Art History Scholarship between the 1820s and the 1870s: the role of the Eastlake Library at the National Gallery
Lead Research Organisation:
Robert Gordon University
Department Name: School of Creative and Cultural Business
Abstract
The period from the 1820s to the 1870s was critical in the intellectual development of art history. The role of public art museums was transformed, as exemplified by the Musée Napoléon (the Louvre) in Paris, the German museums in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt, and the foundation of Britain's National Gallery in 1824. The appointment of Franz Kugler to the chair of art history in Berlin in 1834 heralded the establishment of the discipline in continental European universities. The fact that this was not mirrored in UK universities until the 1930s meant that museums remained an important locus for leading research in the field. This research project therefore aims to cast new light on this area, focusing on the library of Sir Charles Eastlake (1793-1865), the first Director of the National Gallery.
The Eastlake Library numbers some 2,030 volumes covering a wide range of formats: monographs, collection, auction catalogues, treatises, periodicals, technical & travel literature, pamphlets, offprints, as well as a few manuscript volumes, mainly transcripts of unpublished source materials. These reflect his broad-ranging interests the field of art history, especially in relation to attribution and provenance research and in the history of artistic techniques. Although a working library for research rather than a rare books collection, the Library includes two incunabula and numerous volumes which are either unique or held in few libraries either in the United Kingdom or worldwide. A good number of the volumes are annotated by Eastlake, and one of the manuscript items was the sole carrier of the text of the early 15th century Strasbourg Manuscript when the original perished in a fire in 1870. Eastlake's public and scholarly life mean that an examination of his books offers a wider understanding of broader societal and cultural issues, approaches very much in line with Black's concept of 'new library history' (1995).
The Eastlake Library numbers some 2,030 volumes covering a wide range of formats: monographs, collection, auction catalogues, treatises, periodicals, technical & travel literature, pamphlets, offprints, as well as a few manuscript volumes, mainly transcripts of unpublished source materials. These reflect his broad-ranging interests the field of art history, especially in relation to attribution and provenance research and in the history of artistic techniques. Although a working library for research rather than a rare books collection, the Library includes two incunabula and numerous volumes which are either unique or held in few libraries either in the United Kingdom or worldwide. A good number of the volumes are annotated by Eastlake, and one of the manuscript items was the sole carrier of the text of the early 15th century Strasbourg Manuscript when the original perished in a fire in 1870. Eastlake's public and scholarly life mean that an examination of his books offers a wider understanding of broader societal and cultural issues, approaches very much in line with Black's concept of 'new library history' (1995).
People |
ORCID iD |
| Peter Reid (Primary Supervisor) | |
| Katie Lissamore (Student) |