Eric Arthur Entwisle

Eric Entwisle was born on Christmas Day, 1900, and educated at Uppingham and Bedales, which he left at the age of seventeen. His long career in the wallpaper industry, and one of its foremost historians, began in 1924, when he was invited to assist in research for the seminal work, A History of English Wallpaper, 1590-1914, by Sugden and Edmondson, published in 1926. The study of wallpaper was then confined to a few specialists in institutions such as the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, but today a vast amount of material is published, not only as monographs but in popular journals in this country, on the continent and in the Americas, influenced to a significant extent by Entwisle’s pioneering work. He lectured in the United States and kept abreast of European research, especially in France, Italy, Germany and Sweden, but always regretted his ignorance of the Russian language and the very limited opportunities to visit the Soviet Union, before the collapse of communism when Entwisle was eighty-nine, since the country was known to be rich in early wallpaper. He built up a large collection of wallpaper patterns and an unrivalled photographic archive of specimens in private houses, stately homes, palaces, museums and galleries, even depictions in paintings. In 1948 Entwisle was appointed director of the London office of the Wallpaper Manufacturers Association but, as he was the first to admit, he spent more time researching in the British Library than working in his office. He contributed copiously to periodicals such as Country Life, Apollo, The Burlington Magazine, etc. and his first book, The Book of Wallpaper, with an introduction by Sacheverell Sitwell, appeared in 1954, followed in 1960 by A Literary History of Wallpaper, a descriptive bibliography of references to wallpaper, gleaned during hours spent in the Reading Room, beginning with the earliest known example of 1509 and ending with the Catalogue of the Wallpaper Exhibition, held in Munich in 1960, with an introduction by Walter Gropius. This aspect of his activities Entwisle called `butterfly collecting’ and it continued to amuse and divert him throughout his long life. In more serious vein, Wallpapers of the Victorian Era, appeared in 1972, a lavishly illustrated limited edition of 500 copies. The Wallpaper History Society was very much Entwisle’s creation in the early 1990s and he served as its president until his death. He was a modest, gentle, charming scholar; one could picture him in "a house furnished in late Victorian taste, with Morris wallpapers and an air of serenity", to quote Ivor Brown’s description of C. P. Scott’s house in Manchester included in A Literary History. Entwisle died peacefully during the afternoon of 15 June 1998 aged ninety-eight.