FOR more than 60 years Enriqueta Harris has been a key figure in the study of Spanish painting and the arts of Spain in Great Britain.

She was a doyenne of Velázquez scholars worldwide. Visitors from home and abroad knocked constantly on the door of her office in the Warburg Institute and, after her retirement in 1970, went to her home for advice.

She worked tirelessly to ensure that Spanish exhibitions and publications received proper coverage in British journals. Her books, and many of her articles, awakened the interest of intelligent readers, art lovers and specialists alike, and reprints and new editions mark the success of her studies of Velázquez and Goya. Nobody knew more than she did about the impact of Spanish art on Britain across the centuries.

Enriqueta Harris was born in Hampstead in 1910 into a family that had strong ties with Spain and Spanish art. Her father, Lionel Harris, spent a number of years in Spain, dealing in textiles, jewellery and then works of art and antiques, with shops in Madrid and London. Her mother had been born in Seville into a family that combined skills in horsemanship and bullfighting with the buying and selling of art in the Spanish capital.

There was a useful mix of strength of will, sociability and scholarship in Harris’s genes; an unusual conjunction of Jewish and Roman Catholic backgrounds too. Above all she grew up with Spanish paintings around her.

Lionel Harris’s Spanish Gallery in Conduit Street attracted significant attention, and numerous works from it passed into public collections. Four paintings by El Greco, or attributed to him, on display in the gallery in 1913 led Roger Fry to publish a passionate appraisal of the originality of that artist. Later, in 1931 and again in 1938, there were major works by Velázquez and Goya on exhibition in the family gallery.

When Harris was 18, she embarked on a degree course in modern languages at University College London, but took advantage of a new option to combine history of art with a language (in her case, Italian), in the last two years. She graduated in 1931 with a prize and a medal for Italian studies and went on to begin postgraduate research on Spanish painting, with The Followers of Goya as her thesis subject and Tancred Borenius as her supervisor.

She spent time in Spain with a travelling scholarship from the university, and after completing her doctorate in 1934 she was awarded a Leverhulme Foundation grant for further travel, working on the influence of Caravaggio in Spain, and tracing a specifically Spanish sense of realism in the art of Velázquez and other leading 17th-century artists. She published her first two articles in that field in 1935, and established important friendships with young British and Spanish scholars working in similar areas.

On her return to London, she developed her career prospects by giving classes at the Courtauld Institute for a time, but also made contact with the brilliant group of exiled scholars from Nazi Germany who had brought Aby Warburg’s library to England in December 1933 and were installed for a while in the Imperial Institute, in South Kensington.

Harris always recalled with great warmth her debt to Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower, and two articles she published in 1937 and 1938 — one of them on El Greco’s paintings for the chapel of the Charity Hospital at Illescas — echo very clearly their way of interpreting iconographic symbolism and their perceptive analysis of decorative schemes.

The Spanish Civil War had an inevitable impact on her life. Her family provided all the help that they could to Spanish friends, and Harris also gave time to organise the billeting of Basque children. But she was still able to pursue her own lines of research in 1938, when she spent six months as a Tuition Fellow at New York University.

During the Second World War she kept up contacts with her Warburg friends, visiting them at weekends to talk about art, organise their photographic collections and work in their gardens.

The stimulating pamphlet for the National Gallery on El Greco’s The Purification of the Temple, published in 1944, was written in this period, and shows Harris exploiting the iconographical methods of Saxl and his colleagues to particular advantage. Between 1942 and 1946 she worked in the Spanish section of the Ministry of Information, keeping a sharp eye on the Spanish press.

Her artist brother, Tomás, was already assisting his father to run the Spanish Gallery. He would later become the leading authority on Goya’s prints, and was fruitfully employed during hostilities in MI5, controlling the double agent Juan Pujol.

In 1947 Harris was appointed as Wittkower’s assistant in the photographic collection of the Warburg Institute, and later took control of this herself. She remained in that post, except for a two-year gap, until her retirement in 1970. In the institute Harris found exceptionally cultivated minds and a corporate spirit that fostered collaboration. She made enduring friendships there with colleagues, although her marriage in 1952 to the leading authority on ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology, Professor Henri Frankfort, led her to resign her post. Their relationship was tragically short; he died in July 1954.

Subsequently, Harris was reappointed to her curatorship. Years of reviewing books and exhibitions followed, with articles based on new material in relation to individual paintings by Velázquez and aspects of his life. She served on the executive committee for the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition of 1963-64, Goya and His Times, and produced a cluster of Goya-related articles with new or little-known information before publishing an appraisal of his life and work in her book for Phaidon Press in 1969.

Her Velázquez, for the same publisher, came out in 1982, bringing the fruits of her earlier research on Spanish realism to the general reader in tracing the Seville master’s life and art. At the end of that book she examined the impact of Velázquez’s work on later artists, and her fascination with the transmission of Spanish art in general. Its fortuna also led her to study the prints of Spanish works collected by Sir William Stirling-Maxwell in the 19th century, writing on his contribution to the history of Spanish art, and pioneering use of photography to reproduce important paintings.

In later years, arthritis made it increasingly difficult for Harris to travel and work in libraries, but she had always put her immense knowledge and shrewd judgment at the disposition of younger scholars, and this led to a series of collaborative enterprises.

Many honours came her way, particularly from Spain. She was made corresponding member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid; received the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts from King Juan Carlos in 1989; was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabel la Católica, and the published homage of the Friends of the Prado Museum Foundation in 2002.

Enriqueta Harris, authority on Spanish art, was born on May 17, 1910. She died on April 22, 2006, aged 95.