Clive Wainwright, PhD

Clive Wainwright was born on 2 April 1942 in Langport, Somerset, the son of a gardener employed by a Victorian spinster, Miss Page, whose villa at Curry Rivel contained a large library in which young Wainwright was encouraged to browse. Through her influence he was, reluctantly, given a place at Huish’s Grammar School in Taunton, where he had to specialise in science and, when he left at eighteen, he joined ICI in Welwyn Garden City. His predilections were worlds away from the plastics research division in which he found himself but he attended evening classes in art history and joined the newly established, somewhat eccentric but eminently congenial, Victorian Society which had not yet reached its present learned status.

Wainwright’s first plan to obtain release from ICI was to train as a teacher but, on being told that he must shave off the long beard he sported even in his early twenties, he abandoned the idea and joined the Victoria and Albert Museum as an assistant in the National Art Library, where he remained for two years. He soon attracted the attention of Peter Thornton, then the newly appointed Keeper of Woodwork, who took Wainwright on to his staff, a considerable departure from precedent since he was not a graduate and, for this reason, was more than once passed over for promotion. He was, nevertheless, popular with his colleagues and the V & A benefited from his all-embracing knowledge of the Victorian scene which, in the end, he sharpened into a doctoral thesis. The museum benefited, too, from Wainwright’s ability to negotiate with auctioneers and dealers, something that many curators are uncomfortable with, and which resulted in the purchase, cheaply, of precious objects spotted by his unerring eye and photographic memory. At the same time, Wainwright built up a remarkable collection of his own at minimum cost, as well as a remarkable library of Victorian books. His continuing preoccupation was Pugin, who had worked as a furniture designer before he became an architect, and in the early 1970s Wainwright played a key role in transforming the Palace of Westminster to its former Gothic Revival glory with original hand-painted wallpaper and examples of Victorian applied art. He published, jointly with John Hardy, Furniture in the Palace of Westminster (1974) and, in the same year, collaborated with Simon Jervis to produce High Victorian Design. These were influential books which helped to revolutionise the study of Victorian art and architecture, then coming into its own, as did Wainwright’s chapter on furniture in The Houses of Parliament (1976), edited by H M Port. The V & A’s Pugin exhibition of 1994--5 owed everything to Wainwright’s scholarship and enthusiasm.

William Beckford and Horace Walpole came close second and third to Pugin in Wainwright’s affections; he wrote perceptively on both as antiquaries and collectors and on the furniture and furnishings of Fonthill Abbey, Lansdowne Tower and Strawberry Hill. He mounted the exquisite small exhibitions, Beckford, in Bath in 1976 and Walpole in Orleans House in 1980. In 1988, following the award of his doctorate, Wainwright was finally appointed Assistant Keeper in the Department of Furniture and Interior Design (formerly Woodwork) and the publication of his thesis, The Romantic Interior: the British collector at home, 1750--1850, followed in 1989. So complex was the range of his subject that the sumptuously produced book could contain only a small part of Wainwright’s material and he planned to publish other aspects of his research. But the museum was under pressure to cut costs and generate revenue and, to this end, the curatorial staff had to undertake administrative duties that left little time for research. However, in 1991 Wainwright was transferred to the Research Department as Senior Research Fellow in nineteenth-century studies and the future looked brighter. He advised on the restoration of several stately homes, notably Charlecote, Arundel and Cragside, and was closely involved with Sir John Soane’s Museum under the directorship of his former colleague, Peter Thornton. He was well known in the United States, acting as adviser to the Bard Center for the Decorative Arts and, latterly, he included nineteenth-century France and Italy in his researches.

Twenty years previously Wainwright had thought of teaching as a career and a chance to develop his teaching skills came in 1982 when a postgraduate course in the history of design was launched jointly by the Royal College of Art and the V & A. Later, he was a visiting professor in the history of art at Sussex University and Birkbeck College. Wainwright’s final project was to write the history of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s own collections, of which four of the proposed eight chapters were complete at the time of his death. Wainwright had many friends among the museum fraternity and, somewhat paradoxically, was particularly popular with his students. Looking every inch an old fogey in his white William Morris beard, Norfolk jacket and Ulster cape, he actually owned one of the first mobile telephones and carried a digital watch on the end of his Victorian watch-chain. Students invited to lunch or dinner in his restored early Victorian house in Clerkenwell found a kitchen stocked with every conceivable state-of-the-art gadget. As a member of the Society’s Council in 1980--1 he was anything but reactionary. Wainwright leaves behind at the V & A for the use of scholars a priceless furniture and woodwork archive, compiled from secondary research material, including photographs, files and card indexes. He died, aged fifty-seven, at the height of his powers, on 2 July 1999, the day on which he was to receive an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Art.