DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of the First World War, urbanization and bourgeois emancipation thoroughly changed the character of German society. Villages and towns were transformed into cities with large populations and urban infrastructures that included opera houses, concert halls, public parks, zoological gardens, theaters, and libraries. Funding for the creation and building of these cultural institutions came from princes, as well as from bourgeois citizens. Monarchs in Berlin, Dresden, Karlsruhe, and Munich, on the one hand, saw in the construction of art museums opportunities to reclaim royal authority after the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which had challenged established absolutist royal governments across continental Europe. Bourgeois citizens, on the other hand, who had taken advantage of the opportunities offered by industrialization and had subsequently amassed significant wealth, provided funding for museums, zoological gardens, and concert halls, thereby claiming power to shape public spaces within monarchical states according to bourgeois visions. Across the cities of the German Confederation a competition emerged between royal rulers and bourgeois groups to create, fund, and maintain urban cultural institutions. This contest between old monarchical powers and the new bourgeois classes for control over cultural institutions was part of the struggle for cultural and social dominance within the German states.

This social, cultural, and financial competition affected a wide array of cities and was not limited to the capitals of the German states. While royal rulers dominated the support for the arts in capitals such as Berlin, Dresden, Karlsruhe, and Munich, bourgeois philanthropists, alone or in association with others, created and supported artists, art associations, and art museums in cities such as Bremen, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, and Leipzig. Royal art collections—for instance, the famous collections in Dresden—had been the result of royal art patronage and art collecting over centuries. The collections of the Königliche Gemäldegalerie (Royal Picture Gallery) in Dresden were assembled by August II (1670– 1733) and August III (1696–1763) during a period when the Saxon rulers were also kings of Poland.