Art history scholarship between the 1820s and 1870s: contextualising the Eastlake library at the National Gallery, London

Abstract

Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793-1865), the first Director of the National Gallery in London, was a figure of crucial significance in the shaping of art historical understanding in Britain between the 1820s and 1860s. His library, consisting of approximately 2,000 volumes, reflects his interests in the fields of attribution, provenance and the history of artistic techniques. This paper contextualises the Eastlake library by comparing its contents to the Catalogo ragionato dei libri d’arte e d’antichità posseduti dal conte Cicognara (1821), a watershed art bibliography. Eastlake’s library demonstrates his pragmatic and diligent approach to his work and echoes how Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834) constructed his collection. The comparative approach sheds light on how these collections intersected on a scholarly level and underlines points of divergence as they developed according to their owner’s aims. It is also hoped that this comparative approach will be applied to other collections, as mentioned within the article.