Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

domestic culture, more people than ever before could express their characters and ideas through
the arrangement of objects in their homes. Wainwright quotes Charles Eastlake’s advice in Hints
on Household Taste 1868 that:
The smallest example of rare old porcelain, of ivory carving, of ancient metal-work…should be acquired whenever
possible, and treasured with the greatest care…group them together as much as possible. A set of narrow
shelves…forming part of a dining-room sideboard would be admirable. 93
Yet as Eastlake’s detailed instructions make clear this was now anything but a spontaneous or
personal activity it was rather, as Wainwright says, part of a popular even hackneyed fashion. By
the mid-century the true antiquarian interior was vanishing. While the idea was absorbed into the
mainstream, so the reality, in the sense that it has been described here, was on the wane, for the
same reasons and to the same extent that antiquarianism itself, of this sort, was dwindling.
Collections, such as Douce’s and Langlois’s, passed at their death into public museums. The
flood of Continental antiquities dried up and native medieval objects began at last to attract the
attention of professional curators. After years of complaints by antiquaries at the absence of
Gothic art from national collections a royal commission of 1850 recommended the establishment
of a collection of British antiquities. The British Museum duly appointed Sir Augustus Wollaston
Franks (1826-1897), a moving force in the Archaeological Institute, to oversee its formation.
There was also a shift of sensibility. The earnestness of the High Victorians looked to a
more subtle integration of past and present in architecture. A W N Pugin, who had begun by
building ancient fragments into his early churches and had created in his first house a replica of
the Middle Ages, ended by making clear distinctions between new and historic material. His last
churches are plain and his last house for himself, while it contained his collections, was
uncompromisingly modern in design. He had no desire now to transport himself or anyone else
‘back to the fifteenth century’.
Some antiquarian interiors were dispersed when their owners died. Others, in country
houses, survived undetected and as Wainwright points out are now often taken to be much older
93 Quoted in Wainwright, Romantic Interior, p.287.
197