The Story of Art was recommended by Amit Varma at the end of the first episode of Watching the Wheels, a weekly podcast he does with Shruti Rajagopalan and Pranay Kotasthane.
He said that when he was younger, art went over his head, and he could have either told himself he wasn’t sophisticated enough or decided that artists were all pretentious. He chose neither and read Gombrich instead. The book tells the story of art through the hundreds of artworks reproduced in it.
He also shared a story from the book about Whistler, who sued the critic John Ruskin for trashing one of his paintings. When asked in court how he could charge two hundred guineas for a painting that took him two days, Whistler said it was for the knowledge he had gained over a lifetime. He won, was awarded a farthing, and the legal costs bankrupted him.