The Image of Dresden in the Minds of Boston Brahmins

Dresden occupied a central place as a center of art and culture in the minds of wealthy Americans from New England for most of the nineteenth century. When New York’s upper class tackled the project of founding the Metropolitan Museum of Art, William C. Bryant just needed to remind his audience of the beautiful collections and paintings of Dresden’s Green Vault and its Picture Gallery to convince his audience that New York had to catch up. Dresden had been established as a travel destination for well-off Americans since the 1820s. The kings and princes of Saxony had, among Americans, the reputation as being educated, world-open, and welcoming to foreign guests especially if they arrived from the United States.     

Harvard Professor George Ticknor went to Dresden twice and left an incredible large travel journal of several thousand pages from his visit to Dresden in the 1810s and 1830s. Based upon the study of George Ticknor and his wife’s travel journal, I plan to present an analysis of the image of Dresden that emerged in the mind of wealthy and educated New Englanders who had spent time in Dresden. The city offered to wealthy Americans an affordable place to live and access to world-class painting, literature, and theatre. Further, the open-minded King of Saxony invited visiting Americans to participate in the court life and treated well-off Americans as if they belonged to the European nobility. Dresden, thus, afforded prestige-hungry Americans to live a life of the nobility by taking up quarters in the most expensive hotels close to the court, by patronizing royal institutions, and by intermingling with the city’s nobility on a daily basis. Dresden provided its American visitors opportunities at social climbing, cultural improvement, and the flair of having become part of the old European culture.