Eastlake, Charles L.

Bio Sketch

Charles Locke Eastlake (11 March 1836, Plymouth – 20 November 1906, London) was a British architect, furniture designer and design-reform critic — nephew of Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, painter and first Director of the National Gallery, the two names differing only by an "e." Educated at Westminster School and the Royal Academy schools, with three years' travel in France, Italy and Germany, he trained under the architect Philip Hardwick and worked in the revived Early English or "Modern Gothic" idiom; though qualified, he never practised architecture (his competition designs, including Rugby Town Hall, were rejected), turning instead to journalism and the design of furniture and interior goods — his furniture designs, which he never made himself, were produced by cabinet makers. He popularized William Morris's notions of the decorative arts in the Arts and Crafts manner, was Secretary to the Royal Institute of British Architects (1866–77) and later Keeper of the National Gallery (1878–98). His self-illustrated Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details (Longmans, Green, 1868; American edition Boston, 1872) was hugely influential in Britain and the United States, and inspired "a style to be named after him" (Intimus editors) — the "Eastlake style" of furniture and the "Eastlake movement" in architecture, though the manufacturer's label was applied to machine-produced furniture quite unlike his prescriptions. His A History of the Gothic Revival followed in 1872.

Key Works

*Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and Other Details* (1868) — the design-reform handbook and the source of the ingested excerpt "The Dining Room" (Intimus, 2006): the upholsterer-attack, the use/style distinction, and the prescription that the chosen style "be adopted throughout the house we live in."
Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1868; multiple later editions; Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1872, ed. Charles C. Perkins) — the full work, of which the wiki holds only the pp. 63–6 excerpt.
A History of the Gothic Revival (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1872) — the survey of the revival 1820–70, influential for restorationists.
Gallery catalogues: Notes on the Principal Pictures in the Brera Gallery at Milan, in the Louvre, in the Old Pinakothek at Munich, in the Accademia in Venice (Longmans, 1883–88) — from his Keeper years at the National Gallery.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

upholsterer — his adversary-figure: the trade whose "fallacies" and "wholesome doctrine to a credulous public" the polemic attacks
stylistic-unity — his constructive demand: one style "adopted throughout the house we live in"; the editors' "homogenisation" of the interior
dining-room — his titular room: the emblem of downstairs solidity (oak, Turkey carpet, red flock-paper) and of legitimate use-based variation
drawing-room — the foil room: the green-and-gold papered drawing room and its fashion-cycled walnut suite; "the vulgarity of garlands and bouquets"
fashion — his diagnosis of taste's turnover: "so the fashion of taste goes on changing from age to age"
design-reform — his movement: the reform of decorative art against trade convention and sham
taste — his cause: "a healthy and genuine taste was altogether wanting" under convention; taste rescued from conformity ("if we differ from our neighbours… violating good taste")
the-decorative — his object of rescue: "the degradation of decorative art" (editors' phrase for his target)
style — his currency: the style chooseable and house-wide, against room-codes
suitability — his pioneer criterion: fitness-to-use as the only legitimate ground of difference between rooms
simplicity — his aesthetic direction: the "simpler cleaner style" the editors make proto-modernism's domestic prehistory

Relevance to the Core Research

Eastlake is the earliest voice in the wiki's decorating/advice-literature lineage — 1868, eight years before Dresser's repose chapter and two generations before de Wolfe — and supplies three things no other source does. First, the trade prehistory of the decorator's authority: his "barbed attack upon upholsterers" is, in the Intimus editors' framing, exactly what "paves the way for the professional decorator as the arbiter of taste," making his excerpt the origin document for the trade-to-profession story (interior-design) that Taylor & Preston's "upholsterer's trade" genealogy presupposes. Second, the social mechanism of convention: his conformity-panic diagnosis ("under a vague impression that if we differ from our neighbours we shall be violating good taste") is the proto-Bourdieusian observation that taste's enforcement is social, not aesthetic — the founding datum for the wiki's taste and fashion pages. Third, the documentary record of the gendered house: his after-dinner staging ("After dinner the ladies ascend into a green and gold-papered drawing-room") gives the separate-spheres and gender-and-the-interior analyses their most concrete Victorian episode — the rooms, woods, papers and choreography of the spheres' daily separation, described by a male reformer from the dining room's side. For the ornament debate he supplies the reform critique of trade-degraded decorative art, the earliest interior-side position in the wiki (1868, forty years before "Ornament and Crime"). His discourse's afterlife is Ferry's datum: the Garretts (1876) appropriate "the dominant discourse of Eastlake" and "relegate it to the past, while promoting the 'Queen Anne' style as the way forward" (editors, p. 110) — his reader-figures inverted (the dazzled Materfamilias replaced by a resistant Paterfamilias), his gendered dismissal ("Ladies are seldom called upon to choose between the merits of wrought and cast-iron") answered by the women who made exactly such judgements professionally — the first document of the lineage's succession upon its founder (see Ferry's essay, house-decorator, queen-anne-style).

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

The Dining Room (1868/2006) — the sole ingested source: the Intimus reprint of the Hints on Household Taste excerpt (original pp. 63–6; Intimus pp. 101–103), with the editors' headnote.