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

In this respect, he was emulating evidence-based German scholarship in art history.5 Interestingly, Eastlake did not commission a fancy bookplate for himself; a utilitarian stamp with the initial (E) was only inserted in his books by his widow upon their transfer to the National Gallery as she was keen to keep knowledge of the Eastlake Library alive. [...]the academies of Venice, Bologna and Milan all had statements concerning the inclusion of a library in their refreshed statutes in the early 1800s; similarly, the Städel Institut's foundational document (the will of Johann Friedrich Städel of 1815) mentions the inclusion of a collection of art books 'for students and the people'.16 The administration of art libraries from this period was framed according to the audience or community they served. To quote: 'Fact grubbing and description remain the bedrock of library history but inevitably data must surely be synthesised and moulded into models which comment not only on library history but on what libraries can tell us about past societies'.18 Within the institutional context of the National Gallery, documentation exists for the libraries of two other early nineteenth-century administrators, William Seguier and Ralph Nicholson Wornum, in the form of sale catalogues of their now dispersed libraries, plus several volumes from these libraries which can still be identified. Wornum was appointed by Charles Eastlake as Keeper in 1855, a position he retained until 1877, having previously been Librarian for the Government School of Design overseeing what was to become the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum.