Wilson Eyre was born in Florence to a family of expatriate Philadelphians. His family returned when he was eleven, settling in Newport, R.I. Eyre was briefly enrolled in the architectural program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then spent five years in the office of Philadelphia architect James Peacock Sims. He took over the office upon Sims's death in May 1882, and quickly achieved a local, and very soon a national, reputation. He was best known for his picturesque assemblies of calculated asymmetries and his welcoming, informal planning.
Later in life Eyre called this early work eccentric, regretting that he had "tried to be original at the expense of everything technical" and that "so many misguided youths followed my lead." But in the 1880s he and several enthusiastic compatriots of taste overturned the tenor and reputation of Philadelphia architecture.
Eyre's fine-scaled, self-consciously artistic designs and the more stylistically literate work that followed in the mid nineties brought him wide attention. In 1911 he formed a partnership with John Gilbert McIlvaine (1880-1939). Their work of the teens, particularly their country houses with a new breadth and local flavor, again drew the attention of Eyre's peers, who awarded him the Gold Medal of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1917.
Eyre taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1890s. "Do not have theories," he advised students, "no artist has any business with them. If you don't work from inspiration, you can get no aid from theories." In the early 1930s, he made these views more patent: "it is always the man and not the style that counts. Bad taste . . . has always predominated . . . in all periods and styles," and enduring value rests with talent and a good eye. "The artist who has the best sense of proportion and mass, the best sense of ornament and color, and the freshest way of presenting things will stay with us." The continuing appeal of Eyre's work, on paper and in built form, asserts his claim to such standing.