William S. Heckscher
From 1918 to 1921, the family lived in the Netherlands while Heckscher's father served as the Weimar Republic's ambassador to The Hague; there, Heckscher enrolled at the Nederlandsch Lyceum. Heckscher pursued his interests in history and Flemish art by spending his off hours studying at the Dutch Royal Library, the Mauritshuis and the Kröller-Müller Museum, but was dismissed from the Lyceum in 1920 for "lack of scholarly potential". After the family returned to Hamburg, Heckscher attended the city's Kunstgewerbeschule, now the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, but failed a class in ceramics.
William S. Heckscher
Heckscher briefly taught art at the University of Toronto, then from 1942–1946 taught the German language and phonetics at Carleton College, the University of Saskatchewan, and the University of Manitoba. He moved to the United States in 1947 to teach art history at the University of Iowa. In 1955 he was named Professor of Medieval Art and Iconology for the Institute of Art History at the University of Utrecht, a position he would hold for the following ten years.