ABSTRACT
Over the last three decades there has been an unprecedented growth of writing on the institutional origins of art history in Australia. The tendency has been to construct art history’s history in Australia as an essentially twentieth-century phenomenon which originated with the establishment of art history departments at Australian universities in the first half of the twentieth century.1 If one accepts, however, a definition of art history as research in the history of art, then the institutional origins of art history in Australia lie in the nineteenth century, which saw the emergence of a range of cultural institutions and endeavors devoted to broadening public knowledge about the history of art.
