My mother, Edith Hoffman, who has died aged 89, spent most of her life in her native US, where she found success and prosperity as a lecturer in art history. But she was never happier than in the early, less prosperous, years of her marriage, when she lived with my father, Ernest, in a small flat in south London.
Edith had married Ernest Hoffman, an Australian by birth, in 1955 after meeting him by chance at the National Gallery in London during a visit to Britain the year before. She was at the gallery to view two paintings by the 15th-century artist Simon Marmion, who was the focus of her Fulbright scholarship studies on Flemish art, and for research purposes needed to see the backs of the two paintings. The gallery provided a guard who took them both off the wall and turned them around, an unusual scene that caught the attention of Ernest, who was on leave from the RAF. He walked up to ask her what she was doing; a short conversation ensued, and he left. But the next evening they ran into each other again at the Old Vic theatre, and their relationship blossomed. Not long afterwards Mom returned to the US, but she and Dad began to correspond.
When she returned to marry Ernest, they moved into a small property in Herne Hill with a coin-fed gas meter for hot water. In spite of their straitened circumstances – Dad likes to say they were as poor as church mice – Edith loved their life there. She won admission to the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London, where, having already gained bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history in the US, she earned a PhD in 1958. Throughout that period in London she and Ernest enthusiastically attended the theatre, visited museums, and travelled extensively on their motorcycle and scooter, wearing second world war surplus gas suits to fend off the endless English rain.
In 1959 they moved to the US, where I was born in 1961 and where Edith taught art history at the University of Connecticut, the University of Nebraska and Central Connecticut State University. She retired as a full, tenured professor, which was a great achievement for the farm girl – daughter of Clifford Warren and his wife, Hazel – who had grown up dirt poor in a speck of a town, Gilmore City, Iowa, during the Great Depression.
Edith is survived by Ernest and me, her granddaughter, Julia, and her sister, June.
