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.

From the exhibition: Thomas Hope: Regency Designer.

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.1 Then there was the Aurora Room designed around a marble sculptured group of Aurora (Dawn) abducting Cephalus.2 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.3 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.”4 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.5 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.6 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.7 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.8

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.9 Townley too entertained grand designs for displaying his more extensive collection10 but was forced in the restricted rooms of his house at Park Street, Westminster, to adopt a pinched Picturesque.11 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.12 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.13 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,14 as indeed was the banker, poet, and conversationalist Samuel Rogers.15 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.16 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.17 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.18 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.19

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.20 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.21

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.”22

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.23 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.24 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.25 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.26 A particular favorite of Thomas Hope was Vincenzo Pacetti,27 who restored the Hope Asclepius,28 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,29 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,30 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,31 namely the Antinous statue.32 There was also a couple restored as Apollo and the boy nymph Hyacinthus33 and a statue of Apollo with bow and quiver.34 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,35 which may be compared with the pair in the Townley Collection of the British Museum and with that in the Vatican.36 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.37 With it came the portraits of Antoninus Pius and of Faustina Maior.38 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.39 These are the over-life size Athena and the Hygieia.40 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.41 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.42 It appears, however, that the Hope of this excursion was his younger brother Henry Philip.43 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.44

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, 1801.45 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,46 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.47 It was fashionable at the time to have a big foot, and Sir William Hamilton had presented his to the British Museum in 1784.48

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.49 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.50 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.51 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;52 a basalt Egyptianizing lion said to come from the ruins of the Villa Jovis on Capri,53 and a porphyry head of Nero mounted on a bust of gilded bronze by Luigi Valadier.54 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.55 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.56 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.57

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.58 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.59 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 1802-3.60 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 1814-15,61 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.62

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.63 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.64 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.65

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,66 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.67

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 1969,68 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.69 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 1800.70 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.71 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.”72

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.73

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.75 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.76 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.77

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.78 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.79 Thomas Hope acquired the original drawings for these engravings80 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.81 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.82 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.”83

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,84 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 1802-3.85 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.86 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.87

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.88 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 £4,00089 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,90 the result of further purchases as well as disposals. For example, he is said to have sold vases in 180591 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.92 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.”93 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.94

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,95 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.96 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,97 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.98 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.99 The Cawdor vases were auctioned by Skinner and Dyke on June 5 and 6, 1800,100 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.101 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.102 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.”103 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.104 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.105 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.106 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.107 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.108

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.109

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.110 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.111

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.112 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 1826-31.113 There in 1912 the vases were seen and catalogued by Tillyard for the monograph he published on them after their sale and dispersal.114

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.115 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.”116

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.”117

© Bard Graduate Center, Ian Jenkins.