Rarely does a research library travel. In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, the Warburg family in Hamburg negotiated with British sponsors to enable the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for Cultural Study) to find safe haven in London. An initial three-year agreement was followed by a seven-year arrangement and, at the end of 1944, with Europe still at war, the Warburg Institute was incorporated into the University of London. The story of the first eleven years in London – highly productive years in which the staff sought to pursue their original mission while assimilating into British academe – reveals the working of complex politics and shows the degree to which, early on, the fate of the Warburg Institute was linked to that of the newly founded Courtauld Institute of Art.

Created by Aby Warburg as a tool for his research and as a counterpart to his collection of books, the Bildersammlung (image collection) acquired its first subject-based system in the late 1920s. This system was structured according to four binomial theme-motif pairings of key concepts. In January 1933, following the Warburg’s move to London, the books and the image collection were organised according to an iconographic classification system that still makes it unique. While the importance of photographs in the research process was part of the cultural inheritance transferred to the UK, the question of the Warburg Institute Photographic Collection, as a corpus, has received little attention. The original, subsequently disregarded plan for the Bildersammlung, together with other documents, may shed some light on this question.

Otto Kurz was justly renowned on three accounts, as a scholar, a librarian and a human being. His publications and lectures ranged from ancient and medieval Near Eastern art and culture to Italian baroque painting; he built up the internationally renowned library of the Warburg Institute after the war and, as a human being, he was a role model to those who knew him, devotedly dedicated to his family in difficult circumstances and generously helpful to all.

When Ulrich Middeldorf departed Florence in November 1935 to teach art history at the University of Chicago, he left behind at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz the ‘Photo collection – the special pride of our Institute’ in the structure that has characterised it up to the present day. Middeldorf was 25 when he first came to the Institute as a scholar. In the following years he turned the Photothek into a modern research instrument, re-organising its classification system and its card indexes as the main finding aid. His contribution to the growth of the collection was enormous, not only thanks to his own donations, but also through the relationship he fostered with the main patron of the collection, Luigi Vittorio Fossati Bellani.

Otto Pächt came to England already formed as an art historian of the Vienna school. His natural orbit was the Warburg Institute, but with the outbreak of war he moved to Oxford and began to catalogue the illuminated manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. The catalogue was destined to have a major impact on the field; but by the time it was published Pächt had taken up the chair of art history in Vienna, one of the few refugee scholars to have returned to live and work in his native country.

In 1961 Elisabeth Jastrow retired from her position as Professor of Art at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). That same year her friends and colleagues established a scholarship for advanced art history students in her name. Jastrow devoted 20 years of her life to teaching at Greensboro. These were both difficult and rewarding years, fraught with financial worries, lack of library facilities, personal losses and a constant struggle to obtain teaching materials for her classes. At the same time she immersed herself in providing a high quality education despite the limited resources at her disposal. Her career began far from North Carolina under very different circumstances and with plans for a considerably more active academic life.

Bernard V. Bothmer left his mark on the world of Egyptology in three of the United States’ great art institutions: the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Brooklyn Museum and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He created gallery displays, developed library collections and founded image collections that continue to influence scholars worldwide. One can wonder how the course of American Egyptology would have developed if circumstances had not driven him out of his native Germany. Despite hardship, fear and a career interrupted, he trained and profoundly influenced at least four generations of historians of Egyptian art. BVB, as he was affectionately known to those close to him, inspired all who worked with him to the highest level of achievement, a standard which came to be known as “Brooklyn Quality”.