Thomas Hope

Thomas Hope: The Gentleman of Sphinxes

When *Anastasius* appeared anonymously in 1819, literary London decided it could only be Byron. The attribution was flattering and wrong. Byron himself, on reading it, reportedly wept and said that to have written *Anastasius* he would have given up the two poems that had brought him the most glory. The actual author was a fifty-year-old Dutch-born millionaire whom society knew as "the costume and furniture man" — a figure so thoroughly identified with chairs and vases that the wit Sydney Smith could only splutter: "Is this the man of chairs and tables — the gentleman of sphinxes?"

Amsterdam Money

He was born on 30 August 1769 in Amsterdam and baptised days later at the English Reformed Church, the son of John Hope and Philippina Barbara van der Hoeven. The family were Scottish-descended merchant bankers who had emigrated to Holland, and Hope & Co. was one of the great financial houses of Europe. His father died unexpectedly in 1784. When his mother died in early 1790, Thomas came into his rights as an adult, joined the board of Hope & Co. with close to a sixth of the shares, and became an instant millionaire.

This is the fact that governs everything else. Hope never needed a client, a commission, or a patron. He could design purely to prove a point, publish at his own expense, and build a house that was less a residence than an argument.

Eight Years on the Road

At eighteen he gave himself over to the study of art, and from roughly 1787 he embarked on a grand tour of extraordinary length — eight years across Europe, Asia and Africa. He travelled Italy from 1792 to 1794 with his brother Henry Philip. From 1796 he pushed far beyond the standard circuit into the Ottoman Empire: Turkey, Rhodes, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, with something like a year spent in Constantinople. He came home with roughly 350 drawings, now held at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

The distinction matters. The conventional English gentleman's tour ended at Rome and treated antiquity as a finished, marble-white inheritance. Hope went where the ruins were still half-buried and the descendants of the ancients were still living, and he drew what he saw. His later designs are saturated with Egypt and the Levant because he had actually been there, sketchbook in hand, when almost none of his English competitors had.

When revolution spread from France to the Netherlands, Hope fled Amsterdam in 1794 — his chaise crashed at Watergraafsmeer that Christmas Eve — and settled in London with 372 paintings including Hals, Rubens, Rembrandt and Van Dyck.

Duchess Street

In 1799 he bought a townhouse on Duchess Street, off Portland Place, designed by Robert Adam, and set about dismantling Adam's taste in favour of his own. What emerged was not a home but a sequence of curated worlds, each room a different civilisation.

The Egyptian Room set genuine Egyptian sculpture among exotic furniture in pale yellow and bluish green, sharpened with black and gold. The Statue Gallery was deliberately austere — top-lit, yellow-walled, stripped of incident so that white marble would carry the room alone. The Aurora Room was the opposite: mirrors multiplying a statue of the dawn goddess, curtains in the colours of sunrise. He filled these spaces with an antiquities collection of serious scale, having bought Sir William Hamilton's Greek vases in 1801 for £4,500 and accumulated over 1,500 pieces by 1806.

Then he did the genuinely radical thing. He opened it. Visitors came from 1802, and from 10 February 1804 he issued admission tickets through the Royal Academy. A private house became a public school of taste. The Persian ambassador found it "magnificent" but "so vast it seemed almost empty."

The Book That Named a Discipline

In 1807 he published *Household Furniture and Interior Decoration*, a folio recording the Duchess Street rooms and prefaced by a reforming manifesto. The phrase "interior decoration" entered English through this book.

Hope's argument was that English taste had gone slack and should be returned to what he conceived as the spirit of classical purity, and that achieving this required the coordinated labour of the draughtsman, the modeller, the painter and the sculptor — elevating design standards and national commerce together. What he actually produced was less pure than he claimed: Regency classicism as Hope practised it fused Greek and Roman forms with Egyptian motifs, French curves and natural ornament into something visually dense and unmistakably new.

He kept publishing: *Costumes of the Ancients* (1809), *Designs of Modern Costume* (1812), *Anastasius* (1819), the philosophical *Origin and Prospect of Man* (1831), and a posthumous *Historical Essay on Architecture* (1835).

Deepdene, and the Cost of Being Hope

He married Louisa de la Poer Beresford in April 1806 and bought Deepdene, near Dorking in Surrey, in 1807. There he remodelled a Georgian house into something asymmetrical and Italianate, with a tower and an angled wing following Picturesque principles, set in 400 acres with sculpture galleries and a theatre floored in Roman mosaic. He patronised Thorvaldsen, Chantrey and Flaxman, whom he commissioned to illustrate Dante.

He was not, however, well liked. A contemporary called him "far from the most agreeable man in Europe… a little ill-looking man with an effeminate face and manner." The Persian ambassador called him incredibly ugly and reported that Louisa had married him for his money. In 1810 the painter Antoine Dubost, in a quarrel over a price, exhibited a canvas titled *La Belle et la Bête* showing Hope as a monster offering his terrified wife jewels; Louisa's brother slashed it. Of his five children, Charles died at eight in 1817 during an Italian tour, a grief critics detected in *Anastasius*.

Why Thomas Is Called a Genius

The word attached to him late and awkwardly, and the most revealing evidence is Sydney Smith's astonishment at *Anastasius* — praising its power, feeling and eloquence while unable to reconcile it with the gentleman of sphinxes. That reaction is the real argument. Hope's distinction was range: he did serious work in furniture design, interior architecture, collecting, costume scholarship, novel-writing and philosophy, and was taken seriously in each. Robert Irwin called *Anastasius* one of the most important books of the nineteenth century; the novel influenced Thackeray, Twain and Melville.

The specific faculty was synthetic rather than inventive. Hope had seen Egypt, the Levant and Italy first-hand, and he could fuse motifs from all of them into a coherent domestic idiom that others could copy — which is precisely what happened, since Regency style as we now recognise it is substantially his.

The counter-case deserves airing. His money bought him a platform no rival designer could match; it is impossible to separate the influence of his ideas from the influence of his fortune. He preached classical purity while practising eclecticism. He did not build much in his own hand — he assembled, commissioned and published. And the sneer buried in "the man of chairs and tables" contains a fair point: Hope was a supremely educated arranger of other people's craft. That is a real and rare talent. Whether it is genius depends on how much weight one gives to taste as against invention.

What Survived

He fell ill early in 1831 and died on 2 February at Duchess Street, buried ten days later in the Deepdene mausoleum he had built in 1818. His family, turning conservative, demolished the Duchess Street house in 1851, distanced themselves from *Anastasius*, and eventually dispersed the collection at a major Christie's sale in 1917 — which, perversely, revived interest in him. Deepdene was demolished in 1969; only the mausoleum survives, sealed in 1957. Hope's real monument is the Regency Revival of the 1920s and 30s and the Art Deco that followed it, both of which learned from a man who had gone to Egypt to look.

Achievements

• Fellow of the Royal Society