A Life in Pictures: Looking for Elizabeth Senior

Abstract

This essay follows the author’s search for forgotten art historian Elizabeth Senior (1910–41). Using a quest narrative, it traces the process undertaken to piece together the life story of a remarkable young woman, including Internet research, visits to archives and correspondence with family members. Killed at just aged 30 by a bomb during the Blitz in 1941, Senior left a quite substantial body of editorial work and writing. Editress for the inaugural volumes in Allen Lane’s King Penguin series, Senior also wrote multiple reviews for the Burlington Magazine and the British Museum Quarterly, as well as her own art historical books on portraits of Henry VIII and his wives, and on portraits of Christ (co-authored with Ernst Kitzinger). A collaborator and friend to many Jewish émigré art historians, including The Story of Art author Ernst Gombrich, Senior played an important role in facilitating the safe passage of many fleeing the Nazis for England in the 1930s and 1940s. Unmarried at the time of her death, Senior was survived by a 10-week-old baby, whom she had stashed under a table for safety when a bomb landed on her flat.

Keywords:

• archives
• art history
• biography
• Elizabeth Senior
• Ernst Gombrich
• interwar period
• Jewish émigrés
• King Penguin
• life writing
• women’s lives

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Sally Mellersh, Rachel Kitzinger, Lyn Rees, Richard Woodward, Anna Towlson, Fiona Parker Cole, Margaret Ivell, Claire Battershill, Susie Harries, Michael Richardson, Anne Thomas, Margaretta Jolly, Claudia Wedepohl and Eckart Merchant, and, for permissions, Leonie Gombrich and the Warburg Institute, the Penguin Archive at the University of Bristol, the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, the Times Syndicate and Newnham College.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.