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364 Matthew Rampley The Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry was established in March 1863, at the suggestion of Eitelberger, and formally opened in Vienna on 31  March 1864, with Eitelberger as its first director. It is therefore safe to assume the letter was written some time in 1863.3 Although it is short, it casts light on how Eitelberger envisaged the museum in the wider context of the Habsburg Empire and especially with regard to Hungary. His contributions to debates about Viennese topics  – the architecture of the Ringstraße, for example, the design of the future Kunsthistorisches Museum, or the success and failings of the Opera House  – are well known. Yet what were his hopes and aspirations in relation to the Empire as a whole ? How did he envisage the work of his own museum in the context of the Habsburg state, and what did he imagine his own place to be in it ? Eitelberger wrote extensively about the burgeoning network of design museums in the Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy, for example, but he was considerably less forthcoming about Hungary.4 His letter thus offers insight into a seldom explored aspect of his work. The identity of its recipient, Imre Henszlmann, and the familiarity of the mode of address, point moreover towards a social and professional network that spanned both sides of the river Leitha. This article examines these questions but its aim is to offer more than merely a sup- plement to existing knowledge about Eitelberger and the museum he founded. For it examines him as a leading representative of Austrian Liberal thought in the middle dec- ades of the nineteenth century. His views can be seen as symptomatic of the set of ideo- logical commitments and values he shared with the network of like-minded intellectuals, including Henszlmann. As such, the article examines Eitelberger’s views in respect of the cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire and the liberal response to its cultural and ethnic diversity. In what ways did a liberal political outlook shape his approach to the Museum of Art and Industry as well as to the changing cultural politics of Austria-Hun- gary ? What do his attitudes tell us about the strengths and failings of liberal ideology when it came to the field of art and culture in the later Habsburg Empire ? In addition, what do they tell us about the Museum as a site where values and ideals were articulated and negotiated ? In order to begin to answer such questions it is valuable to return to the correspond- ence with Henszlmann, since the letter was written on the basis of a twenty-year friend- 3 K. Pokorny-Nagel, Zur Gründungsgeschichte des k. k. Österreichischen Museum für Kunst und Industrie, in : Kunst und Industrie. Die Anfänge des Museums für Angewandte Kunst (exh.-cat. Vienna, MAK, ed. P. Noever), Ostfildern-Ruit 2000, pp.  52–89. 4 R. Eitelberger von Edelberg, Die Gewerbemuseen in den Kronländern Österreichs, in : idem, Oesterreichische Kunst-Institute und kunstgewerbliche Zeitfragen (Gesammelte kunsthistorische Schriften von Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg, vol.  2), Vienna 1879, pp.  253–266. Open Access © 2019 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN