Originally published in Thomas Hope: Regency Designer, edited by David Watkin and Philip Hewat-Jaboor, New Haven and London: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York by Yale University Press, 2008.
Thomas
Hope drew much inspiration for his own furniture, fashionable costume, and
interior design from
a detailed knowledge of antiquity. His scholarly aesthetic,
however, was no mere antiquarian pursuit, no mere revival
of classical taste. Grander and more complex than these, Hope’s vision blended ancient with
modern, familiar with exotic, classical with Oriental, nature with culture, art with morality, and life with death. At Duchess Street
Hope the alchemist
melded together compound elements to forge a new and eclectic whole. We see his genius at work with the room he called the Lararium
and its piling up of objects representing comparative religions; we see it again in the Hindu and Moorish pictures and furnishings of the Indian Room and in Hope’s Regency-Pharaonic
designs and the sacred eschatology of the Egyptian Room; and we see it in the Greek
temple architecture of the Picture Gallery. Then
there was the Aurora Room designed
around a marble sculptured group of Aurora (Dawn) abducting Cephalus. In Hope’s outline engraving
for
his book Household Furniture, this sculpture appears as a paradigm
of refinement in modern taste, carved from white marble in
Rome by John Flaxman, the leading British sculptor of the day. And yet its altarlike base evokes the setting of an ancient cult image and thus seems
to blur the boundary between
the
contemporary secular world of the Regency salon and the ancient, sacred temple. A shrinelike interior was further suggested by the furniture and fittings and from the carefully selected symbolic
imagery of the room ‘s plaster
frieze and other ornament. Most striking, perhaps, were the azure, black, and orange curtains that
lined the walls. At the center
of each long wall these
draperies parted to reveal mirrors that reflected reverse images of the sculpture. The colors of the room, in Hope’s words,
were intended to evoke
“the fiery hue which fringes the clouds just before sunrise.” A classical dawn, answering the one personified in the sculpture, is summoned by Hope’s
phrase “rosy-fingered,” borrowed from Home r. To see this poetic attempt at capturing nature simply as a neoclassical device would be to miss the timeless
romance of not only this but of all Hope’s interiors.
Flanking Flaxman’s sculpture were two glass caskets, each one containing a velvet cushion.
On one cushion there rested
a marble
arm, which was said to have been acquired in Rome but thought to come from one of the human Lapiths doing battle
with Centaurs in the south metopes of the Parthenon. In
the other showcase was a stalactite, again from Greece
but this time from the
celebrated cave at Antiparos, which had been remarked
upon by the French ambassador to Constantinople, the Marquis de Nointel,
who had traveled in Greece in 1670-80. Hope
had himself made a
drawing of the cave, depicting it as a natural dome sheltering the plantlike forms of the giant, columnar stalactites
within. A piece of nature’s own architecture was set beside a fragment from the greatest man-made
building of antiquity, and
in this juxtaposition we find an epitome
of Hope’s pictorial and intellectual landscape. Art and nature
meet and are enshrined as equal contributors to the
romantic classicism of the Duchess Street interiors.
Art was similarly married to nature in the house and
grounds of the Deepdene, the country home and estate in Surrey that Hope bought in1807. There, for example,
was the “Hope”
itself, a natural
bowl in
the landscape that had been developed in the
seventeenth century by a
previous owner, Charles Howard, as a garden with terraces descending like the seats
of a Greek theatre. This feature, described
by John Aubrey in his book on the antiquities of Surrey, must have attracted Thomas
Hope
to the place by its name. He was to echo this Theatre of Nature
with a Greek-style Theatre of
the Arts in the small
mock
auditorium he attached
to the Sculpture Gallery at the Deepdene. In place of a seated audience
he planted its steps with classical heads and cinerary urns in rows.
Both at Duchess Street and at the Deepdene,
there is poetry in
the setting out of his collections
that distinguishes Hope’s from
other comparable house
museums in contemporary London, notably those of Charles Townley and the 1st Marquis of Lansdowne,
who both died in 1805. Lansdowne decorated the formal Adam interiors of his Mayfair
mansion with ancient marbles
in a conventional neoclassical fashion,
but he failed in his own lifetime to achieve his scheme for an additional
grand gallery. Townley too entertained grand
designs for displaying
his more extensive collection but
was forced in the restricted rooms of his house at Park Street, Westminster, to
adopt a pinched Picturesque. He had been amassing his collections of sculpture, vases, and other antiquities since he first visited Italy in 1768
on
the first of
three Grand Tours. His vast archive of documentary papers and drawings now in the British Museum testifies to the sustained interest that he took not only in his own collection, but also those of other collectors in London and elsewhere in Britain. Visiting in February 1804, Townley was
one of the first to see Hope’s newly arranged London residence, and he left us a list of the sculptures that he found there. To this simple document Townley appen ded a rhyming couplet that seems, rather nastily, to betray a touch of jealousy:
Something there is more needful than expense, and
something previous ev’n to taste … ‘tis sense.
Closer to the peculiar romance of Hope’s interiors are those of Sir John Soane, who was influenced by Hope, as indeed was the banker, poet, and conversationalist Samuel Rogers. Rogers went to Hope’s
house for inspiration in arranging his own collection of Greek vases and casts of
the Parthenon frieze as a setting at 22 St. James’s Place for his celebrated candlelit evenings of convivial Table Talk. Of all contemporary establishments, only Soane’s home miraculously survives, with the collections intact, at
Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Its witty juxtaposition of contrasts, artful use of mirrors, pictorial setting of objects, such as vases in columbarium niches, the necromancy of its Egyptian
mummy sarcophagus, the eclectic mix of archaeological cultures elegantly combined
in the unifying aesthetic of Regency classicism, all serve to remind us
of what we have lost at Duchess Street, ruthlessly demolished in 1851 by Hope’s son and heir, Henry Thomas.
Although the
house is long gone, something of its spirit can be found
in Anastasius, Hope’s novel, which provides a literary
parallel for the Duchess Street experience. The
young Greek of the story
explores his adolescent emotions as he discovers the natural and man-made world
during travels that take him through Turkey and the colorful dominions of the
Ottoman Empire—Greece, Egypt, and Syria. Anastasius was a window
through which Hope’s readers could enter a world that was both vast and
utopian. It was a world of fancy dress, which he would re-create in fashionable
interiors occupied by people who dressed the part. Here is the essential
purpose not only of Hope’s book, but also of his interiors. Duchess Street,
with its thematically arranged rooms, all on the upper floor approached by a
grand staircase, functioned as a theater in which the make-believe lives of
himself, his family, and their social set were acted out. Hope was actor,
impresario, scenery and costume designer, who, in his books on dress ancient
and modern, showed his guests what to wear. He commissioned several fancy-dress
portraits of himself and his family. In 1798 Sir William Beechey painted
one of Hope newly returned from his travels and decked out in Turkish dress.
This mature Anastasius was, by 1824 at least, suspended in the staircase hall
at Duchess Street to greet guests upon arrival.
Contemplating Hope as collector and antiquary, it helps to
keep Beechey’s portrait of him in mind, the defining image of Hope as a visitor
to the past, a foreign country. This was not the conventional souvenir of the
Italian Grand Tour set in Rome, where “Signor Speranza” would have been
depicted in fashionable European dress with some token souvenir of classical
statuary. Instead “Ümit Bey” stands on the terrace of a Turkish palace, and in
the background rise the dome and minarets of a mosque. The dress and the
setting are from contemporary Ottoman Turkey, where Hope had resided and
traveled and which he had himself drawn. In Anglo-Turkish relations, the year
1798 was an annus mirabilis. In that
year Admiral Lord Nelson defeated the French at the Battle of the Nile and thus
dealt a mortal blow to French efforts to capture Egypt from the Ottomans. In
that same year, the British were to capitalize on their new-found favor at
Constantinople by dispatching Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, at
the head of an embassy to the Turkish capital. Ultimately, however,
Beechey’s portrait references more than the particular culture it represents.
It is not only Turkish but is also belongs to a larger field of
eighteenth-century fascination for the exotic, epitomized in the bringing to
London in 1774 of Omai, the native of Tahiti, and his portraits by Joshua
Reynolds.
By contemporary standards, Hope’s own travels were
extraordinary. Most Europeans of his time did not go beyond Italy, where, for
those in need of exotica, Naples and Sicily came to represent the fringe. At
the age of eighteen in 1787, he embarked on the first of a set of journeys that
would occupy him off and on for the next ten years and take him to Turkey,
Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, Spain, Hungary, Palestine, Portugal, France,
Germany, and ultimately back to England. There, in 1795, other members of the
Hope family of wealthy Dutch bankers (of Scottish descent) had settled in
Hanover Square, London, to escape Napoléon’s invasion of their homeland. Travel
opened Hope’s eyes to a world where ancient past and foreign present fused into
one eclectic “other.” No book, no picture or household interior could
substitute for the experience of travel itself for, as Hope himself puts it,
not even in “the least unfaithful, the least inaccurate even, such as Stuart’s
Athens, Revett’s Ionia, no adequate idea can be obtained of that variety of
effect produced by particular site, by perspective, a change of aspect and a
change of light.”
Hope
was himself a considerable draftsman, and a record of his travels in 1796 and
1797 is preserved in five volumes of drawings now in the Benaki Museum in
Athens. The drawings are a compendium of architecture, ruins, landscape,
sea and river craft, costume, interiors, and antiquities. Among these last is a
study of the central block of the east frieze of the Parthenon as yet
uncollected by Elgin and still resting on the ground as part of a parapet
wall. In his crisp outline drawing. Hope shows the figures of
the frieze standing in their classical costumes or seated on Greek furniture.
Zeus, as father of the gods, occupies a throne with an armrest supported by a
sphinx, an ancient forerunner of Hope’s own zoomorphic Grecian furniture. Hope
sets up a conversation between this ancient gathering in stone and the four sailors in modern Turkish costume, who sit
on the ground smoking pipes after taking tea. With their backs to the viewer, they face the frieze,
and one of them actually
points toward it. Meanwhile, one of the seated gods (Hera) and one of the standing figures look out from the frieze, not at any particular spectator but with a gaze that transcends this fleeting
moment. So at Duchess
Street the many ancient gods and heroes
frozen there in marble
would look coldly upon the modern
world with unseeing eyes, unmoved
by the admiring gaze of those gathered to view them.
Collecting Sculpture in Italy
Before his arrival in London in January 1795, Hope seems not
to have conceived of making a collection, but before the year was
out,
he had left London for Rome in the
company of his brothers,
Henry Philip and Adrian Elias, expressly, it seems, for the purpose of buying classical sculpture. No doubt they had witnessed
in England the well-established habit of forming a sculpture gallery,
and this experience had inspired Thomas and his brothers
to a new venture. In Rome of the 1790s, there were two principal sources through which classical sculpture could be bought.
On the one hand, there were the collections of the old Roman aristocracy who had fallen on hard times, and there were licensed
excavations on the other. Both sources could be accessed
through a community
of dealers, which included several British members, notably
Thomas Jenkins, Gavin Hamilton, James Byres, and the Irish
painter Robert Fagan. There were also the restorer-dealers who would themselves
renovate a statue and sell it on. A particular favorite of Thomas Hope was
Vincenzo Pacetti, who restored the Hope
Asclepius, said to come from Hadrian’s Villa. It is one of few Grand
Tour sculptures to make the round trip between Rome and London, leaving England
in the 1950s, when it was bought for a private collection in Rome. In 1796
Henry Philip bought from Pacetti the Dionysos,
along with an archaistic statuette known then as Bacchus and Hope, an irresistible subject for a collector of
the same name. It was said of the piece that it was acquired from the
Aldobrandini Palace on the Quirinal. Adrian Elias bought the Roman copy of the Pathos (Desire) by Skopas, which had
been restored as a copy of the Sauroctonus
Apollo by Praxiteles and which, before 1532, appears to have been in the
collection of Francesco Lisca. The brothers Hope also made joint purchases,
such as in 1796 that which came from the restorer Giovanni Pierantoni,
namely the Antinous statue. There
was also a couple restored as Apollo and the boy nymph Hyacinthus and a
statue of Apollo with bow and quiver. Whoever the purchaser was, all the
sculpture bought on this shopping trip to Rome would find its way into Thomas
Hope’s Duchess Street mansion.
Further purchases
were made from Prince Sigismondo Chigi, who had acquired sculpture from excavations
at the imperal villa of Antoninus Pius at Laurentum, south of the Roman port at
Ostia. These include the greyhound bitch and dog, which may be compared
with the pair in the Townley Collection of the British Museum and with that in
the Vatican. Most probably also from the site of the same imperial villa
came a portrait of a female of the Julio-Claudian court, possibly Agrippina or
Livia. With it came the portraits of Antoninus Pius and of Faustina Maior.
The whereabouts of the former is unknown; the female bust is in the Royal
Ontario Museum, Toronto.
Two of
the grand highlights of the Hope collection came from Tor Boacciana on the
outskirts of Ostia, where the Irish painter and antiquary Robert Fagan
conducted excavations. These are the over-life size Athena and the Hygieia.
Their discovery is described, in a note quoted by Waywell, as “among the ruins
of a magnificent palace, and thirty feet below the surface of the ground,
broken into fragments and buried immediately under the niches in which they had
been once placed” The Athena is thought to be a Roman copy of the second
century A.D., based on a lost Greek statue made around 440-420 B.C. The
putative Greek original may be attributed to one of the pupils of Phidias,
either Alkamenes or Agorakritos. The Roman copy was extensively and
impressively restored as a variant of the Athena
Parthenos, another Phidian creation. Sadly, much of the restoration was
removed after the Hope sale of 1917, at which this statue fetched £7,140, the highest price of all.
It was bought
by Agnew acting for Viscount
Cowdray. When it was sold again at Sotheby’s in 1933, the value had plummeted
to a mere £200. This fall in value is eloquent
reminder of the economic depression that blighted America
and Europe in the after math of World War I and,
indeed, a shift in taste away
from restored
Roman copies and toward
such Greek
originals
as the market provided. The Athena later passed into the estate of
W. R. Hearst at San Simeon and, after his death, to the Los Angeles County Museum.
The
other star piece in Hope’s collection was the Hygieia, another Roman statue that has been dated to the second
century A.D. and a copy of a lost Greek original probably of
the first half of
the fourth century B.C. Like the Athena, her head is her own and,
with similar inlaid
eyes and near equal stature,
this goddess of healing
formed a pair with the goddess of wisdom. She was bought at the Hope sale in 1917 for £4,200 by Spink acting for Sir Alfred Mond, later Lord Melchett. At
the Melchett sale of 1936, the price had fallen to £598 10s, when she was purchased
by Hearst and donated
to the Los Angeles County Museum in
1950.
Hope at Home
In
1799 Hope bought the Duchess
Street house, where his burgeoning collection was to be displayed. It
is sometimes said that the acquisition of the house did not, as we might expect, detain him in England, and later that year he was again in Greece
planning a tour of the Peloponnese with the Levant Trading
Company’s consular agent in Athens, Procopio Macri. It appears, however, that the Hope of this excursion was his younger brother Henry Philip. Late in 1799, it was he who carved
his name and initials on a column at Delphi, having already in June of that year visited the Troad
in northwest Turkey.
Thomas Hope, meanwhile, was taking
advantage of the home
market in antiquities. He
bid successfully for sculpture at the sale of
the Duke of St. Albans’s
pictures and antiquities at Christie’s on April 29, 1801. Earlier at Lord Bessborough’s sale at Christie’s on April7, 1801, he
had made other purchases. William Ponsonby, 2nd Earl of Bessborough, had died in 1793, and as is so
often with those formed
in the eighteenth century, his collection
did not long survive him. Among a clutch of items Hope purchased at this sale was
the Ganymede, said to have been found in 1767 in
the Campus Martius in
Rome and bought from the Villa Albani. Also at Bessborough’s sale, Hope acquired
a colossal porphyry foot. It was fashionable at the time to
have a big foot, and Sir William Hamilton had presented his to the British Museum in
1784.
Sir William Hamilton’s return
to England in 18oo, at the end of a thirty-six-year residence
in Naples, was to provide the opportunity for further
purchases. Hope ‘s acquisition of Hamilton’s
vases is well known, but his purchase of sculpture from Hamilton
was forgotten until recently. Hope bought sculpture at Hamilton’s sale of pictures and sculpture in March 1801, where he competed
in the bidding with Frederick Howard , 5th
Earl of Carlisle. Hope’s
purchases included a Roman statuette in archaic Greek style of Dionysos, which he illustrated in his 1809 book Costume of the Ancients
restored with the Dionysiac
staff, or thyrsus, in one hand and a drinking cup in the other. It was said to have been found in Rome. Once it belonged to Lord Melchett, but its present location is unknown. There was also a Roman archaizing statuette of a goddess
holding a lotus flower in one hand and an egg in the other. She was said to have been excavated near Capua. Such archaizing
sculpture was fashionable
in Hope’s day and had been so since Johann
Joachim Winckelmann
publicized the several
examples still to be found in the Albani collection
in Rome. To Hope and his contemporaries these sculptures were not seen as the Roman revivals of earlier Greek styles, as they are now recognized, but were authentic Etruscan
or early Greek productions viewed
as sculptural examples of that
noble simplicity found in archaic
vase paintings. From a later period of Greek art
comes a statuette of Cupid embracing
Psyche
that remains
lost; a basalt Egyptianizing lion said to come from the ruins of the Villa Jovis on Capri, and a porphyry
head of Nero
mounted on a bust of
gilded
bronze
by Luigi Valadier. Another
portrait bust,
thought
to have belonged
to Cicero and excavated in the ruins of his
villa at Formiae near Gaeta, is perhaps
to be identified with a fine terminal bust of
Meleager. Hope also acquired a marble cinerary urn carved
in the form of a covered basket, which is shown on a tripod stand in the Picture Gallery at Duchess Street.
Finally, there is the black basalt head mounted on a bust of rosso
antico that has entered the collection
of the British Museum. Thought by Hamilton to resemble Cicero, it is almost certainly an
eighteenth-century forgery.
The French occupation of Italy in 1798 would keep British travelers out of the country, until the Treaty of Amiens
in 1802-3 brought a respite in hostilities that allowed Hope to make his way to Rome and eventually to Naples. In Rome part of his purpose was
to negotiate the release of some of the sculpture
purchased in the previous decade and confiscated by the French before it could
be shipped to England. In Naples he acquired a fine
statue of Aphrodite, about which we are unusually well informed owing to recent discoveries in the
Townley archives of the British Museum. These concern an Aphrodite with drapery
around the lower part of her
body in the so-called Syracuse form of the Medici type. She is said by Charles
Westmacott to have been discovered at Baiae, the pleasure park of the Emperor Nero on the Bay of Naples. The statue was presented
to Athens in 1920 by the Greek shipbroker Michael
Embeirikos, who had acquired
her at the auction sale of the Hope collection in 1917.The Westmacott provenance was to be repeated in
subsequent mention of the statue but is now shown to be false. In fact it came from the ruins of ancient
Minturnum on the banks of the River Garigliano, the ancient Liris on the border between Campania and Latium. It was restored
with a new head by Carlo Albacini, a gifted pupil of the great restorer Cavaceppi.
Exactly how Hope came upon the Aphrodite is not known,
but it seems certain that he snapped her up on the Naples leg of his Italian journey of 1802-3. In May 1803 he was sensibly back in
Paris and therefore able to cross the channel to safety, when the peace
with France was broken in May. He would not again venture abroad until 1814-15, when the Hopes wintered
in Paris, but they were once more forced to retreat, this time by Napoleon’s escape from Elba. After his final
defeat at Waterloo, the Hope family set off for Europe once more, and after a slow and difficult journey,
during which they were robbed, they reached Rome in April 1817. Their stay was
cut short, however, by an even greater misfortune, the death of their second son, Charles, at the hands of quack doctors who attended his illness.
During the years spent in England between 1803 and 1814, Hope had much to busy himself
with, arranging and promoting the display of his collection, first at the London mansion
and later at the Deepdene. At Duchess Street Hope’s classical sculptures were arranged
principally in the Statue Gallery,
while others were to be found in the Picture
Gallery, with its architectural detailing quoted from famous Athenian
monuments and in the so-called
AnteRoom. In the Statue Gallery,
walls were left plain and painted yellow to provide
strong contrast and to bring out the contours of the sculptures. The ceiling of the room was
coffered like a Greek temple
and had three openings to provide light from above in the manner
that was to become preferred
in nineteenth-century sculpture galleries. The sculpture
itself, at least to begin
with, was arranged symmetrically along the long walls with statues, statuettes, busts, and cinerary
urns placed to match one another, like facing like. Subjects too were matched,
and thus we find Pothos (Desire) facing Aphrodite, and a bust of the Antonine emperor
Lucius Verus opposite
Antoninus Pius.
As
part of his architectural
transformation of the Deepdene, Hope developed there a second Sculpture
Gallery that extended
westward from the main house. This formed part of a
picturesque complex of spaces, including a great Conservatory that ran parallel to and connected
with the Sculpture Gallery
and, to the west of these two rooms, the so-called Theatre of Arts. In the winter of 1824-25,
Hope removed to these newly laid-out rooms a large part of his classical sculpture
collection, and so upon
his death in 1831, the collection was divided between the two houses.
His heir was his eldest son, Henry Thomas Hope, also a serious
collector of sculpture
and one who had ideas of his own. Soon after
his father’s death, most of the sculpture
was returned to Duchess Street from the Deepdene, and the
Sculpture Gallery there was used for other purposes. Henry shared his father’s sense of
self-importance but had not inherited
Thomas Hope’s sense of style.
He carried out extensive
rebuilding and refurbishment at the country house, transforming it from a rambling picturesque and in parts neo-Gothic villa into a more formal and grandiose Italianate palace. In 1849 he moved the entire collection of antiquities to the Deepdene, two years
before the Duchess Street mansion was demolished. A
sale of vases and other miscellaneous antiquities in 1849 was no doubt prompted by this
move. Most of the sculptures were accommodated in
the entrance hall, with the great pieces, modern
as well as ancient, set up in its cavernous arches.
The Sculpture Gallery does not appear to have been
reused and, indeed, was probably demolished before the 185os were out.
Greek Vases
Turning from his sculpture, and thus avoiding
the sad decline of the Hope fortunes
that preceded its sale in 1917 and the eventual demolition of the Deepdene in 1969, let us explore
how Hope acquired his Greek vases, which were both a prominent
feature of display
in the Duchess Street mansion
and a great influence upon his own design of furniture
and costume. Hope’s acquisition of Sir William Hamilton’s second collection of Greek
vases in 1801 was
a significant event in the development of the Hope style. The ancient painted
pots made for everyday use that we commonly call Greek vases had been found in Italy at
least since Roman times and since the Renaissance were highly valued
as curiosities by collectors and artists. Although these vessels were previously thought
of as Etruscan, it was gradually
realized in the eighteenth century that they should properly be
called Greek. Although there had in antiquity been an Etruscan
ceramic industry that produced
its own version
of Athenian black- and
redfigured painted pottery, the Etruscans, it must be said, were better at
bronze-casting, goldsmithing, and carving engraved
seal stones than they were at potting.
The best vases found in Italy were not Etruscan, therefore, but had either been imported in antiquity from mainland Greece or produced in
southern Italy, where Greeks
had founded colonies in what they themselves called Magna Graecia. In the ancient
regions of Campania, Apulia, and Lucania and on Sicily, Greek settlers had brought
their own pottery production with them and founded
the South-Italian branch of an industry that was to flourish and persist deep into the fourth century B.C., when the mainland Greek workshops of Corinth and Athens that inspired it had long ceased to dominate the market.
Sir
William Hamilton was resident in Naples as the British diplomatic representative from 1764 until 1800. During
that time, he had ample opportunity to collect
antiquities, gathering such fruits as he was able to pluck from officially restricted royal excavations in the ancient cities of
Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Older than the towns buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 were Greek and other tombs scattered
through the countryside
of southern Italy. Hamilton
acquired vases directly from these tombs or from existing collections. Hamilton
was by no means the first to collect
vases, and a number
of prominent Neapolitan
intellectuals had anticipated his passion for them as curiosities of ancient handicraft and as a picture
book of ancient
life and beliefs. Hamilton, however, made his own contribution to the understanding of Greek vases by
promoting them as examplars
of ancient art, described by Winckelmann, the greatest art historian of his time, as “a treasury of ancient drawings.”
Hamilton’s promotion of vases manifested itself
in three principal ways: first, by publishing his first vase collection
in four sumptuous volumes
that collectively make up what may arguably be judged the most beautiful
book of the eighteenth
century; second, by successfully placing his first collection of vases, and indeed other antiquities, in the British
Museum, where it represented the national holding
of such objects
and laid the foundation of the museum’s
current identity as a great showplace of art and antiquity; and third, in the influence
that his publications had on contemporary taste, especially on the new pottery
of
Josiah Wedgwood
and Thomas Bentley,
and ultimately on
the Regency Greek Revival,
of which Hope was
to become a leading luminary.
Hamilton sold his first collection to the British Museum in
1772 and in so doing greatly increased
the value of the trade in vases. He would afterward complain that he had undersold the collection, but like an addict aware of the dangers of his own weakness,
he resolved to give up the vases and succeeded
in doing so for seventeen years. Then in 1789 the compulsion took hold of him once
more. How
it came about is explained
in a letter to his
nephew and fellow collector Charles Greville, an impecunious
scion of the House of Warwick.
Sir William’s own words
tell
how it was that the Hope collection of Greek
vases, as it would become, was first conceived:
A treasure of Greek, commonly
called Etruscan, vases have been found within these twelve months,
the choice of which are in my possession, tho’ at a considerable expense. I do not mean
to be such a fool as to give or leave them to the British Museum, but I will contrive
to have them published
without any expense to myself, and artists and antiquarians will have the greatest obligation to me. The drawings on these vases are most excellent and many
of the subjects from Homer. In short, it will show that such monuments of high
antiquity are not so insignificant as has
been thought by many, and if I choose afterwards to dispose of the collection (of more than seventy capital vases)
I may get my own price.
The impulse for this new interest in vases had been a series of
lucky strikes by people we would today call tomb robbers on land in
the neighborhood of Nola, S. Agata dei Goti, Trebbia,
Santa Maria di Capua, Puglia,
and elsewhere.74 In mentioning seventy vases, Hamilton was speaking of the
best figured vessels
in his collection. By the time he embarked
his collection for England in 1798,
the total number of figured
and nonfigured vases together had risen to more than a thousand. From the start, Hamilton
was forced to see his second collection as a financial
speculation. Never a wealthy man, he had mounting
debts that were increased by ambitious improvements to
his Naples residence, Palazzo Sessa, and the expense of keeping Emma Hart, who had lived
with him as his mistress since 1786. The eventual sale of the collection to Hope in 1801 was the outcome of a protracted attempt
to sell the collection at a profit to the monarchs of
Russia and Prussia and to his kinsman William
Beckford.
From the start, Hamilton
planned to publish his second
collection as he had his first. He did not, however, wish to repeat the expense
and worry of his first attempt, caused in part by his employment of
the brilliant but unreliable Pierre François Hugues, who liked to go by the name of Baron d’Hancarville. Hamilton did, however, need someone to oversee the book’s
production,
organize the drawing of the vases, the engraving
of the drawings, and the drafting of the commentaries that accompanied the engravings. The texts were to be supplied by Count
Italinsky, the Russian consul in Naples,
and the art work was executed
by Wilhelm Tischbein. He arrived as a youthful painter
in Naples in the spring of 1787 in the company of Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
who was on the southern leg of his Italian
journey.
Tischbein did not travel further, as planned, but
remained in Naples, where he was appointed director of the Neapolitan
Academy of Fine Arts. Tischbein was an ideal collaborator
for Hamilton, since he shared an enthusiasm for the project in hand without overcomplicating the processes. Hamilton’s aims in
publishing his second vase collection remained the same as those that had motivated publication of the first collection. On the one hand, there was a desire to provide models of taste for contemporary
artists and manufacturers and, on the other, he
wanted to furnish antiquaries with a set of images illustrating ancient life, religion, and myth. D’Hancarville had confused matters and overwritten the text of the first publication in his ambition to create a new kind of art history based
on his claims to have discovered the prehistory
of human culture in ancient symbolism. Hamilton
controlled
he
intellectual scope of the second publication himself by writing
the introduction, and while ltalinsky composed the commentaries, Tischbein
and his students reproduced the vase paintings in simple black-and-white outline. This technique contrasted
with the complex color and chiaroscuro of images that d ‘Hancarville had commissioned for the first collection. At first Tischbein’s best pupils at the academy were employed to trace the subjects using oiled paper. This proved
too slow, so a skilled
engraver was hired to draw the vase paintings directly onto a copper engraving plate. The first volume
of an eventual four appeared
in 1793; the fourth volume did not appear until
after Hamilton’s death in 1803, by
which time Tischbein
had even prepared
plates for a fifth volume.
The
actual dates of publication
for Hamilton’s second vase collection do not agree with the dates given on the title pages and
are
generally later than has been supposed. Nevertheless,
the plates circulated separately in advance of the volumes themselves, and Tischbein’s letters to the Duchess Amalia in Weimar
enclosed advance prints. John Flaxman in Rome seems to have been influenced by the sight of such images
when in 1792 he
was working on his outline illustrations for an engraved
set of scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Thomas Hope acquired
the original drawings for these engravings and
also commissioned a set of illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy in the same outline technique that would become Hope’s preferred drawing method, both in the records he made of his travels and in his published works. A Platonic aesthetic of the Enlightenment appreciation of ancient art found virtue in seeing the forms of architecture and sculpture reduced to the simple and chaste outlines
of ancient vase painting. Thomas Hope echoed
a familiar neoclassical principle that moral worth could be found in pictorial
understatement, when in
1805 he wrote to the respected Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton: “Beauty consists not in ornament, it consists in outline- where this is elegant and well understood the simplest object will be pleasing: without a good outline, the richest and most decorated will only appear tawdry.”
Apart from the beauty of their line, Greek vases would also
provide Hope with an encyclopedia of subjects of Greek myth and daily life on which he could draw in devising
his own designs for furniture and costume. Not only did Hope base his designs upon vases, but the British school of history painting, from which Hope himself commissioned a number of works, also took inspiration from
them. From Richard Westall, for example, in 1804 Hope ordered two historical paintings, one
of which, The Expiation of Orestes at
the Shrine of Delphos makes direct reference to the subject of a Paestan bell-krater that Hope is said to have acquired from a
M. de Paroi in Naples, no doubt when he was there in 1802-3. From the dramatis
personae of the vase
painting, Westall selected Orestes kneeling at the Delphic tripod and the naked and beautiful Apollo fending off a Fury. Apollo was posed not as the figure in the vase painting
but in the manner of the Apollo Belvedere. Similarly, spear-carrying Athena in Westall’s painting strongly resembles the Hope Athena.
Hamilton’s attempts to sell his second
vase collection failed,
and in 1798 he was forced to ship it to England, lest his vases should fall into the hands of the French,
who were in Rome and on the brink of marching
on Naples. HMS Colossus was hardly seaworthy, and her voyage out of the Bay of
Naples in late November was to be her last. Moored off the Scilly
Isles in an attempt to ride out a storm, the
ship drifted and foundered on a reef and broke up, spilling
her precious cargo of Sir William’s
vases into the water. The news was shattering to Hamilton, who had been forced to leave Naples
and to exchange his comfortable
home for the cold and gloom of the Bourbon palace at Palermo on
Sicily. At first he clung to the hope that the vases might be salvaged, but in fact very few of them were ever recovered
by the
islanders, and when Roland Morris relocated the wreck and led an expedition in the 1970s to dive for the cargo, all that were found were
many weathered sherds. Now in the British Museum,
some of these fragments have been matched
to the plates in Tischbein’s publication and are themselves published in an exemplary volume, the product of years of painstaking work.
By
November 1800, Hamilton and Emma, now
his second wife, were back in England, where they found a pleasant surprise
awaiting them. The intention had been to load all the best figured vases aboard Colossus,
but the consignment got muddled and many of them had been left off the ship and were dispatched safely to England aboard another vessel. Hamilton spent the winter
of 1801 preparing his vases, along with his pictures and sculpture, for sale at Christie’s. The vase auction never took place,
for Thomas Hope stepped in at the eleventh hour and bought the collection wholesale.
Hamilton had hoped to realize £5,000 but settled for £4,000 and
the satisfaction that the collection would, as he originally
intended, be kept together.
Exactly how many vases Hamilton had sold to Hope is unclear.
In 1796 Hamilton owned about a thousand of them and, according
to his statement that he lost about one third on the Colossus, it is estimated that about seven hundred remained. By 1806, however, we are told that Hope possessed more than fifteen hundred vases,
the result of further purchases as well as disposals. For example, he is said to have sold vases in 1805 and also to have given others to a servant, who sold them to Henry Tresham, who would in turn sell his
vases to Samuel Rogers. Still others went to Frederick Howard,
5th Earl of Carlisle. This shifting of collections from one to another collector is nicely described by
Richard Payne Knight, who wrote a letter dated June 13, 1812, to Lord Aberdeen: “We collectors who have been preying upon each other’s spoils lately
like cray· fish in a pond, which immediately begin sucking
the shell of a deceased brother. Chinnery’s vases went chiefly to Hope, Sir Harry
Englefield, Rogers and
myself.” The
Napoleonic Wars had killed off the Grand Tour
trade, but at home in England there flourished a market in auctions that recycled earlier collections.
The
vases of William Chinnery, brother of the painter George, were sold at Christie ‘s, on June 3 and 4,
1812. The star of the sale was lot 89, an amphora with a battle
between Greeks and Trojans on
one side and a wedding
scene on the other. Now in the Los Angeles County Museum, the amphora was knocked down at the sale for £180 12s to “Henry” Hope, at least according to the annotation
in a
copy of the sale catalogue, and I take this to mean the brother,
Henry Philip, rather than the cousin Henry.
Whether Henry
Philip was buying for himself or for Thomas is not clear, but as we have seen with sculpture, it
may be that a purchase of vases by Henry Philip invariably ended up with Thomas. The origin
of this vase in the Chinnery collection, although
remarked upon at the time, has been forgotten by modern
scholars. In his catalogue
of the Hope vases, Tillyard repeated the false history given it by Millin and reported it
as coming
to Hope via the collection of the bibliomaniac James Edwards. The latter certainly had a large and impressive South Italian vase, a volute-krater for which Edwards is said to have paid 1,000 guineas, but this is not to be confused with the Chinnery amphora now in Los Angeles.
Other vases in the Hope collection were purchased at the sale
of
John Campbell, 1st Baron Cawdor, and that of Sir John Coghill, sold at Christie’s on
June r8 and r9, r8r9. The Coghill
vases were catalogued by Hope’s fellow Dutchman James
Millingen. The most expensive item at the Coghill
sale, at £367 10s,
was a fine Athenian kalyx-krater showing the rape of the daughters of Leucippus
by the Dioscuri in
their chariots. At the Deepdene sale of 1917, it was sold to C. S. Gulbenkian and is now in Portugal. The Cawdor vases were auctioned by Skinner and Dyke on June 5 and 6, 1800, at
which the star piece was the socalled
Cawdor Vase. This large South-Italian volute-krater went not to Hope but to Soane and now graces the courtyard window
of the dining room in Sir John Soane’s Museum. Soane paid £685s, a considerable bargain,
and far less than Edwards paid for his magnificent vase of the same shape. Curiously, the Cawdor Vase,
like the Chinnery amphora, has also been confused with Edwards’s 1,000-guinea vase. At last we can now disentangle the separate
history of these three magnificent but quite distinct vases:
the Chinnery amphora, now in Los Angeles;
the Edwards krater, now in New York; and the Cawdor Vase, now at the Soane Museum.
Hope arranged his vases at Duchess Street
on the east side of the courtyard
in four rooms and illustrated them in Household Furniture. To
judge from these illustrations, the decoration of the rooms was
relatively plain, but as always at
Duchess Street, it was made to reflect
the supposed symbolic meaning of the contents. Hope
had inherited from Hamilton’s generation the notion that, because they were found in tombs vases were sacred and chiefly designed for
the dead and that the scenes upon them
had mainly to do with
reincarnation rites connected to the worship
of Dionysos (Bacchus) as a god of fertility. In Hope’s
own words: “vases relate chiefly
to the Bacchanalian
rites … connected with the representations of mystic death and regeneration.” Hence, he explains, the arrangement of vases in his own first Vase Room featured shelves
divided by supports
terminating in a head of bearded Bacchus. Above these were arched recesses, intended to simulate the niches
of ancient columbaria in the catacombs
of Rome.
Hope would have known that these niches
were, anachronistically, Roman and is likely to have acquired the idea for them from Giuseppe
Bracci’s design for an imagined
tomb
of Winckelmann’s featured in d ‘Hancarville’s book of Hamilton’s vases. This was itself probably inspired by the Tomb of Freedmen
of Livia engraved
in F. Bianchini’s Camera ed inscrizioni sepulcrali dei liberti, servi ed ufficiali della Casa di Augusto (Rome, 1727),
which had been reproduced in the 1750s
by Piranesi.
As in Soane’s later use of the
same motif for vases displayed
in his dining room,
the columbarium niche at Duchess
Street was not intended to be an archaeologically correct setting but simply an atmospheric
reference to ancient sepulchres.
We
feel that atmosphere
more now at Sir John Soane’s Museum
than we do in the rather stringent
record that Hope gives
us of his vase rooms in Household Furniture. For another
impression, there is the self-portrait
drawn in 1813 of Adam Buck and his family. It
so brilliantly captures the essence of Hope’s
Regency taste for vases that it was once thought to be a portrait
of Hope himself. In
a friezelike composition, Buck introduces himself and his family as
an idealized group accompanied by the terminal bust of a deceased child. Further reference
to “mystic death and regeneration,” to use Hope’s own
phrase from Household Furniture, can
be found in the carefully selected
subjects of the vases that occupy the columbaria
and in the relief on the wall showing a maenad and satyr dancing
with the infant Dionysos cradled
in a winnowing basket. The drawing owes much to Hope and much also to Buck’s own knowledge of other contemporary London vase collections, many of which he was recording at the time in a set of outline drawings that he hoped to publish
as a book to rival
Tischbein’s publication of Hamilton’s collection. This project
floundered, and the original
drawings passed upon Buck’s death in 1833 into the library of Thomas Hope’s son
Adrian John Hope and are now
in Trinity College Library, Dublin. Apart from its debt to a thorough knowledge of Greek vases and to the neoclassical revival
of supposed pagan beliefs, it is interesting to note that the seated woman and child in Buck’s
family portrait are composed in direct quotation of Nicolas Poussin’s Holy Family! This painting, which Buck probably
saw in an engraving, doubtless also appealed
to him because of its neo-antique furniture, including a tripod
stand.
The
concentrated, storelike display of Hope’s
vases on bracketed shelves reinforced
the museum character
of his vase rooms. Both
the sculptures and the painted vases relied on Thomas Hope’s genius for presenting them as decorative and, at the same
time, “meaningful” adjuncts
to his distinctive interiors. Indeed, to contemporary visitors the entire arrangement of the first floor at Duchess Street seemed more like a museum
than a house.
Some will have had in mind the newly laid-out Louvre, which had been
witnessed by many British visitors in 1802-3, during the peace of the Treaty
of Amiens. As we have seen, Hope was himself in Paris in 1803 and must have visited
the Louvre before returning to England to open the house in Duchess Street
to the public. Others, in comparing Hope’s house with a
museum, must have had the British Museum in mind, then arranged
in the rooms of Montagu House.
No visual records
survive of what these rooms looked like, but they cannot have been as Greek as those at
Duchess Street. Even George Saunders’s
add-on Townley Gallery, completed in 1808 and designed to accommodate the British Museum’s newly acquired Egyptian and Townley marbles,
was more Palladian than it was Greek. The
British Museum acquired its Greek temple
architecture only when Robert Smirke began to rebuild it from 1823 onward, and it is tempting to see in
his designs a direct influence from Hope. In Smirke’s
grand saloons, there are many echoes
to be found of Hope’s Sculpture and Picture Galleries: the coffered ceilings, top-lit by raised lanterns,
the elongated Doric columns with their shallow echinus, the cornice over doorways on scroll brackets.
All these adaptations of Greek temple architecture for a neoclassical interior were to be adopted by Smirke.
If
Hope’s architectural vision for a temple of the Muses has an
afterlife in the British Museum,
then so too does his museology.
At Duchess Street with its ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Moorish,
Indian, Greek, and Roman collections and symbolic decorations, there was to be found, as in the British Museum then and now, a universal history of mankind.
Visitors could dine at the shrine of an Egyptian mummy, breathe the incense
of the Orient burned in
silver censers mounted on the walls of the Indian Room, observe the lives of the ancients painted
on the body of a Greek vase, or glimpse the exotic present
in a mosque painted
in Hindustan. Hope plays with the boundary
between ancient and modern, real life
and fantasy, sacred and secular.
His was an eventful museum of themed
interiors and evening entertainments, a son et lumière
experience worthy
of Andre Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire, where
world culture stands in place of religion, where no faith is preached but all faiths may be represented.
The
Hope vases remained
at Duchess Street
until they were removed to the Deepdene by Henry Thomas in 1849, pending the demolition of 1851. The sale of a few apparently unwanted vases and other objects is reported in the same year. The
collection was displayed in a
room adjoining the library, which became
known as the Etruscan Room, and part of a complex probably added by Thomas Hope around
1826-31. There in 1912 the vases
were seen and catalogued
by Tillyard for the monograph
he published on them after
their sale and dispersal.
The
sculpture, as we have seen, fared differently from the vases, but even Henry Thomas’s
arrangement of it was to be dismantled when between 1893 and
1909
Lilian, Duchess of Marlborough, took up residence
in the house on a lease. She is said to have disliked the classical art in the Deepdene,
and though previous occupants
had welcomed visitors
to view the collections, the duchess wanted none of it. When in 1917 the
contents were being prepared for auction, the classical sculptures were not even found in
the house but had
been consigned to an ice house
on
the grounds
and to a warren of sand caves. Their excavation from the Surrey sands served only to scatter
them to the winds. Unlike the vases, no
complete pre-sale, illustrated catalogue had been compiled of the sculpture,
and before Geoffrey
Waywell’s book appeared in 1986, it is fair to say that Thomas
Hope’s classical
sculptures had been largely forgotten.
How
now should we evaluate the merits of Hope’s collection?
Viewing his antiquities as a whole, we see nothing
particularly remarkable about them; they are very much a collection of their time.
Hope had none of the pioneering spirit
of Hamilton in respect to his vases, or of Payne Knight and his bronzes
or, notoriously, of Elgin and his Greek sculptures. It is true that Hope had rather more fine Athenian black- and red-figured
vases than Hamilton did, and among them there are some remarkable pieces. Nevertheless, this is only to be expected
in a second-generation collector building
upon the advances
made by Hamilton and his contemporaries in
the understanding of ancient vase painting. Even then Hope adhered, as we have seen, to the mystical
and funereal interpretation of the purpose of ancient
painted vases, which was already
rather old fashioned in his day. In 1822 his
fellow countryman James Millingen condemned this idea of vase painting as a vain
folly and complained that
it had greatly retarded proper understanding. With a remarkably
modernsounding voice he wrote: “The vases of which the origin is supposed to be so mysterious are no others than the common pottery intended for the various
purposes of life and for ornament, like
the China and the Staffordshire ware of the present day.”
In
sculpture too there is nothing
exceptional about Hope’s collection. The mix of Roman portraits, representations
of gods and heroes,
mythical and real beasts, and decorative objects
is what we have come to expect of restored
marbles purchased on the Grand Tour market of Italy. Typically,
there were few or no
sculptures that dated from before the Roman era. Hope’s collection did have its share of works carved in the self-conscious archaizing style of Roman sculpture
evoking Greek originals, which became fashionable with collectors of the later eighteenth
century. Here too, however,
Hope was following an established trend rather than setting a new one. Like other British collectors, including
Henry Blundell of Ince, Hope took his lead from Winckelmann’s pioneering History of Ancient Art of
1764 and the archaistic sculpture Winckelmann found at Rome in the collection of his employer, Cardinal
Alessandro Albani.
Such an assessment of the limitations of Hope’s collecting is
not intended to diminish his achievement. Rather, it enables us to acknowledge that which was truly exceptional about
the man and his collection. Unsurpassed among British collectors of antiquity
was Hope’s sophistication
and poetic sense of style in creating
picturesque settings for his works of art. Never before and never again, with the possible
exception of Sir John Soane’s Museum,
would England see such rooms as those at Duchess Street and the Deepdene, where nature, art, and morality were brought together and combined with
“the ubiquitous presence of death.”
© Bard Graduate Center, Ian Jenkins.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (I968): 93-1, 24; David Watkin, “Thomas Hope ‘s House in Duchess Street,” Apollo (March 2004): 3 1-39.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 110-13.
Household Furniture (18o7): pl. VII.
Ibid., 25.
Geoffrey B. Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures: Ancient Sculptures in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, I986): 100, cat. no. 64.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 113-14; Fani-Maria Tsigakou, Thomas Hope (1769-1831), Pictures from 18th Century Greece (Athens: Melissa, I985): 185), cat. no. 83.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (I 968): 159-61.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (I 986): 54-55.
Tim Knox, “The King’s Library and its architectural genesis,” in Kim Sloan and Andrew Burnett, eds., Enlightenment, Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (London: British Museum Press, 2003): 54-57; Thorsten Opper, “Ancient glory and modern learning: the sculpture-decorated library,” in Sloan and Burnett, Enlightenment (2003): 62-65.
Ruth Guilding, “Robert Adam and Charles Townley, the development of the top-lit sculpture gallery,” Apollo I43 (I996): 27-32.
Brian Cook, “The Townley Marbles in Westminster and Bloomsbury,” Collectors and Collections, British Museum Yearbook 2 (1977): 34 -78; Brian Cook, The Townley Marbles (London: British Museum Press, 1985); Ian Jenkins, “Charles Townley’s collection,” in Andrew Wilton and Ilaria Bignamini, Grand Tour, The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tate Britain, 1996): 257-62.
Jenkins, “Charles Townley’s collection” (1996): 262-69.
Cited in Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 48- 49.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 227-28.
P. Clayden, The Early Life of Samuel Rogers (London, 1887): 448-49; Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 229.
Thomas Hope, Anastasius, or the Memoirs of a Modern Greek, written at the close of the 18th century, 3 vols. (London, 1819); Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 5-7.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (I968): 232.
Ibid., 42.
National Portrait Gallery, London, inv. no. 4574.
Arthur Hamilton Smith, “Lord Elgin and His Collection,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 36 (1916): 163-370; William St. Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles (3rd edition, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998): 1-34; Dyfri Williams, “Of publick utility and publick property,” in Athena Tsingarida with Donna Kurtz, eds., Appropriating Antiquity, Collections et Collectionneurs d’antiques en Belgique et en Grande-Bretagne au XIX Siecle (Brussels: Editions Le Livre Timperman, 2002): 103-64.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 154.
Ibid., 83.
Tsigakou, Pictures (1985); Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 65.
Tsigakou, Pictures (1985): 97, cat. no. 29; see also 95, cat. no. 28.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 40.
Seymour Howard, “An antiquarian handlist and the beginnings of the Pio Clementino,” Antiquity Restored, Essays on the Afterlife of the Antique (Vienna: Irsa, 1990): 142-53.
Hugh Honour, “Vincenzo Pacetti,” The Connoisseur (November 1960): 174-81; Nancy Ramage, “Restorer and collector, notes on eighteenth-century recreations of Roman statues,” in Elaine Gazda, ed., The Ancient Art of Emulation, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, supp. vol. I (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002): 68-71, with bibliography at n. 26.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 69-71, cat. no. 3.
Ibid., 72-73, cat. no. 6; now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Ibid., 74-75, cat. no. 9.
Howard, ‘“Pio Clementino” (1990): 151.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 21-22, cat. no. 5); now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Liverpool.
Ibid., 73-74, cat. no. 8.
Ibid., 76, cat. no. 10.
Ibid., 90, cat. nos. 36, 37; now in a British private collection.
Jenkins and Bignamini, entry for cat. nos. 204-206, in Wilton and Bignamini, Grand Tour (2002): 250-51.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 93-94, cat. no. 51; now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Ibid., 94-95, cat. nos. 53, 54.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 41.
Ibid., 67-69, cat. nos. 1, 2; both are now in Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Jonathan Scott, The Pleasure of Antiquity, British Collectors of Greece and Rome (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003): 276.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 9, 99; the Hygeia went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1950 from the Hearst estate.
I am grateful to Michael Stanley for rescuing me from error here.
C. W. Eliot, “Lord Byron and the monastery at Delphi,” American Journal of Archaeology 71 (1967): 290, fig. 4.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 42.
Ibid., 42, 88, cat. no. 31.
Ibid., 100, cat. no. 66.
Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, Sir William Hamilton and His Collection (London: British Museum Press, 1996): 229, cat. nos. 132, 133; for others, see Carlos Picon, “Big Feet,” Archäologischer Anzeiger (1983): 95-106.
Ian Jenkins, “Seeking the bubble reputation,” Journal of the History of Collections 9 (1997): 197-99.
Ibid., 197, item I; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 85-86, cat. no. 27.
Jenkins, “Bubble reputation” (1997): 97, item 2; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (I986): 8), cat. no. 26.
Jenkins, “Bubble reputation” (1997): 198, item 3; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 86-87, cat. no. 29.
Jenkins, “Bubble reputation” (1997): 198, item 4; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 41, n. 34; Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian: Uma doacao ao Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, no 25 aniversario do Museu de Arte Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 1994): 34-35, no. 10; now in the collection of the National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon.
Jenkins, “Bubble reputation” (1997): 198, item 5; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 97-98, cat. no. 58; See Philip Hewat-Jaboor, “Fonthill House: One of the Most Princely Edifices in the Kingdom,” in Derek Ostergard, ed., William Beckford, 1760-1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, exh. cat., Bard Graduate Center, New York (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001): 54, n. 38.
Jenkins, “Bubble reputation” (1997): I98, item 6; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 91, cat. no. 41.
Jenkins, “Bubble reputation” (1997): 199, item 7; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 106, cat. no. 85, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
John Thackray, “The Modern Pliny: Hamilton and Vesuvius,” in Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes (1996): 67, fig. 31; Jenkins, “Bubble reputation” (1997): 199, item 8; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 100, cat. no. 67.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (I986): 76, cat. no. II; for the new discoveries, see Ian Jenkins, “Neue Dokumente zur Entdeckung und Restaurierung der Venus Hope und anderer Venus Statuen,” in Max Kunze and Stephanie-Gerrit Bruer, eds., Wiedererstandene Antike, Ergänzungen antiker Kunstwerke seit der Renaissance (Munich: Biering and Brinkmann, 2003): 181-92.
Charles Molloy Westmacott, British Galleries of Painting and Sculpture (London: Sherwood, 1824): 221; now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 9.
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 21.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 101-4; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 42-49.
Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum (London: British Museum Press, 1992): 41-44.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 45, fig. 3.
Ibid., 50-56.
Ibid., 57-61.
Ibid., 62-66.
R. M. Cook, Greek Painted Pottery (3rd edition, London: Methuen, 1997): 275-311; Dietrich von Bothmer, “Greek vase-painting, two hundred years of connoisseurship,” Papers on the Amasis Painter and his World (Malibu: Getty Trust, 1987): 184-204; Vinnie Nørskov, Greek Vases in New Contexts (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2002): 27-34.
Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes (1996): passim.
Claire Lyons, “The Museo Mastrilli and the culture of collecting in Naples, 1700-1715,” Journal of the History of Collections 4 (1992): 1-26.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden, 1764): 123; Ian Jenkins, “D’Hancarville’s ‘Exhibition’ of Hamilton’s Vases,” in Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes (1996): 153.
A. Morrison, A Catalogue of the Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents formed between 1865 and 1882 by A.Morrison: The Hamilton and Nelson Papers, vol. I (1893): 180.
Ian Jenkins, “Contemporary Minds: Sir William Hamilton’s Affair with Antiquity,” in Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes (1996): 52-55; Valerie Smallwood and Susan Woodford, Fragments from Sir William Hamilton’s Second Collection of Vases Recovered from the Wreck of HMS Colossus, Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, Great Britain, Fascicule 20, The British Museum Fascicule 10 (London: British Museum Press, 2002): 11-12.
Jenkins, “Contemporary Minds” (1996): 58.
Frances Haskell, “The Baron d ‘Hancarville, an adventurer and art historian in eighteenth-century Europe,” in E. Cheney and N. Ritchie, eds., Oxford, China, and Italy: Writings in Honour of Sir Harold Acton (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984): 177—91; reprinted in Haskell, Past and Present in Art and Taste, Selected Essays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987): 30-45; Michael Vickers, “Value and simplicity: a historical case,” in Michael Vickers and David Gill, Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I994): 1-32, a revised version of “Value and Simplicity: Eighteenth-century taste and the study of Greek vases,” Past and Present I 16 (1987): 98-137; Jenkins, “Contemporary Minds” (1996): 45-51; Ian Jenkins, “Talking Stones: Hamilton’s Collection of Carved Stones,” in Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes (1996): 93-101; Jenkins, “D’Hancarville’s ‘Exhibition”’ (1996): 149-55.
Jenkins, “Contemporary Minds” (1996): 55-57; Smallwood and Woodford, Colossus (2002): 13-16.
F. von Alten, Aus Tischbein’s Leben und Briefwechsel (Leipzig, 1872): 50-54 (letters dated 11 December 1790 and 19 March 1791).
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 35; David Irwin, John Flaxman 1755-1826, Sculptor, Illustrator, Designer (London: Studio Vista, 1979): 68, 81-83; David Bindman, “Studies for the Outline Engravings, Rome, 1792-93,” in John Flaxman, ed. David Bindman (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979): 86.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 30-33.
Ibid., 35-36, 51-52.
George Cumberland, Thoughts on Outline, Sculpture, and the system that guided the ancient artists in composing their figures and groups, etc. (London, 1796); Vickers, “Value and Simplicity” (1987): 129 ff.; Hans-Ulrich Cain, ed., Faszination der Linie, Griechische Zeichenkunst auf dem Weg von Neapel nach Europa, exh. cat., Leipzig, Antikenmuseum der Universität (Leipzig: Leipzig University, 2004).
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 198 (Hope to Boulton, 14 September 1805, Birmingham, Boulton Papers, ff. 2-4).
Ibid., 43.
E.M.W. Tillyard, The Hope Vases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923): 137, cat. no. 267.
Smallwood and Woodford, Colossus (2002): 16-17.
Ibid., passim; now in the collection of the British Museum, London.
Jenkins, “Contemporary Minds” (1996): 58-59.
Morrison, Hamilton and Nelson Papers: 552, Hamilton to Greville, 3 April 1801.
A. L. Millin, Monuments antiques inédits ou nouvellement Expliqués, vol. 2 (Paris, 1806): 15, quoted by Tillyard, Hope Vases (1923): 2.
Adolph Michaelis, “Die Privatsammlungen antiker Bildwerke in England, Deepdene,” Archäologische Zeitung 32 (1874): 15-16.
Ian Jenkins, “Adam Buck and Greek Vases,” Burlington Magazine 130 (1988): 454.
R. Liscombe, “Richard Payne Knight, some unpublished correspondence,” Art Bulletin 61 (1979): 606.
Photocopy of annotated copy in the library of the Greek and Roman Department, British Museum, London; it is now in the Los Angeles County Museum.
James Christie, Disquisitions upon the Painted Greek Vases and their Probable Connection with the Shows of the Eleusinian and ocher Mysteries (London, 1825): vi.
Los Angeles, inv. no. A5933; A. L. Millin, Peintures de Vases Antiques vulgairement appelés Etrusques (Paris: M. Dubois Maisonneuve, 1 808): 94, pls. 49, 50; Tillyard, Hope Vases (1923): 149, cat. no. 283; A. D. Trendall, The Red-Figured Vases of Lucania, Campania and Sicily, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967): 339, no. 799; Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum Los Angeles r (1977): pls. 46-47.
Jenkins, “Adam Buck” (1988): 455, figs. 68, 69; 457 s.v. Soane; now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
James Millingen, Peintures antiques de vases grecs de la collection de Sir John Coghill (Rome, 1827).
It is now in the Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; Lisbon, inv. no. 682; A Catalogue of Painted Greek Vases, Bronzes, Coins, ancient and modern Sculpture etc. The property of Sir John Coghill Bart. deceased and formed by him at a great expense during his residence a few years ago in Italy, which will be sold by auction by Mr Christie, Friday, June 18, 1819 and the following day: 19 June, lot 109: photocopy of annotated copy in the library of the Greek and Roman Department, British Museum, London; Millingen, Coghill (1827): pls. 1-3; Tillyard, Hope Vases (1923): 65-68, cat. no. 116; John Beazley, Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters (2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963): 1042.1.
Soane Museum, inv. no. 101 L; Cawdor Sale: Catalogue of Antique Marble Statues and Bustoes with Etruscan Vases etc., Skinner and Dyke, London, 5-6 June 1800: second day, lot 64; Soane Journal 4, fol. 27I, 9 June 1800, for confirmation of the price; A. D. Trendall, The Red-Figured Vases of Apulia, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, I982): 906—7, 931-32, no. 119.
Jenkins, Adam Buck (1988): 454, 457 s.v. Soane.
Watkin, “Thomas Hope’s House” (2004): 35, fig. 14.
Household Furniture (1807): 23.
Ibid., 34.
Thackray, “The Modern Pliny” (1996): 148, cat. no. 31.
Jenkins, “Adam Buck” (I988): passim.
Ian Jenkins, Adam Buck’s Greek Vases, British Museum Occasional Paper 75 (London: British Museum Press, 1989); now in Trinity College Library, Dublin.
Ian Jenkins, “Athens Rising near the Pole, London, Athens and the Idea of Freedom,” in Celina Fox, ed., London World City 1800-1840 (London: Verlag Aurel Bongers Recklinghausen, 1992): 147. The painting is now in the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 104.
Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes (1992): 102-10.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 121, 240-42.
Adolph Michaelis, “Museographisches-Vasen des Hrn. Hope,” Archäologischer Anzeiger 7 (1849): 97-102.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 180-81; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 60.
Tillyard, Hope Vases (1923): 2.
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (1986): 63.
James Millingen, Ancient Unedited Monuments, Painted Greek Vases from Collections in Various Countries, Principally in Great Britain (London, 1822): iv-vi. For the changing taste and opinion of the times, see Ian Jenkins, “La vente des vases Durand (Paris 1836) et leur reception en Grande-Bretagne,” in A.-F. Laurens and K. Pomian, L’Anticomanie, La Collection d’Antiquités (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1992): 269-78.
Watkin, Thomas Hope (1968): 242.