical work. His best known work on art theory, Art and Illusion, was published shortly before he published this short article in a semi-popular magazine.

One of the chief influences on Gombrich's thinking about art was a philosopher of science, Karl Popper (1902-1994), who argued that science especially, and our thinking generally, proceeded (or at least should proceed) through a process of “conjecture and refutation”; that is, we learn about the world by formulating hypotheses and testing them against experience, generating knew hypotheses when our initial conjectures are refuted. Gombrich adapted these ideas to art via a pair of phrases, “making and matching” and “schema and correction.” These phrases don’t appear in the article we will discuss, but you will find the idea that we engage with art by way of expectations that we gradually alter in response to experience.

• Gombrich’s reference to reading is the most prominent of a whole group of comparisons of pictorial art to language. Ask yourself how close you think the analogy is. You’ve seen Schopenhauer reject it and accompany his rejection with comments about allegorical paintings like the still life Gombrich considers (see HK 483-486).

• What do you think is the role played in Gombrich’s argument by the discussion of Escher? How could general truths about art be discovered by considering such an unusual body of work?

• Think about the conflict between composition and illusion that Gombrich turns to in the final paragraphs. You should go back to his discussion of cubism earlier in the paper, and you should also think how it fits with what Bell said about representation (see pp. 9-11 of the Bell handout).