Bard Graduate Center is a research institute for advanced, interdisciplinary study of diverse material worlds. We support the innovative scholarship of our faculty and students as well as resident fellows, guest curators and artists, and visiting speakers.

Originally published in Thomas Hope: Regency Designer, edited by David Watkin and Philip Hewat-Jaboor. Published for Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. 249–263.

From the exhibition: Thomas Hope: Regency Designer.

The continuing interest demonstrated in Hope’s furniture designs by designers, craftsmen, and patrons after his death may be explained by the restrained yet truly classical nature of his furniture. This was appreciated by such influential writers as John Claudius Loudon, an admirer and promoter of Hope’s Deepdene. In his Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, first published in I833 and reprinted several times without substantial changes until the 1860s, Loudon cited Hope’s publications, some of which he had borrowed from a bookseller, among his list of sources. He also illustrated four chair designs from Household Furniture, praising them for their beauty and freedom from historical associations, which therefore made them appropriate for men of taste.1 Hope had, of course, chosen to publish his furniture designs in clear drawings with measurements in order to facilitate their imitation. However, according to the doctrines of Modernism, styles are so much the outcome of a particular set of social and economic circumstances that they cannot, indeed should not, be echoed in other periods. To adopt this view is to ignore the fact that good furniture, for example, has a permanent appeal, so that in Italy and France furniture to eighteenth-century designs has been manufactured continually up to the present day, wisely out of the sight of art historians. It is probably true that Empire-style furniture has also been made without any serious break from the early nineteenth century onward.

Hope exercised great influence on American furniture design in the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond. Catherine Voorsanger has shown2 how the “Modern Grecian Style” that appeared in New York about 1825 was an assertive interpretation of forms drawn from Thomas Hope and George Smith, evolving toward 1830 to the elimination of surface ornament in favor of bold outlines, rich veneers, and simple geometries. Resembling Biedermeier furniture, it also reflected the first waves of German immigration and was so widespread that it became a kind of national style. When he republished in 1996 pattern books on household arts originally published in Baltimore in 1840 by John Hall, an English immigrant, the architect Thomas Gordon Smith pointed out Hope’s influence, noting his importance in using the tripod base of the Roman candelabrum for the base of a circular table, which “freed it from its associations with lighting.”3 The klismos chair and other examples of Hope’s furniture, including the monopodium table, a pole screen, and a tripod, furnished a double parlor in the John Cox Stevens House, New York (1845–48), designed in an elegant Greek Revival style by the architect Alexander Jackson Davis.

This association between Hope’s classical furniture designs and rooms perceived as part of the masculine domain was reinforced by the American writer and rural architect Alexander Jackson Downing, who illustrated the klismos chair with two other Hope chair designs in The Architecture of Country Houses, first published in 1850, recommending them for library chairs.4 Whole suites of Hope’s furniture were suggested for classical interiors as a slightly chilly alternative to fashionable styles such as the Gothic Revival.

Even at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, when the prominent displays included the Medieval Court by A. W. N. Pugin and galleries devoted to nationalism and naturalism, Hope’s classical furniture was praised. A notable example of his inlaid monopodium table, in ebony and silver, fitted with a silver vase in the center of the top, was exhibited by the silversmith C. F. Hancock of Bruton Street. It was described by contemporaries as recalling “the ‘Hope’ fashion, as it was set by the predecessor of the present distinguished amateur.”5 This example of Hope-inspired design was highly appropriate because Purnell Bransby Purnell, to whom the table and vase were presented in 1851, was a prominent collector of classical antiquities.6

Turning to France, we find that a significant feature of taste in the 1860s was for neo-Greek furniture, which was the significant style of the decade, particularly in Paris, and involved all the decorative arts including metalwork and jewelry.7 The idea of reviving Greek art originated in the 1850s with influential critics such as Félix Duban, architect of the Salle de Melpomène (1860–63) at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Henri-Auguste Fourdinois had studied with Duban before joining his father’s cabinetmaking firm, although most of his later work was in a neo-Renaissance manner. Also influential was Victor Marie-Marie-Charles Ruprich-Robert, an architect trained at the École des Beaux-Arts who published a pattern book on neo-Greek style.8 This furniture was bold and striking, featuring gryphons, heavy pendant rings, pairs of wings, and female busts. Prototypes of furniture in the neo-Greek style were displayed at the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in Paris, from which later variants in simpler, more commercial styles were produced.

The theatrical quality of much Empire-style furniture, whether designed by Percier and Fontaine or by Hope, appealed to painters who willingly used the furniture as props, particularly in fashionable later nineteenth-century portraits. The kitsch, the costly, and the camp recur in the story of the Regency Revival, an early instance being a watercolor of 1876 by Giovanni Boldini, titled Il Pianoforte.9 In a palatial neo-Empire painted room, a girl in the dress of the 1870s sits on a klismos chair at a remarkable Empire-style piano, its legs crowned with winged sphinx heads of gilt bronze. She is being ogled by a winsome youth decked out in a kind of Regency costume and hairdo. Such watercolors were made popular in engravings by Felix Milius, as was Baldini’s similar painting The Letter.10

Interest in Hope’s designs by consumers, designers, and furniture makers continued in the 1860s and 1870s.11 The so-called Queen Anne Revival was also stimulating an eclectic enthusiasm for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century furniture design in the 1870s, so that in Walter Crane’s illustrations for Beauty and the Beast of about 1873–74, characters are sitting incongruously on Thomas Hope revival furniture.12 Large and successful furniture-making firms such as Holland & Son used Hope’s designs, including figures from Costume of the Ancients, as inlaid or painted decoration on their furniture. Public interest in Regency and Empire furnishings became even more apparent in the 1880s, when designs were illustrated in the trade journal The Cabinet Maker & Art Furnisher on August 1, 1884, as well as being recommended for consumers, particularly women, by that doyen of home-furnishing advice Mrs. Haweis in her books The Art of Decoration (1881) and Beautiful Houses (1882).13

In January 1895, The Cabinet Maker & Art Furnisher devoted several pages to illustrations of Hope’s designs from Household Furniture, recommending them because “the Empire style comes to us in much the same way that it came at the beginning of the century.”14 Firms such as Edwards and Roberts of Wardour Street produced furniture directly after Hope’s designs, such as the magnificent chair of mahogany with a brass inlaid lyre back of 1892–99,15 and combined these with other pieces in the Empire style16. Typical of the ensembles into which pieces by such makers as Edwards and Roberts were incorporated was a bedroom decorated in the 1890s at Minley Manor, Hampshire. The house had been built in the French Renaissance manner in the 1850s by Henry Clutton, but a guest bedroom was now transformed in the French Empire style with prints of Napoléon on the walls.17 James McNeill Whistler collected pieces of Sheraton and Empire furniture, original and reproduction, incorporating some of these in his Paris studio in the 1890s.18 John Singer Sargent also owned Empire furniture, including a circular table with Egyptian term figures, which he included in several portraits, notably that of Sir George and Lady Ida Sitwell and family in 1900.19

The availability of casts from old mounts assisted those interested in producing furniture in Hope’s style.20 Certain designs were more popular than others, probably because they epitomized classical styles while being sufficiently restrained to fit into a range of different interiors. The armchair with X-frame legs, based on the classical curule, different versions of which were illustrated by Hope in the Aurora Room and in Household Furniture,21 was produced by several firms for different clients. These included the painter Sir Herbert Herkomer, who created the Romanesque Arts and Crafts fantasy of Lululaund in Bushey, Hertfordshire (1886– 94), and Willie James, owner of West Dean, Sussex, a house frequently visited by Edward VII as Prince of Wales and from 1901 as king.22

Early Twentieth-Century England

The rich, costly, and durable materials of Empire-style furniture, and its association with wealth and display, were all qualities that particularly appealed to the Edwardians. Empire suites thus became popular in the new luxury hotels and liners of about 1900, such as the Hotel Cecil,23 the Carlton,24 and Norman Shaw’s Piccadilly Hotel. These were equally fashionable in the United States of America, including the Waldorf Hotel in New York City, which had Empire-style rooms as early as 1895. The style made an unusual entry into commercial architecture in the now-demolished United Kingdom Provident Association, Aldwych, London, built in 1906 by Henry Thomas Hare.25 The domed general office and the first-floor hall, with lavish decorative details, including a pentelic marble frieze with figures in gilt bronze by Lynn Jenkins, have the flavor of the French Empire style and of Hope.

A very different and more serious phase was ushered in by the architects Charles Reilly and Sir Albert Richardson.26 Reilly, an influential professor of architecture at the Liverpool School of Architecture, promoted a combination of French Beaux-Arts and American classicism, although his Students’ Union at Liverpool of 1910 is a handsome essay in an English neo-Grecian style. The Regency Revival was promoted by his friend Stanley Adshead, who went into partnership with Stanley Ramsey, a pupil of Reilly, with whom he produced a model estate for the Duchy of Cornwall at Kennington in 1913–14. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and his brother Adrian designed a Hopeian house at 129 Grosvenor Road, of 1913–I5, for the Honorable Sir Arthur Stanley, M.P., an unmarried son of the 17th Earl of Derby.27 He sent Giles Scott to Pompeii to study antique domestic architecture, and he commissioned Scott to design neo-antique furniture for the house.28 It had a neo-antique stoa open to the Thames, but men who ran the barges invaded it and stole the cushions.29

In the meantime, Albert Richardson played a key role in drawing attention to Thomas Hope as a model for modern designers. In 1911 he was the first to publish plates from Hope’s Household Furniture, as well as surviving pieces of Hope’s furniture. These appeared in two articles in the Architectural Review, in which he praised Hope for raising furniture design to “a living and first rate art, closely allied to architecture.”30 This was part of Richardson’s ambition to break away from what he saw as the sentimental insularity of the Arts and Crafts movement and to reintroduce the English to the intellectual clarity of continental neoclassical architecture and design. To promote this aim, he published more pioneering articles on the “Néo Grec Style” of Jean-Charles Krafft, Jacques-Ignace Hittorff, and Karl Friedrich Schinkel,31 culminating in his monumental folio on British classical architecture from the 1730s to the 1880s as a consistent tradition that he intended to revive.32

The Deepdene Sale in 1917

The sale of Thomas Hope’s collection at the Deepdene in the middle of World War I, at one of the most traumatic moments in European history, was a turning point in the appreciation of his achievement and in what we might call his afterlife. Comparatively few people had seen his furniture since his death in 1831,33 but the dispersal of his collections, which began in 1917 and ended in 1937, gave access to it for a new generation of international collectors, private and public, on both sides of the Atlantic. These included three figures we have already introduced: the American playwright Edward Knoblock, Sir Albert Richardson, and Lord Gerald Wellesley, both architects, and also the Italian art historian Mario Praz. Buyers also included many of the better-known furniture dealers, including L. Harris, H. Blairman, and H. & J. Simmons.

Edward Knoblock, who played an important role as an early collector of Hope’s furniture, was born in New York and educated first in Berlin and then for four years at Harvard, where he studied French and English literature.34 He was intended for the family firm of architects but settled in 1897 in London, where he became a playwright. He had a great success with Kismet in 1911 and also collaborated with Arnold Bennett on Milestones, a play about three generations of the same family, first produced at the Royalty Theatre in 1912. Henry James said to him: “You first discovered yourself in England, just as I first did myself.” However, in 1912 he took an apartment in the Palais Royal in Paris, the garden square designed by Victor Louis in the 1780s, which he said was then “looked upon by French people as decayed and antiquated.” He claimed that “I was among those first to ‘resuscitate’ it,” which he did by furnishing his apartment in the late Directoire and Retour de l’Egypte manner, “then still considered a bastard style.”35

Knoblock took a set of rooms in Albany in April 1914, which he described as “that oldest and most sedate of bachelor chamber in London. I had always wanted to live there.”36 In the set with the “bow-window and balcony facing Vigo Street,” he aimed to create authentic Empire Revival interiors with the help of the architect Maxwell Ayrton. The English counterpart of his rooms in the Palais Royal, they included “a Récamier couch and various cabinets—all, of course, solemn Regency,” with “walls marbled in deep sienna and varnished,”37 and divided into panels by Greek key friezes, and curtains sporting palmette borders.

Knoblock was an extensive purchaser of Thomas Hope’s furniture at the Deepdene sale in 1917. The result was described, somewhat ironically, by his friend Arnold Bennett, in his novel The Pretty Lady (1918), in which Knoblock appears as “G. J. Hoape.” Bennett, who was of a generation to find Hope rather strong meat, wrote in a chapter called “The Albany”:

[Hope] had furnished his flat in the Regency style of the first decade of the nineteenth century, as matured by George Smith, “upholder extraordinary to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.” The Pavilion at Brighton had given the original idea to G.J., who saw in it the solution of the problem of combining the somewhat massive dignity suitable to a bachelor of middling age with the bright, unconquerable colours which the eternal twilight of London demands…. Here was the clash of rich primary colours, the perpendiculars which began with bronze girls’ heads and ended with bronze girls’ feet or animals’ claws, the vast flat surfaces of furniture, the stiff curves of wood and a drapery, the morbid rage for solidity which would employ a candelabrum weighing five hundredweight to hold a single wax candle; it was a style debased, a style which was shedding the last graces of French Empire in order soon to appeal to a Victoria determined to be utterly English and good … a formidable blue chair whose arms developed into the grinning heads of bronze lions … the unique bookcase which bore the names of “Homer” and “Virgil” in bronze characters on its outer wings.38

More importantly, Knoblock shortly set out his Hope furniture at Beach House, Worthing, an elegant villa of 1820 by J. B. Rebecca, which he had bought at the end of the war. He remodeled, redecorated, and refurnished this in 1918–21 with Maxwell Ayrton as architect, creating the first Hope revival interior after the Deepdene sale. Knoblock described how “I split my interests between architecture and authorship … not resting till every moulding and door-knob in the place was of the correct period.” As a result, “the place ended by my not possessing it but by its possessing me,” so that he came to feel that “the fortune I put into Beach House I should have spent in running a theatre.” Nonetheless, he was justifiably proud of it as a “perfect example of the Regency days­—a museum which I might ultimately bequeath to the town.”

The Painted Library, with wall decoration of simulated drapery and Parisian fringe, contained not only the monopodium table with an inlaid top and plain support, but also other furniture from the Deepdene, including the bookcase and one of Denon’s Egyptian armchairs. Knoblock’s enthusiasm for the monopodium table resulted in his ownership of another version, with inlaid top and base, which might have been originally in his chambers in Albany. By 1931 this version was in the back drawing room of his London home, 11 Montagu Place,39 and finally in his last home, 21 Ashley Place, London.40

Beach House was publicized in the influential pages of Country Life in 192441 by the twenty-one year-old Christopher Hussey, who, as we shall see, was to be a major figure in the twentieth-century rediscovery of Thomas Hope. Indeed, this article, the first ever published on a Regency house in Country Life, also contained the first full account of Thomas Hope, while John Martin Robinson has claimed that “the photographs show Hope’s collection redeployed in a modern Thomas Hope interior which has remained an influential architectural inspiration ever since.”42

John Cornforth also hailed Beach House as “the first major statement of the Empire Revival,”43 so that the dispersal of Knoblock’s collection of Hope furniture is a great loss. Discovering that Hope’s mother was a Van der Hoeven, Knoblock developed a strong emotional sympathy with Hope, because his own paternal grandmother was a Verhoeven. He confessed that, as a consequence, “I sometimes wonder whether further back I may not have some of the same blood in my veins as Thomas Hope.”44

A parallel to Knoblock in France was the bachelor scholar and collector Paul Marmottan, who used his private fortune to acquire paintings, furniture, and other objets d’art from the Empire period. His aim, like that of Knoblock and, as we shall see, of Mario Praz in Italy, was to create an Empire setting in his own house. He was moved by a feeling of kinship with the Napoleonic régime, particularly in its cultural and administrative aspects, the courts of Napoleonic Italy having a special fascination for him as a lover of Italy.45 After his death, his house and its contents, through the terms of his will, became the Musée Marmottan. Beginning to collect in the 1880s at a time when the art of the Empire was widely discredited, Marmottan acquired three paintings by Louis Gauffier,46 an artist whose work had also appealed to Hope. Gauffier owned pieces of early neoclassical and Directoire furniture, which he included in his paintings. Marmottan made a special study of his work and published a major article on him.47 He also bought a 1795 portrait of Cacault, the French ambassador to Rome and Florence,48 by J.–L. Sablet, who painted Thomas Hope playing cricket in 1792.

The Italian literary and art historian Mario Praz was consciously indebted to both Knoblock and Marmottan, as is clear from the chapter he devoted to memories of them in his book On Neoclassicism.49 Praz is important as a pioneer in collecting watercolors of Empire interiors, which he published in his key work on the history of interior decoration. Here he used his study of psychology and poetry to explain the extraordinary hold that such watercolors have over us.50

Praz visited Knoblock in September 1937 in his house at Ashley Place, having discovered him as a collector of Hope furniture through the writings of Margaret Jourdain, to whom we shall shortly return. Praz knew that in the 1920s Knoblock had become a film impresario in Hollywood, where he moved in the circle of Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford and renewed his friendship with Somerset Maugham and Hugh Walpole. Praz initially wondered whether Knoblock, as “an expert in theatrical production, [would] have been able to compete with the skill of the baroque architects who knew how to create an illusion of amplitude and breathtaking space in surroundings on a very small scale?” However, he was reassured on arrival at Ashley Place by “that sense of a charming deception which one feels in contemplating a stage scene from the wings, a half-dark scene, with the curtain lowered, a fictitious room.”51 Praz had responded with sensitivity to the world inhabited by Knoblock, of whom a close friend wrote that “his knowledge of everything connected with the Theatre was astounding, from the history of furniture and costume to stage-management and the art of acting.”52

A student of psychology and perception, Praz claimed that “the ultimate meaning of a harmoniously decorated house is to mirror man, but to mirror him in his ideal being; it is an exaltation of the self … a museum of the soul.”53 Praz was influenced by Walter Benjamin, the German writer on aesthetics and literature, who argued: “The interior is not only the universe, but also the sheath of the private man. To inhabit means to leave traces.… The detective novel is born, which sets out to search for these traces. The Philosophy of Furniture [an essay by Edgar Allan Poe] and his mystery stories show Poe as the first physiognomist of the interior.”54

Praz must have sympathized with Knoblock as an operator in the imaginative world of stage and film production who valued the associations of the objects he had collected with episodes in both his own life and in that of Thomas Hope, to whom, as we have seen, Knoblock had persuaded himself that he was related. One of the associations of the Deepdene sale for Knoblock was that he went to it direct from having been “invalided home from a Hospital ship off the Turkish coast,” where he “had hung between life and death for many weeks.” He described himself at the sale as “a miserable figure,” yet “forgetful for the moment of all the senseless slaughter across the ChanneJ.”55 He found that acquiring objects of such high quality acted as a tonic so that he felt that “this sale saved my life, almost as much as the admirable surgeon had done in those far away Mediterranean waters.” Moreover, returning to military service, he was sustained by the thought that all these treasures were awaiting his return. He also claimed to enjoy a special kinship with his Hope pieces on the grounds that they had passed directly from Hope’s own family to him at the Deepdene sale, without any intermediate owners.

The most complete expression of such an associative approach to collecting came in Mario Praz’s remarkable autobiography.56 This is cast in the unusual form of a tour of the magnificent apartment in the Palazzo Ricci in Rome in which he housed his striking collection of Regency and Empire objects. Each piece recalls a chain of personal recollections; a typical example was the reference to his massive bookcase flanked by bearded male figures, which may have been designed by Thomas Hope. Recalling his memories of Knoblock and his wartime acquisitions of Hope’s furniture, Praz wrote of the sale at the Deepdene in 1917 that pieces such as the monumental bookcase with sphinx heads and lion monopodia.57 “had fallen to Knoblock for a ridiculously low sum during a period when people were afraid of bombings and had no wish whatever to buy furniture.”58

Like Marmottan and Knoblock, Praz wanted his collection to become a permanent museum after his death. In Praz’s case, it would be an expression of “his yearning for a lost ‘united’ Europe of royal and noble families,”59 for he was a conservative who wrote: “As long as there are four walls that still keep the aroma of that vanished Europe, it is among those walls that we wish to die.”60 His collection was bought after his death by the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna in Rome, which installed it as the Museo Mario Praz in his apartment at the Palazzo Primoli in 1995.

The 1920s and 1930s: Regency and Modernism

The sympathies of Knoblock were accompanied by the scholarly study of Regency furniture and of Thomas Hope by Margaret Jourdain. She was engaged to write articles for Country Life by its proprietor, Edward Hudson, and was the redoubtable companion from 1919 until her death in 1951 of the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett. In a book on late Georgian furniture and decoration, Miss Jourdain illustrated pieces of Hope furniture from Knoblock’s collection, just five years after his acquisition of them at the Deepdene sale.61 She followed this with a fuller account of Hope in her monograph on Regency furniture,62 whereas further evidence of the continuing fascination with Hope was the publication in 1937 by John Tiranti, Ltd., of the plates, though not the text, of his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration.

Interest in Regency and Empire styles had already been promoted by the appearance of a massive volume published by Country Life in 1931, Buckingham Palace, its Furniture, Decoration and History, by H. Clifford Smith and Christopher Hussey, who acknowledged in the preface help from Albert Richardson. The book was dedicated to Queen Mary, who had done much to reinstate Regency interiors and furniture in the royal palaces that had been displaced and rejected by subsequent changes of taste. This book was followed by a monograph on the Royal Pavilion at Brighton by its director, Henry Roberts. Also dedicated to Queen Mary, the book helped make extravagant aspects of Regency taste seem broadly acceptable in the modern world.63

Richardson owned a set of wall lights purchased at the Deepdene sale as well as a pair of griffon wall lights and a picture frame. Although he created carefully arranged thematic interiors in which to incorporate his furniture at Avenue House, Ampthill, Bedfordshire, he may have found that the wall lights did not fit, for aesthetic reasons or because of size, and he moved them to 31 Old Burlington Street, London.64 Apart from Richardson and Knoblock, others who bought at the Deepdene sale in 1917 included Irene Law, Thomas Hope’s great-granddaughter, and Lord Gerald Wellesley, later 7th Duke of Wellington. Mrs. Law and her husband, Henry, subsequently published a well-documented study of members of the Hope family that contained the fullest account so far of Thomas Hope’s life and achievements.65

Lord Gerald Wellesley, an architect, decorator, and collector, was a friend of Knoblock and another member of the group of Hope enthusiasts of the early twentieth century. They were influential in introducing Hope’s furniture to both public and private collections through their generosity in lending to exhibitions, as well as by allowing their furniture to be illustrated in contemporary periodicals, such as Country Life.66 He also owned one of the monopodium tables, as well as two startling black-and-gold wall lights from the Egyptian Room at Duchess Street, some Egyptian figures and a pair of marble obelisks from the Deepdene. As a recognized authority on the Regency period, he was consulted in 1945 by Leigh Ashton, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, about the possibility of acquiring furniture from the Knoblock collection, and Wellesley strongly recommended the acquisition of the bookcase and the Denon armchairs from the Deepdene. Unfortunately, his advice was not followed, presumably for lack of funds or lack of display space for the bookcase. He had also advised the museum regarding the successful acquisition of an example of the inlaid monopodium table in 1936.67

Lord Gerald Wellesley, who was in the diplomatic service from 1908 to 1919, was briefly a pupil of Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel, Grenadier Guards Officer, landowner, brilliant and idiosyncratic classical architect, and Roman Catholic convert, who traveled around in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce, sporting an astrakhan coat and an eyeglass.

Becoming a partner in 1921 of Trenwith Wills, a pupil of Reilly and of Sir Albert Richardson, Wellesley created Regency interiors for himself about 1930 at 11 Titchfield Terrace, Albert Road, Regent’s Park, which were clearly influenced by Knoblock.68 Wellesley’s empathy for this period was fully understandable in view of his regard for his famous ancestor, the great Duke of Wellington, the “iron duke.” Christopher Hussey, who shared a house with Wellesley in the country, illustrated Titchfield Terrace in a remarkable article on the interiors of four “Regency” houses, the others being Wellesley’s at 17 Park Square East, for H. Venning; Goodhart-Rendel’s at 13 Crawford Street; and Knoblock’s at 11 Montagu Place.69

Wellesley and Trenwith Wills also rebuilt Hinton Ampner House, Hampshire, for Ralph Dutton in 1936–37,70 in a style appropriate to his collection of eighteenth-century and Regency furniture, which included pieces in the manner of Hope.71 Dutton, a wealthy bachelor and connoisseur who was keenly interested in Hope, published a book on English interiors72 in which he included engravings from Hope’s Designs of Modern Costume (1812), including one on the title page. The dust jacket featured an aquatint of the room known as the Green Pavilion at Frogmore House, built by James Wyatt in Windsor Great Park for Queen Charlotte in the 1790s. This illustration was taken from Pyne’s Royal Residences (1819), an early use of this important source for knowledge of Regency interiors. Dutton claimed perceptively that the furnishings of Carlton House, also known from Royal Residences, “represented a new sentiment in the arrangement of rooms.”73

His friend Wellesley, who owned Hope furniture, published a well-informed article on Hope and Regency furniture in 1937, in which he described the introduction to Hope’s Household Furniture as “perhaps the most important apologetic for the whole Regency style existing.”74 He even went so far as to claim that “as the poetry of Shakespeare is to the rest of Elizabethan poetry, so the furniture of Thomas Hope is to the rest of Regency furniture.”75 Becoming known in private circles as “the iron duchess” on inheriting the Wellington dukedom in 1943, he proceeded to decorate in suitably Regency styles the iron duke’s country seat, Stratfield Saye, Hampshire.76 Similar work was subsequently carried out at Sheringham Hall, Norfolk, a chaste classical villa of 1810–13 by Humphry Repton, which was decorated and furnished in the Regency Revival manner from 1954 to 1958 by its bachelor squire, Thomas Upcher. With furniture such as the gryphon wall lights, inspired by Hope’s Household Furniture (pls. xxx, LIII), these interiors were duly recorded by Christopher Hussey in Country Life.77

One of the most striking examples of what we might call the “Anglo-Franco-American Empire Revival taste” on the eve of World War II had been the dining room at the Holme, Regent’s Park (1939), for Mrs. Marshall Field, later the Honorable Mrs. Peter Pleydell-Bouverie.78 This glittering essay in white, silver, and gold, created in a Regency villa designed by Decimus Burton in 1817, was designed by Stephane Boudin of the Paris firm of Jansen. Mrs. Field’s brother, Edward James, employed the decorator Mrs. Dolly Mann, a friend of Knoblock’s,79 to create extravagant neo-Regency effects at Monkton on the estate of West Dean House in Sussex. This style had already made an effortless transference to the gloss and glass of 1920s and 1930s Art Déco. A classic example with a serious neoclassical tone is Mulberry House, 36 Smith Square, a Lutyens house of 1911 in which two rooms were transformed for Lady Melchett by Darcy Braddell in 1931.80 They contained decorations by Glynn Philpot and C. S. Jagger, including jazz-modern neo-Greek murals in silver foil and a bronze relief depicting “Scandal,” combined with Greek Doric columns and a genuine Greek head—the perfect setting for an early Evelyn Waugh novel. Categorizing such contemporary taste as “Vogue Regency,” Osbert Lancaster suggested that Regency furniture was compatible with modern design. He thus claimed that “today, the more sensible of modern architects realise that the desperate attempt to find a contemporary style can only succeed if the search starts at the point where Soane left off.”81

Osbert Lancaster was reflecting views expressed by Christopher Hussey, who wrote in 1929 about Regency furniture at Southill Park and drew attention to Hope’s Household Furniture, stressing Hope as a “progressive” figure who was “tired of the inanities of prevailing fashions.” Hussey thus claimed to see a “striking similarity between some of the pieces illustrated here and recent ‘modern’ furniture.” The context is that Country Life always sought to illustrate new country and town houses, as well as old ones. All the new ones had been traditional in design, so the new International Modern houses presented Hussey with something of a problem. He and the designers, architects, and patrons with whom he associated had a genuine feeling for Thomas Hope as someone with whom twentieth-century man could feel an affinity. Hope had rejected the trivial ornament of his day, arguing that ornament should only be used when it had a meaning, and that furniture should have a solid architectural quality. Hussey emphasized the square solemnity of Hope’s furniture in a fascinating attempt to make Regency design look modern. This was a case of special pleading in which Hussey saw the Hope he wanted to see, for how could one seriously hail as modern and functional someone who, like Hope, justified his ambitious design for a curtain pelmet as a “trophy of Grecian armour; applicable to the cornice of a window curtain”?82

Nonetheless, Hussey enlarged on this modernist theme two years later in the article on four modern Regency houses that we have already noted. Here he felt obliged to rescue Regency from the low popularity rating that it held in 1931. He mildly ridiculed the fact that it was “felt to be something ‘daring,’” that “friends murmur ‘how exciting’ or raise their eyebrows slightly” at a style that had associations with Regency “bucks” and “the wicked goings on of the Regent’s cronies.” Hussey complained that it was thus considered as morally debased, artificial, and “heavy and tasteless,” by comparison with the work of Adam. Rejecting those who today often regarded it as “ugly,” he urged that “the Regency designers were the modernists of a hundred and thirty years ago.” He referred to their “impatience with triviality” which led them to seek remedies in “solidarity and simplicity.” He thus saw a “kinship between Regency and modern taste (the product of similar social conditions),” even describing Lord Gerald Wellesley’s drawing room at Park Square East for H. J. Venning as “frankly modern.”

Hussey claimed Hope’s Household Furniture as the “bible and Roll of Battle Abbey in one to all Regency bucks,” although, oddly, he mistakenly believed that it illustrated interiors at the Deepdene. He argued that “it must always be remembered that Regency was the last recognizable style that furniture designers employed before the great débâcle of Victorianism. It is thus one of the natural points for departure into the future, and quite the best. For it is sane, civilised and formal, imparting to the experimental designer a healthy horror of the amorphous, the grimly functional and the merely ‘fun.’”83

Ten years after the Deepdene sale, examples of Hope’s furniture were on public display in London in 1928 and 1929 to encourage and stimulate other collectors.84 The Olympia Exhibition in 1928 included Lord Gerald Wellesley’s monopodium table and Richardson’s griffon wall lights. The exhibition at Lansdowne House in 1929 featured Knoblock’s monopodium table with a plain base, his armchair by Denon, and a pair of pole screens. Also on display was Hope’s table from the Aurora Room, which had been owned in 1924 by the decorator Ronald Fleming.81

In fact, the hopes for a modern classicism of such individuals as Hussey, Lancaster, and the architect Raymond Erith were dashed when it became increasingly clear that the Modern movement was to reject any sympathies for earlier and classical design. Gloom was heightened by the massive demolition of Georgian and Regency buildings in London between the wars, although this doubtless drew the attention of the public to their merits, on the principle that we never appreciate anything until it is taken away from us. The destruction of Nash’s Regent Street, the very heart of Regency London, was the subject of an entire chapter of a book on town planning by the architect Arthur Trystan Edwards.86 As early as 1914, he had written an article praising Adshead and Ramsey’s newly completed Duchy of Cornwall Estate, Kennington. In lamenting the demolition of Regent Street, he defended stucco, so long condemned as “sham,” and described the street as “the most beautiful street in the world. In a second edition of Good and Bad Manners in Architecture in 1944, he claimed that his chapter had been responsible for creating “the Regency cult.

However, the London County Council had decided in 1926 to demolish a great neoclassical masterpiece, Waterloo Bridge, built in 1811–17 from designs by John Rennie. Its cubic austerity and powerful Greek Doric elements made it the architectural equivalent to some of Thomas Hope’s more massive and archaeological furniture. Country Life ran an appeal to save the bridge to which it devoted a special number in 1926 in which Sir Reginald Blomfield hailed it as simply “the finest bridge that has ever been built.”87 This went even further than Albert Richardson’s praise of it as one of the outstanding buildings of its time in his Monumental Classic Architecture (1914). It was nonetheless demolished in 1938.

Christopher Hussey, in the meantime, had become increasingly interested in the Picturesque movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which Thomas Hope had also played a significant part. In his major study of the Picturesque of 1924,88 Hussey described the Deepdene briefly, as he was to do later in a book on country houses in which he included a chapter on Scotney Castle, Kent, which he had inherited in 1952.89 This was a romantic house, built in 1837–44 from designs by Anthony Salvin as a Picturesque assembly related to its landscape, along lines of which Hope would have approved. Hussey could discover little about the Deepdene, writing that “there are reasons for believing he [Hope] began [it] not long after purchasing the property in 1802, although the date usually given is twenty-seven years later.”90

The reasons for the revival of interest in the arts of the Regency and Empire are multifarious. They include the glamour of objects associated with royal and princely families, connections that appealed to those who, like Mario Praz, despaired at the destruction of the old social order in Europe after 1914. For Marmottan, as we have seen, the romantic appeal of Napoléon, his family, and his courts was important; Knoblock regarded himself as a descendant of Hope; Mrs. Henry Law, who actually was a descendant, was certainly proud of that but even more of the fact that her maternal grandmother was, in consequence, Lady Mildred Cecil, a daughter of the 2nd Marquess of Salisbury; while Lord Gerald Wellesley saw himself as contributing to the world of his predecessor, the great Duke of Wellington. The understanding and promotion of Regency design was also seen by writers such as Hussey as a means of civilizing the potentially threatening aspects of modernism.

From the 1930s to the Present Day

In 1934 Gavin Henderson, 2nd Lord Faringdon, inherited Buscot Park, Berkshire, which he filled with a magnificent collection of furniture and works of art, including a pair of armchairs and a couch, from the Egyptian Room at Duchess Street, as well as a pair of torchères, also by Thomas Hope.91 Since this late Georgian house had been completely remodeled in the Victorian period, Faringdon employed the architect Geddes Hyslop to return it in the late 1930s to a classical form, so that the furniture could be displayed in a stylistically sympathetic setting that would also be appropriate as having the character of a private house not a public museum. Since Buscot was given to the National Trust in 1948 and opened to the public, Hope’s striking furniture has become familiar to many thousands of visitors.

Lord Faringdon was advised by the photographer and interior designer Angus McBean, who was one of the many enthusiasts for Hope’s furniture after World War II. McBean owned a cabinet that had been illustrated in the watercolor by Penry Williams of the Boudoir at the Deepdene, as well as a pair of bacchante masks. Fellow collectors included James Watson-Gandy-Brandreth, who bought the bookcase from Knoblock’s collection in 1946; and the influential dealer in architectural drawings and books Ben Weinreb, who owned a second cabinet.92 The year 1958 saw the appearance of the first book devoted solely to Hope, published as an unillustrated paperback.93 The doctoral dissertation of Sandor Baumgarten, a Hungarian scholar, it was written in a flowery style and concentrated on Hope as a literary figure but contained much valuable bibliographical and documentary information. Clifford Musgrave, director of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, for which he acquired some Hope objects, published a book on Regency furniture with a chapter entitled “Thomas Hope and Classical Purity.”94 The doctoral dissertation on Thomas Hope by David Watkin, nominally supervised by Nikolaus Pevsner but effectively so by John Harris, attempted to cover Hope’s contributions to all the arts. Published as a monograph in 1968,95 it was followed four years later by the major international exhibition The Age of Neo-Classicism at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Academy in London. Ample attention was here given to Hope, including a re-creation of the Aurora Room at Duchess Street with its contents.

The architect Sir James Stirling was, surprisingly, a collector of furniture by Thomas Hope and George Bullock, although this had no recognizable influence on his own brutalist architecture. Mark Girouard explained that Stirling “had become interested in Hope because he had a new appreciation of the monumental and was about to develop this in his own architecture. The Hope chairs, with their statuesque simplicity and swooping curves, were like individual monuments designed for Regency drawing rooms.”96 Stirling’s collection included two chairs after Hope’s design with lyres inlaid in the back as well as Knoblock’s monopodium table. Mark Girouard quoted Stirling as confessing in 1984 that he liked Hope’s chairs because “they are extreme, outrageous, over the top, eccentric, and much more gutsy than anything French Empire. There’s absolutely no feeling of restraint or lack of confidence. But they aren’t huge in scale either.” Girouard pointed out: “On other occasions he cited them as examples of the fact that monumentality was a matter of presence, rather than of size.” The interest taken in Hope’s designs by this high profile modernist architect was as important as the fact that he owned examples of Hopeian furniture.97

Finally, an infinitely more serious figure in Hope studies is the scholar and collector Philip Hewat-Jaboor, whose former London apartment contained key objects from Duchess Street, all illustrated in Household Furniture: the pair of exotic wall lights from the Egyptian Room purchased by the future Duke of Wellington at the Deepdene Sale in 1917; the pedimented cabinet containing Greek vases from the “Room Containing Greek Fictile Vases,” a Chinese sang-de-boeuf vase, ornamented with delicately chase gilt-bronze mounts designed by Hope; and a pair of gilded and painted stands modeled on Roman altars and made to support Chinese fish tanks.

© Bard Graduate Center, Frances Collard and David Watkin.