William S. Heckscher

William S. Heckscher (1904–1999) was a prominent German art historian and professor of fine art and art history at universities in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Wilhelm Sebastian Martin Hugo Heckscher was born in Hamburg, Germany on December 14, 1904. He was the son of Hulda Foerster and Siegfried Heckscher, a lawyer and director of the Hamburg America Line. His maternal grandfather was the astronomer and mathematician Wilhelm Foerster.

From 1918 to 1921, the family lived in the Netherlands while Heckscher's father served as the Weimar Republic's ambassador to The Hague; there, Heckscher enrolled at the Nederlandsch Lyceum. Heckscher pursued his interests in history and Flemish art by spending his off hours studying at the Dutch Royal Library, the Mauritshuis and the Kröller-Müller Museum, but was dismissed from the Lyceum in 1920 for "lack of scholarly potential". After the family returned to Hamburg, Heckscher attended the Kunstgewerbeschule am Lerchenfeld, but failed a class in ceramics.

Having been stymied at furthering his formal art education, at the age of 19 Heckscher returned to The Hague and worked as a portrait painter. He spent months copying panels by Jan van Eyck and Konrad Witz, took informal painting lessons with Ludwig Bartning of the Berlin Academy, and was contracted to work on an anatomical atlas. His portraiture was in demand among Dutch, German, and Belgian patrons; this was his means of support from 1924 to 1930.

Heckscher was commissioned in 1931 to paint a portrait of Gustav Pauli, the director of Kunsthalle Hamburg. While at work in Pauli's office, they were interrupted by a strange little man unknown to Heckscher. The man, apparently a colleague of Pauli, immediately launched into some Dürer problem that was troubling him. The stranger's animated discussion with Pauli left Heckscher astounded at the depth of the man's insight. Intrigued, Heckscher followed Panofsky to his office and all but begged to study under him. Panofsky was thoroughly unimpressed by Heckscher's education—he had never finished high school—but Heckscher persisted, and Panofsky eventually relented, telling him of a program to support gifted students who had not completed high school. Heckscher passed the rigorous examination and was accepted into the University of Hamburg, but was only grudgingly given a seat in the back of Panofsky's seminar.

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