Obituaries of Clive Wainwright

Clive Wainwright (1942–99) was a furniture historian, with particular knowledge of 19th-century furniture designers, makers and dealers. He joined the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1966, on the staff of the National Art Library, moving to the Furniture and Woodwork Department in 1968. In 1988 he was appointed Assistant Keeper of the department, and later a role was found for him in the newly created Research Department.

From The Times, 10 July 1999

Clive Wainwright, furniture historian, died of a heart attack on July 2 aged 57. He was born on April 2, 1942.

Clive Wainwright was one of the most original scholars in the world of furniture history, and one of the most loveable. He worked in the Furniture and Woodwork Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum during a period of creative excitement, and helped to revolutionise the study of his subject.
His knowledge of 19th-century furniture dealers and makers, as well as designers, was encyclopaedic and together with his remarkable powers of recall it enabled him to reconstruct an idea of the vanished collections of Regency and Victorian connoisseurs, with an emphasis on those of antiquarian taste. Objects fascinated him, but so did the people who made them and for whom they were made.

A report partly by Wainwright in the early 1970s started the process by which the Palace of Westminster recovered its Puginian glory, at Arundel Castle in West Sussex his advice led to some superb acquisitions; and he was behind the revival of the Cast Court at the V&A. He also prompted the National Trust's reinterpretation of Charlecote House in Warwickshire as an example of 19th-century antiquarianism, rather than as a jewel of the Elizabethan period. (Too much time in his company could lead one to believe that every icon of English domestic architecture was really a Victorian invention.)

One glance at Wainwright was enough to see that he was an advocate for the Victorian period. Physically, he looked like a reincarnation of William Morris, with profuse grey hair and beard. He dressed in apparently unvarying tweed or chalk stripe suits, over which would be buttoned a plaid ulster cape in cold weather. A silver watch chain hung across the expanse of waistcoat, but ended in a medallion, for his watch was a modern digital one. Though at one with the Victorians, Wainwright was not stuck in a time warp. He had a zeal for the latest technology. But then the Victorians whom he championed, notably Pugin, were themselves progressive in using the technology of their day.

Born in Langport, Somerset, Clive Wainwright was the son of a gardener. His grammar school education did not lead to university; instead he became a research chemist with ICI. Not wanting to remain 'a test-tube shaker', he joined the staff of the National Art Library at the V&A in 1966 and two years later he found his way into the Furniture and Woodwork Department.

Once a week he would have tea with the pioneering collector of Victorian furniture Charles Handley-Read, who fanned his passion for 19th century design long before it was generally fashionable.

A visit to consult Wainwright in his department would lead to a treasure hunt through the ranks of filing cabinets that became his particular preserve. Eventually he felt obliged to obtain a doctorate, and his thesis became the basis of his principal work, 'The Romantic Interior: The British Collector at Home 1750-1850', which was published by Yale in 1989.

In the previous year he had finally been appointed Assistant Keeper, and more recently a role was found for him in the newly created Research Department.

But much more important than his job titles were the extent of his learning, his lecturing and exhibitions and his generosity to other researchers. He was almost always at work on an essay for an exhibition catalogue or a contribution to 'Apollo' or 'Country Life'. His rediscovery of the Regency furniture-maker George Bullock was a significant scholarly achievement, and he was the driving force behind the V&A's Pugin exhibition of 1994-95.

As a curator, he was an early exponent of absolute authenticity, whatever the taste of the moment. The displays in the Continental Gallery, re-using Henry Cole's display cases, packed with objects are very much a reflection of his taste.

Wainwright was an active member of the Victorian Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Ruskin Society. In 1996 he was appointed Visiting Professor in the History of Art.

Retaining his West Country burr, he pronounced any foreign word in an uncompromisingly Anglicised manner. But his horizons were far from limited, since he loved travel. His wife Jane, whom he married in 1967, is American, and they often visited the United States. She survives him.

Reproduced with kind permission of The Times
© Times Newspapers Limited

From The Independent, 5 July 1999

Clive Wainwright: He was a great lover of new technology, with a kitchen full of the latest gadgets alongside a dining room with furniture by Pugin

Clive Wainwright was a major figure in furniture studies whose loss will be felt throughout the world of furniture and design history.

He was based for more than 30 years at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and was a generous scholar with a great breadth of outside interests. He loved the V&A with a deep and abiding passion for giving him the opportunity to work closely with its great library, to write and research, and to develop, as he did, into a formidable and polymathic authority on many different aspects of design and the decorative arts, above all as a specialist on 19th-century furniture and collections, but also with a great knowledge of many other subjects, as knowledgeable about Ettore Sottsass, the contemporary Italian designer, as he was about Romanesque book production.

His magnum opus was 'The Romantic Interior: the British collector at home 1750-1850', published by Yale University Press in 1989. The book demonstrated his strengths as a scholar with an astonishingly wide range of knowledge of early 19th century collections and an interest more in provenance and the appetites of early collectors than in the physical appearance and the making of furniture. It led to appointments of which he was enormously proud, including, for example. an invitation to lecture at the Scuola Normale Superioro in Pisa and his appointment as a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, London University.

Born in Langport in Somerset in 1942, Wainwright was the son of a gardener and, although he was the least rural person imaginable, he was proud to have risen from a relatively humble background. Educated at Huish's Grammar School in Taunton, he went straight into industry without going to university in order to work at ICI in Welwyn Garden City.

His background as a research chemist doing early work on the development of plastics for household use was one amongst many unexpected aspects of his personality, so that while his bearded appearance made one think that he might be a neo-Luddite. In practice he was a great lover of new technology, using a mobile telephone long before they were common and with a kitchen full of the latest gadgets alongside a dining room with furniture by Pugin.

In 1966, he entered the Victoria and Albert Museum as a Museum Assistant after he had been told that to become a school teacher he would have to shave off his beard. He started working in the National Art Library. Then in 1968, he transferred to the Department of Furniture and Woodwork, which remained his spiritual home.

In the late 1960s, the Department of Furniture and Woodwork was extremely hierarchical and Wainwright as a non-graduate was at the bottom of the tree but Peter Thomton, the energetic and then newly appointed Keeper, rapidly transformed the atmosphere of the department into an engine of active scholarship and research. Wainwright worked particularly closely with Simon Jervis and together they led a scholarly reappraisal of 19th century furniture which moved away from Pevsnersian orthodoxies to a much more active appreciation of the full gamut of styles.

During the 1970s, Wainwright's great achievement was in building up the Furniture and Woodwork archive. This was a classic example of effective compilation of all kinds of secondary research material for use by scholars but in some ways the greatest research resource was Wainwright himself whose encyclopaedic mind was always able to cone up with recondite bibliographic references which he would impart with a generosity of spirit not always evident in other parts of the museum world. Alongside his official duties, he began to publish widely on subjects including William Beckford's collection, the early furniture of AWN Pugin and the furnishings of Abbotsford, Sir Walter Scott's house in the lowlands of Scotland.

In 1988, he was finally appointed as Assistant Keeper in a department which had recently been renamed the Department of Furniture and Interior Design. This was a period of increasingly rapid change at the museum and it was one of the minor tragedies of Wainwright's life that just at the moment when he had achieved a position which might have given him more freedom to publish and research, the expectations of people in his position changed and he was expected to devote more time to public and administrative duties than to scholarship. However, in 1991 his position was to some extent resolved by his appointment as a Senior Research Fellow in Nineteenth Century Studies in the newly established Research Department.

Clive Wainwright never really lost his early vocation as a teacher. He was one of the very few members of staff at the V&A who enthusiastically embraced the establishment of a postgraduate course in the history of design jointly with the Royal College of Art in 1982 and from its inception he taught courses on 19th century design. However left-wing the students and however hostile to an antiquarian approach to historical research, they always admired Wainwright's knowledge, as well as his lecturing style by which he talked from memory timing himself with a fob watch tucked into his waistcoat pocket. He was due to be made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art on the day he died.

No account of Clive Wainwright would be complete without reference to his devotion to his American wife. Jane, whom he married in August 1967 and their purchase in 1971 of a fine early 19th century house on the New River Estate in Islington, which they filled with their collection of 19th century furniture and where they entertained friends. Together they shared a passion for the Palace of Westminster, where Jane is Director of Information Systems in the House of Commons library. In spirit, Clive Wainwright belonged to the early Victorians, to Pugin and to Barry, dressed in tweeds, an optimist and an autodidact with a passionate enthusiasm for scholarship, travel and gadgetry.

Clive Wainwright, author, museum curator and antiquary: born Langport, Somerset 2 April 1942, Museum Assistant, Victoria and Albert Museum 1966- 75, Research Assistant 1975-88, Assistant Keeper, Department of Furniture and Interior Design 1988-91, Senior Research Fellow in Nineteenth-Century Studies, Research Department 1991-99: married 1967 Jane Mylander; died London 2 July 1999.

Reproduced with kind permission of Charles Saumarez Smith and The Independent
© The Independent

From The Guardian, 15 July 1999

Clive Wainwright: Expert on Victorian interiors who helped renovate the Palace of Westminster and whose home was an object lesson in antiquarian taste.

A Miss Havisham-like spinster was the deciding factor in the childhood of the scholar, antiquary and museum curator Clive Wainwright, who has died aged 57. Miss Page live in Victorian state outside Curry Rivel, in Somerset, having long ago had a fiancé who died in the colonies. She took an interest in her gardener's boy, who hung around her large villa looking at old books. When this budding Pip passed the 11-plus but his parents failed the interview, she harangued the headmaster of Huish's Grammar School, Taunton, until he let the boy in.

So began what was to be one of the more illustrious careers in the annals of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Wainwright became the Victorian furniture authority par excellence, the leading expert on the history of antique-collecting and dealing in Britain, the prime influence on the interior renovation of the Palace of Westminster and a teacher of enthusiasm and generosity.

Forced at school to specialize in science, Clive left and found a berth with the plastics division of ICI in Welwyn Garden City. But he went to evening classes and joined the Victorian Society, whose tours in the 1960s and 1970s were eccentric crusades of companionship and discovery. In 1966 he took a drop in salary to become a V&A museum assistant, where he was assigned to the library until poached by Peter Thornton for the furniture and woodwork department, where he stayed until 1991.

The muscular furniture of Pugin, Burges and the Gothic Revival became a speciality, under the spell of the collector Charles Handley-Read. But at the core of Clive's interests lay the growth of antiquarianism in Britain, a subject he explored in 'The Romantic Interior', published (following a doctorate) in 1989.

Horace Walpole, Beckford, Walter Scott, Pugin and the manifold designers, craftsmen, dealers and go-betweens who did their bidding, became his quarry. What Clive could see, as pure connoisseurs could not, was the creativity that lay at the heart of the compromises between designer, dealer and patron. Pugin, for instance, he understood not as an idealist trying to develop a Christian architecture, but as a jobbing designer and Gothic antiquary who knew his materials and sources and took his chances. Here the sceptical scientist and the carpenter who made himself a boat as a teenager came to the fore.

Clive's pragmatism, sharp eye and memory, made him formidable. He could spot a special artifact while turning a house half upside down and exchanging civilities with its owner. Many curators dislike having to deal with dealers, but Clive forged alliances (notably with Michael Whiteway and Martin Levy). This, in exchange for his scholarship, secured precious things cheap for the V&A. Much of its Frank-Lloyd Wright collection, for instance, he acquired on a 48-hour dash to Chicago. He also built up an exceptional collection of his own. He liked nothing more than to dish the salesrooms, but never resorted to underhand tricks.

Clive was not at heart a special exhibitions man, though he did initiate the V&A's 1994 Pugin show. Instead, he enriched and supported others exhibitions by suggesting recondite objects, negotiating loans and writing catalogue essays. Such was his role in the great 'London 1800-1840' show at Essen in 1992, or the 'Gothic Revival' show lately put on at the Musée d'Orsay by his colleague Marc Bascou in a challenge to French rigidities of taste.

He gradually warmed to France and then to Italy, whose cultures latterly informed his lectures. He was gleeful when he stumbled on bastardized Pugin furniture and Walter Scott in Czech translation in a musty Bohemian library. He was well known in America, where he was a help to the Bard Center for the Decorative Arts.

Life was seldom easy for Clive at the V&A, which he likened to the Balkans on a good day. In his early years the museum's civil service gradings impeded the advancement of a non-university man. Later he was more than once passed over for promotion, but found a new niche in the research department. His loyalties were too wide to be contained by an institution to whose collections he stayed passionately attached; and he had a heterodox, left-wing streak belied by his manner and appearance. When showing parties round the House of Lords, he accompanied his paean to the sovereign's throne with a declaration of rampant republicanism.

He found an outlet in teaching, first on a course run by the Royal College of Art with the V&A, later as visiting professor at Sussex University and Birkbeck College. He helped students of all ages with their research and was prodigal of his learning.

Among the many great houses on whose restoration he advised were Charlecote, Cragside and Arundel; and he was latterly vital to the counsels of Sir John Soane's Museum. But perhaps his greatest pride was the role he played in transforming the Palace of Westminster from the dowdy office building it had declined into by the 1970s into a showcase of Victorian applied art - and wallpaper.

In 1967 Wainwright married Jane, an American computer programmer who is now director of information systems at the House of Commons library. Their intimacy was striking and the Clerkenwell house they restored, which they were told was Regency but which Clive rightly insisted was early Victorian, became an object lesson in antiquarian taste, boasting rich red walls with meticulously grained woodwork, decades before such fashions had infiltrated the World of Interiors.

Andrew Saint

Ben Evans writes:
Clive Wainwright had an inspirational impact on my life. He had unrivalled enthusiasm and interest and time for those who responded. His depth of knowledge was remarkable and through his willingness to share that knowledge, I developed the perspectives that guide me today.

His very personal tour of the Palace of Westminster was peppered with stories of discovery, thrones in Suffolk junk shops, magnificent floors under lino. This detective work made it possible to understand how much the Victorians had invented our parliamentary traditions.

Clive made personal friends with a number of his ex-students. Invitation to dinner allowed an insight into a man whose willingness to engage in new ideas defied his somewhat fogey appearance. Discussions about the great exhibitions of 1851 and 1951 and their impact on the nation's identity remain at the forefront of my mind in my role as editor of the content of the Millennium Dome. His knowledge and ideas will continue to influence for many years to come.

Clive Wainwright, scholar, antiquary and museum curator, born April 2, 1942; died July 2, 1999.

Reproduced with kind permission of Andrew Saint and Ben Evans and The Guardian.