BORN IN PRAGUE IN 1823, Leopold Eidlitz was educated at the Polytechnic in Vienna and later taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. He emigrated to New York in 1843, and entered the offices of Richard Upjohn in New York City. He later collaborated with H.H. Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted in Albany, New York.

Eidlitz published THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF ART, MORE ESPECIALLY OF ARCHITECTURE in London in 1881. Popular opinion holds that he was more important as a critic and theoretician than as an architect, though his book seems to have had little impact on his contemporaries. He perhaps had more influence through ARCHITECTURAL RECORD--he wrote three articles for the magazine*--the language of both is very close to his book. RECORD editor Russell Sturgis had studied under Eidlitz at the Academy in Berlin. More important, founding editor Montgomery Schuyler considered himself somewhat of a disciple, so Eidlitz’s views found their way into the magazine through him.

When Eidlitz died in New York on March 22, 1908, Schuyler wrote a three-part survey** of his career, attempting to "rescue" him from oblivion. He ended the last article with these sentiments:

'It was Eidlitz's saying: "American architecture is the art of covering one thing with another thing to imitate a third thing which, if genuine, would not be desirable." It was that of his contemporary and frequent competitor, James Renwick, that "the business of an American architect is to build something that will stand and be fairly presentable for about thirty years." Obviously working in the spirit of the second saying tends to make the first come true. But Eidlitz planned and built for a secular duration. It is a melancholy reflection that nevertheless he survived more than half of his own work, more than half in bulk and in value, and that of some of the best of it has been impossible to find any memorial for the purpose of this study. There is, one hopes, enough of it remaining to be stimulating and exemplary to students of a younger generation, of whom it was his own hope that some would "see what he meant." But for a knowledge of him one has largely to fall back upon the personal recollections of his friends. "The most striking individuality I ever met," said Fred Law Olmsted, who had an eye for character among other things. And after one of the discussions, in the collaboration of the Capitol, in which Eidlitz had eminently displayed his power of insight and of exposition, Richardson exclaimed, in his impetuous way, "I never met a man who had architecture so completely at his fingers' ends." And again, in a still higher flight of enthusiasm, "Architect or not architect, the ablest man I ever knew." The senior partner on his side said, "Richardson has far more copiousness of invention than I." To those who really knew the architect now departed, it will seem well within bounds to say that his was the clearest and most vigorous mind that in his day and in this country was applied to the practice of architecture.'

* "Architects of Fashion" (Apr-Jun 1894, pp. 347-353), "The Vicissitudes of Architecture" (Apr.-Jun 1892, pp. 471-484), and "Competitions--The Vicissitudes of Architecture" (Oct-Dec 1894, pp. 147-156).

** September 1908, pp. 164–79; October 1908, pp. 277–92; November 1908, pp. 365–78.