The Brownings and Mrs. Kinney: A Record of Their Friendship

Abstract

Europe has long held a special attraction for American artists of various tastes and disciplines. One of the first to call his countrymen's attention to Europe as a source of creative impulse for the fertile American imagination was Washington Irving. When writing in 1819 that “never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery,” Irving admitted that only “Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical associations.” There, he argued, “were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly-cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom.” Although America was young, bustling, democratic, and full of promise, “Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age.” “Every mouldering stone was a chronicle,” so that, as Irving asserted, “to wander over the scenes of [Europe's] renouned achievement [was] to tread … in the footsteps of antiquity … to escape, in short, from the commonplace realities of the present, and lose [oneself] among the shadowy grandeurs of the past.”

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