The discipline of art history in Australia has passed through four stages. The foundations were laid in the 1940s with the arrival of three eminent émigrés. Ursula Hoff, schooled in the rigours and erudition of the Warburg Institute, came first. Franz Philipp, a Dunera survivor, well educated in the Viennese School, under Julius von Schlosser and others, came next. Then came Joseph Burke, first Herald Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, and a product of the Courtauld Institute in London and the Anglophiliacs of Yale. Hoff would become the first trained art historian to work in a public Australian art gallery. Over the years, she made the Prints and Drawings Room at the National Gallery of Victoria a powerhouse of scholarship and connoisseurship. Burke and Philipp joined forces to create the Department of Fine Arts. Burke modestly proclaimed that ‘Franz was the architect and I was the builder’; I suspect that Philipp felt he was both.