Wilhelm Leibl. These choices reflected Hitler's taste at the time, which was a preference for sentimental 19th-century Germanic romantic painters, including "both 'schmaltzy' genre pictures ... [and] heroic, idyllic, allegorical. historical-patriotic themes, the visual equivalent of Wagner, without the genius." It was after the Anschluss with Austria, with the House of German Art in Munich already completed, that Hitler conceived of having his dream museum not in any of the premiere cities in Germany, where it could be overshadowed, but in his "hometown" of Linz in Austria, and discussed his plans with the director of the local Provincial Museum, Theodor Kerschner, while visiting there. Additionally, after a state trip to Rome, Florence and Naples in 1938 – between the Anschluss with Austria and the taking of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia – Hitler, "overwhelmed and challenged by the riches of the Italian museums" expanded the conception of his planned gallery. It would now be the unsurpassed art gallery in all of Europe, indeed "the greatest museum in the world", featuring the finest of all European art. He conceived that the best of Germanic art would have pride of place in the National Gallery in Berlin, while the new museum in Linz would feature the best of the art of the Mediterranean world, especially from the nineteenth century. The idea and overall design concept for a new cultural district in Linz anchored by the Führermuseum was Hitler's own. He intended Linz to be one of the future cultural capitals of the Reich, to have its own university, and to overshadow Vienna, a city in which he had spent some years as a struggling artist, and about which he felt considerable distaste, not only because of the Jewish influence on the city, but because of his own failure to gain admission to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. [Hitler] envisaged Linz as the future seat of the new German Kultur, and lavished all his limited pictorial talent and architectural training on a vast project which would realize this ambition.... [He] devoted a disproportionate amount of time and energy, for a chief of state, to the plans for Linz, personally creating the architectural scheme for an imposing array of public buildings, and setting the formula for an art collection which was to specialize heavily in his beloved, mawkish German school of the nineteenth century. His private library, discovered by the American Army deep in