Richard Wollheim was one of the most distinguished and productive philosophers of his generation. He made a significant contribution to the postwar flourishing of British philosophy; and as his career continued long past the normal age of retirement his work grew steadily more individual, rich and expressive. So his reputation continued to increase, and his publications were eagerly awaited into his eightieth year.

Unlike most of his contemporaries Wollheim did not seek to add to metaphysics or the philosophy of language. Rather he concentrated on his main interests prior to philosophy, the elucidation of human feeling and its expression in art. This led him to integrate the kind of analytic and conceptual think-ing already familiar in philosophy with substantive investigation, inspired by psychoanalysis, of the processes by which we invest things and persons with emotional significance. In this he became the practitioner of a unique kind of philosophical inquiry, informed by abstract argument and distinction, but enriched by the imaginative use of depth psychology and the discussion of many concrete examples.

He conducted this kind of investigation particularly in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Thus in his relatively early Art and Its Objects he produced a pioneering but abstract account — studied, among others, by conceptual artists for whom the question was a particularly live one — of what makes something a work of art. Then later, as his thinking matured, he offered in Painting as an Art a very much fuller understanding of the constitution of art in painting. This included detailed discussion of the roles of artist and spectator, the imaginative processes which relate them, and the ways these are made possible by invention, technique and tradition.

In his major work in mind and psychology, The Thread of Life, he attempted to show how such meaning-giving processes create and inform personal identity itself, and how incidentally they engender a “tyranny of the past” which threatens to pervert the course of life. No one familiar with this work could hold that analytic philosophy as practised by Wollheim fails to engage with basic questions of significance in life. He continued to develop his ideas and approach in his last books, On the Emotions and On Pictorial Organization, the latter published less than a year ago.

Wollheim’s appreciation of art, and the intellectual and emotional sophistication which were to render him so penetrating a student of it, must have owed much to his family life. His mother was a beauty and an actress, and his father a theatrical impresario, particularly attached to Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet. When the children were born, and in accord with what he took to be English mores, his father contrived for his mother to quit the stage, and for the family to move to the country, where he himself spent little time.

Richard’s early contact with his father thus consisted mainly in his being allowed to watch him as he dressed and scented himself before departing for work; and his time alternated between cosseted domestic isolation — with his mother unoccupied and in want of the applause she had been accustomed to seek — and the excitement of being backstage and with the artists and performers with whom his father was engaged.

As a little boy he had many solitary days exploring his father’s cosmopolitan library, and many evenings in which he presented himself for the admiration of actresses he adored and longed to touch (one of whom he overheard, to his chagrin, recommending to his father that he be sent to a surgeon to have his ears pinned back). After this, his first English schools were a particular trial, with their bullying, punishment and sport.

He was happier at Westminster, where his intellectual life and his commitments to painting, socialism and pacifism began to blossom. He made friendships which were to endure for the remainder of his life, one being with the future philosopher David Pears. But he remained characteristically detached and critical, and his later account of the sadism of his headmaster — published as a review of a book intended as a tribute to a great educational figure — provoked the outrage of schoolfellows who were more satisfied than he had been with arrangements there.

After a year at Balliol College, Oxford, and spurred by Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, he renounced his pacifism to join the Army. He took part in the landing at Normandy, and was later captured by the Germans. In freezing rain he excused himself from his captors to go to urinate with a companion at a hedge, and the two escaped to the road below. His companion did not speak French, so as they made their way to allied lines Wollheim explained that this was his idiot brother.

Later, as an intelligence officer, he tried unsuccessfully to resist a plan on the part of his superiors to arrange a dance between British soldiers (who were not allowed to fraternise with German civilians) and women recently liberated from Belsen (who were not German and were therefore eligible for social contact). The superiors felt sure that the event would be a tonic for both the soldiers and the women, and would not be persuaded that the women’s incarceration might have rendered them less rather than more ready for such an occasion.

The first arrangement was for transport to pick up the women to bring them to the soldiers, but this failed when the appearance of military trucks caused panic among the women. The second was for the soldiers to join the women in Belsen itself, which was prepared for the anticipated festivity; but this also failed when the women, baring their arms to show their tattoos, absolutely and forcibly refused to dance. Fighting broke out, and the event was finally cancelled for good.

After military service Wollheim returned to Oxford. Within a year of his graduation A. J. Ayer, then the most famous British philosopher, offered him a job at University College London. He married Anne Powell, with whom he was to have two sons, and started to show his capacity for work in a series of publications. Apart from articles, he wrote Socialism and Culture, which indicated his hope that his love of painting and his devotion to socialism could be combined in an account of human nature that encompassed both politics and art, and F. H. Bradley, a study of a philosopher marginalised by the simplifying influence of logical positivism. His father had introduced him to the work of Freud, and after he settled in London he also began a psychoanalysis, which he found both healing and revelatory.

As his analysis enabled him to make better sense of his own emotional life, so the work of Freud and Melanie Klein, upon which he now began to focus, enabled him to make better sense of a topic which had long preoccupied him, the manifestation of emotion in art. Klein’s accounts of the expression of feeling in children’s play had gone far beyond Freud’s, and had delineated unconscious processes of representation and communication which were concerned not only with sexuality and aggression but also with nurturance, care, wholeness and the making good of what was damaged or broken.