Renate R. A. Burgess (1910–1988)

Dr Renate Burgess, Keeper of Art Collections at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine from 1964 to 1980, died in London on 15 August 1988. Renate Ruth Adelheid Burgess was born in Hanover on 2 August 1910. Her parents came from Silesia. Her father was Dr. phil. Friedrich Bergius (1884-1949), a chemist who won the Nobel Prize (with Carl Bosch) in 1931 for his inventions in the field ofcoal hydrogenation.' Her mother, Margarethe Bergius, was a member of a Jewish family named Sachs. They were divorced when Renate was twelve years old. After her school education at the Westendschule in Berlin, she studied art history, archaelogy, and French philology in Berlin and Munich. At Munich she was impressed by Wilhelm Pinder's method of style analysis, and her exercises in this genre of art history are recognizable, years later, in her catalogue-card descriptions of Wellcome Institute paintings. In 1933-1934 she travelled in France and Belgium doing research on fourteenthand fifteenth-century sculpture for her doctorate, which she received from the University of Munich in June 1935. Her thesis was published in the following year.2 Being unable to take up work in a museum owing to the Nazi restrictions on Jews, she worked for eighteen months for the art dealers Julius Bohler in Munich. Then she showed her political commitment by doing social work and teaching in Berlin for the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church): this organization defied the Nazi ban on the entry of Jews into Christian churches, and opposed those who wished to unite all the churches under the Fuhrer. In 1938 she chose to leave Germany-of her own resolve and under no compulsion, as she would later stress3and came to London, where she was assisted by Hilda Matheson of the BBC and the art historian Elizabeth Senior among others. After a brief return to Germany, she, alone of her family, settled in Britain. Life was difficult. She had been allowed to take only ten marks out of Germany. Unlike some of her art-historian friends who had emigrated earlier (Ernst Kitzinger, Helmut Gernsheim, Edith Hoffman), she was unable to find professional employment and took up a series of domestic, factory and clerical jobs in Beaconsfield, London and Cambridge (where she worked for the Master of Downing College). Her undeserved misfortunes at this time strengthened but never soured her doughty character.