Name: Heckscher, William S[ebastian] (nee, Wilhelm Sebastian Matin Hugo Heckscher)
Date Born: 1904 Place born: Hamburg, Germany
Date died: 1999 Place died: Princeton, NJ
(Source:http://www.lib.duke.edu/lilly/artlibry/dah/hecksherw.htm)

Dutch baroque scholar; art museum director; student of Panofsky. Heckscher was raised in Hamburg, where he attended the University of Hamburg, studying under Erwin Panofsky (q.v.). It was Panofsky, according to one of Heckscher's students, who helped steer Heckscher in the Warburg-School style of art history. Heckscher received his doctorate in 1935, emmigrating almost immediately to the US in 1936, where he spent a year at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. Suspicions about German aliens were so high, that Heckscher passed most of the years of World War II first as an enemy alien in an internment camp in Britain and Canada. During the latter incarceration, he tutored newer internees to pass Canadian universities' entrance exams. After the war, Heckscher taught at universities in the Netherlands and United States. His familiarity with art-historical institutions on both sides of the Atlantic made him in instrumental in bringing scholarship closer together, such as successfully bring a copy of the Index of Christian Art to Utrecht's Institute of Art History.
In 1966 he became Chair of the Department of Art History at Duke University, a position he held until his retirement in 1974. A James B. Duke professor, he was also director of the Duke University Museum of Art, 1970-74.
Heckscher and his family retired to Princeton, where he remained active writing articles and advising the Princeton University Library. He was awarded an honorary degree from McGill University for his work with fellow prisoners in the Canadian camp.

Biography: KRG, 81 mentioned; KMP, 65 cited;
Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 271-5;
New York Times, February 7, 2000, Section B; p. 9;
Sears, Elizabeth. "The Life and Work of William S. Heckscher." Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 53 no1 (1990): 107-33.

Bibliography: Rembrandt's Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp; an Iconological Study. New York: New York University Press, 1958.
"Bernini's Elephant and Obelisk." Art Bulletin 29 (1947): 155-82.
"The Genesis of Iconology," in Stil und Überlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes Akten des XXI Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte. Bonn, 1964, 3 (1967): 239-62.

In "Brigadoon" I wrote:
In the Farnham camp the idea of completing High School first surfaced when a school was formed in 1940/41 with good, non-professional, volunteer teachers to instruct us volunteer pupils. William Heckscher, a budding academic, became headmaster in November .... and won the confidence and support of the camp Commandant, Major Eric Kippen, who had been a POW in Germany in the First War. An intelligent man, a Montreal stockbroker between the Wars, he had been made to understand early who we internees were through the intervention and pleading by our most august fellow inmate, Count Lingen, the youngest grandson of the Kaiser. Kippen, who had two sons in school in Montreal, was sympathetic to us all, but particularly to the needs of the camp school. Heckscher and Kippen really got on and respected each other.
Kippen said in a conversation in 1981 with Bill Heckscher ..."You were the "spark plug" that started the school. Then you got me interested,...very interested". Early in 1941, Kippen assigned a special hut where we had lectures, could study after hours, and where we could all function pretty much without distraction. Heckscher later described him as ..."silent, military, human, and gentlemanly", ... and stressed that ..."it was he who worried about young men who were falling behind, who arranged for a regular "P.T." hour, and who delegated a teacher to do the final invigilating". ..

[also see: p.148 Eric Koch. "Deemed Suspect - A Wartime Blunder". available from Goodread Biographies, Formac Publ. Co. Ltd.5359 Inglis St., Halifax, N.S. B3H 1J4, Canada.]

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How Bill Heckscher managed to establish the school is well described in Walter Hitschfeld’s presentation of Bill to the 1981 McGill Convocation for his Hon. Doctorate:

.."He convinced the military guardians to tolerate, eventually to aid, what he was up to, got generous help from the YMCA, and through the intervention of that towering figure in Canadian education, Henry Marshall Tory, he made the case to McGill University, that his pupils be allowed to write its extramural matriculation examination. ... through a toughness of spirit, allied with soft-spoken good humour, through consummate tact and devotion, but above all through his patent love of learning, he led and inspired his boys, and in the space of seven months, we wrote the exams... which helped loosen the rigours of internment for everybody. ...But Heckscher shrugs off all praise, recalling merely that during the first war, his grandfather had taught French Prisoners of war in Germany!"...

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In 1997 I sent "Brigadoon" to Bill Heckscher, and to my joy he sent me a letter of thanks.

Bill Heckcher 1941, age 37 Bill Heckscher 1997, age 93