Wilson Eyre (1858-1944) was an early leader of a school of calculatedly informal architecture that still characterizes the Philadelphia area. Best known for houses designed over the course of six decades before and after the turn of the century, he was also celebrated for garden, sculpture, furniture, and graphic designs. His distinctive drawings attracted admiration as works of art in themselves.
Through a long career, Eyre's designs remained stamped by sensibilities formed in the late 1870s. He and many of his generation turned away from the self-conscious modernism that had been focal earlier in that decade, seeking to recapture lost visual harmonies and familiarities. With this renewal of fundamentally picturesque values came a new and sweeping attraction to domestic architecture from centuries before. There was a new emphasis on the old fashioned: on the blurring of function, on cozy irregularity, on domestic informality, on familiar, welcoming forms in an industrial, urbanizing epoch that threatened a radical newness.
Eyre's work stood out amid related expressions in the 1880s and early 1890s; his buildings and drawings showed his extraordinary gifts for creating fluid, animated compositions and warm, inviting spaces. He quickly achieved a local following and a national reputation.
As the appeal of that "delicate sensibility of the 'nineties'" faded, Eyre and his colleagues demonstrated a remarkable ability to transform their work, bringing some of its inventively lyrical aspects into more plausibly historic guises. Still later, nearer the turn of the century, Eyre married many of the same sensibilities to new ones, discovering a calmer language of broad surfaces, rectilinear plan forms, prominent crafted details, local textures, and sympathetically interwoven gardens. By the teens many elements of his picturesque, informal work had been carried forward by a host of younger Philadelphia firms. Eyre's work remains engaging today, silently asserting the enduring value of the tasteful eye and the richness of historical continuities.