Charles Lock Eastlake

Eastlake, Charles Lock (Sir), 1793—1865

by Benjamin Colbert

Sir Charles Lock Eastlake was born on 17 November 1793 at Plymouth, the son of George Eastlake (d. 1820), solicitor to the Admiralty, and Mary Eastlake, née Pierce (d. 1823). He was drawn to painting at an early age and began his formal studies under Benjamin Robert Haydon in 1809 and entered the Royal Academy Schools. Visits to Paris in 1814 and 1815 allowed him to see Napoleon’s pillaged art collections in the Louvre intact and his portraits of the captured Napoleon, whom he had seen on the Bellerophon in Plymouth Sound that July, realised 1000 guineas, an extraordinary sum of money at the time.

Flush with success, he used the proceeds to visit Italy. He arrived in Rome on 24 November 1816, and once there stayed for fourteen years, visiting England in 1820 and again in 1828, after his father’s death. In Rome, Eastlake established a studio frequented by writers, artists, and tourists, an increasing number of which sought out Rome and its fine arts. In 1819 he toured the Apennines with Maria Graham and her husband, and contributed six illustrations and the frontispiece to her Three Months in the Mountains East of Rome (1820).

In 1823, he exhibited his paintings for the first time at the Royal Academy, where he became an associate by 1827. In 1830 he became a Royal Academician and returned to London, continuing to exhibit and establish his reputation as a leading British artist and connoisseur. As he approached middle age, he was increasingly called upon as an arts administrator, becoming secretary of the Fine Arts Commission in 1841 and keeper of the National Gallery in 1843. He also published Materials for a History of Painting (1847) and Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts (1848).

On April 1849, Eastlake married the traveller and writer, Elizabeth Rigby (1809-1893; ODNB), translator of Johann David Passavant’s Tour of a German Artist in England (1836) and author of A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic (1841). In 1850, Eastlake was elected president of the Royal Academy and trustee of the National Gallery, and was knighted in November. From the summer of 1852 the Eastlakes frequently travelled to the continent, combining business with pleasure after 1855, when Eastlake became the first Director of the National Gallery, responsible for the search for paintings to enhance the Gallery’s European holdings.

It was on a trip to Italy in 1865 that Sir Charles developed an inflammation of the lungs and died at Pisa, Christmas Eve. He was buried in the protestant cemetery at Florence, and later reinterred at Kensal Green cemetery in London.

Sources:

Robertson, David. ‘Eastlake, Sir Charles Lock (1793–1865), printer and art administrator’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sept. 2004. Web. 15 June 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/8414