Thomas Hope, the Aurora Room in the Duchess Street house, London. Published in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, Plate VII, 1907.

Penry Williams, watercolor of the "Circular Conservatory," painted for John Britton's Illustrations of the Deepdene, 1825-26 (unpublished).

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SEPTEMBER 2008 » book review

Discovering Hope

Thomas Hope: Regency Designer
edited by David Watkin and Philip Hewat-Jaboor
Yale University Press, New Haven, CT; 2008
520 pages; hardcover; 40 b&w & 420 color illistrations; $100
ISBN: 978-0-300-12416-3

Reviewed by Thomas Gordon Smith

Who was Thomas Hope and why is a man who died 177 years ago important today? Because Hope was a polymath and had a complex personality, the answer branches into many facets conveyed in the 15 chapters of the exquisite Thomas Hope: Regency Designer. Expert authors develop specific qualities of Hope's ideas with a wealth of pictorial evidence that shows what he and a multitude of helpers produced.

David Watkin and Philip Hewat-Jaboor have coordinated a book that serves as the catalogue for a major exhibition in London and New York City but also stands as the definitive record and analysis of Hope's accomplishments. It explores the subject more deeply than the physical exhibition can do and one will return to it for years. Having both the book and the show is a rare opportunity, and we have that luxury in New York City through mid-November 2008.

Fresh from a three-month showing at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London, "Thomas Hope: Regency Designer" runs at the Bard Graduate Center on West 86th Street from mid-July through mid-November. The exhibition includes a remarkable group of objects that make Hope's ideas tangible. David Watkin and Philip Hewat-Jaboor were joined by Daniella Ben-Arie as curators. They were aided by Susan Weber, director of the Bard Graduate Center, and many members of the Bard and V&A staff. Fourteen authors contributed essays that explore Hope's contributions to design, philosophy and literature. Hundreds of individuals are acknowledged in the front matter for assisting in the exhibition and catalogue efforts. The book itself weighs four pounds and costs $100, but I urge you to buy a copy early because relatively few were printed. Then lug it along to the Bard exhibition. For readers of Period Homes, I will focus on the architecture, interiors and furniture and encourage you to discover the other facets in the wide-ranging book and exhibition.

Thomas Hope, born in the Netherlands, resettled with his Scottish banking family in London. He was an extremely wealthy outsider to a London society that he successively criticized and attempted to enter. Exclusion and independence allowed him to preach by publishing books and practice by thoroughly remodeling major houses. In these he created total environments that encompassed the attire for his wife, furniture, interior decoration, gardens and collections of decorative arts, Greek vases, paintings and statuary. Hope was not an architect and he did not build from scratch, but in his famous town residence on Duchess Street in London and his later country house in Surrey, the Deepdene, he conceived architectural additions and radically renovated interiors with the aid of two architects and legions of craftsmen. Once complete, especially at Duchess Street, he threw the houses open as models of cosmopolitan and intellectualized ways of living. The effects contrasted with the practices of the insular British society he desperately wanted to join and whose aesthetic attitudes he influenced.

In youth, Thomas Hope's grand tour lasted 10 years during the final decade of the 18th century. In Italy, he commissioned paintings and statuary from Canova, Flaxman and Thorvaldsen. He ventured beyond Rome, not only to Greece, but also to Egypt, Syria and Ottoman Turkey. Unlike most grand tourists, Hope stayed a long time and recorded architectural settings with a strong sense of place and intimate detail. He was also interested in recording ethnic clothing and hairstyles. The wash of "Room in a Turkish Palace, Constantinople," painted about 1790, is a finished study from preparatory drawings and notes. The work shows Hope's concern for interior arrangements of the posh room, which he labeled "Turkish room. Sopha scarlet cloth & gold fringe. Cushions silk stuff with velvet flowers.[...] Small Octagon table inlaid in mother of pearl.[…]" A decade later, Hope would create refined settings for his London house on Duchess Street that reflected his studies.

Thomas Hope returned from travel to London. From 1799 to 1802, he transformed a 1770 house by Robert Adam into a demonstration piece for reforming domestic taste in Britain. He animated a polyglot archaeology with a strong infusion of the imperial style that Charles Percier created for Napoleon. With considerable frustration, Hope pushed London cabinetmakers practicing the elegant, light, flat and abstract mode we associate with Hepplewhite and Sheraton to produce full-bodied, and what John Morley called "marmoreal," designs. Like others in Europe, from Scandinavia to the toe of Italy, he synthesized archaeological sources from architecture, statuary and ancient and Renaissance furniture.

In England, this goal had been adumbrated in etchings by the young architect Charles Heathcote Tatham. Thomas Hope engaged Tatham as an amanuensis to remodel the Duchess Street house and to add a wing for a picture gallery. The gallery was a very early domestic interior to sport fulsome Greek Doric columns. Hope never acknowledged Tatham's essential contributions, a self-aggrandizing practice he would repeat in the 1810s and '20s when he fundamentally transformed his country house, the Deepdene. Hope undoubtedly had similar technical and aesthetic help from furniture makers and decorators. Whether arrogant or not, Hope's influence went far beyond that of a connoisseur merely assembling great works by others. The determined stamp of Thomas Hope in architecture or interior decoration formed the foundation of a new taste. When Hope published his Duchess Street house in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration in 1807, he borrowed the identical title from Charles Percier. The line engravings, however, show a wholly synthetic British vision, not a borrowed style from Paris.

Although a chapter called "The Afterlife of Thomas Hope" demonstrates that Hope had a following throughout the 20th century, David Watkin can be said to have discovered Hope in the 1960s and fortunately, with the help of friends he inspired, he never left the subject. Watkin also recognized Tatham's involvement during his study of the drawings. In the chapter "The Reform of Taste in London: Hope's House in Duchess Street," Watkin describes Hope's transformation of a severe Adam building into a rich demonstration piece: how a house could be intellectually and aesthetically stimulating.

Other chapters discuss how several generations of Hope family members set paradigms for connoisseurship that must have inspired Thomas. No predecessors, however, had the polemical agenda combined with artistic talent and taste that allowed Hope to achieve ideas of note and shock value. Hope was also anxious for acceptance. By May 1802, he had completed the transformation of the house enough to invite 1,000 people for a party at Duchess Street, including the Prince of Wales. Two years later, Hope sent tickets for admission to members of the Royal Academy, causing resentment at his impudence, but luring some curiosity-seekers. By the spring of 1807, however, a virtual tour was available to anyone who could obtain a copy of Household Furniture and Interior Decoration Executed from Designs by Thomas Hope. In an extensive text, he cites a goal for "cultivating a new description of art, so urgently wanted, and hitherto so rarely possessed." He apologizes for the limits of the "lineal engraving" technique because, "In many ornaments, either very boldly projecting, or very deeply receding much of the beauty must depend on the strong contrast of the light and of the shaded parts." The illustrations were less elaborate, according to Watkin, because Hope wished to keep the book price down to promote its access to the cabinetmaking trade.

On the other hand, the outline engraving imitated his model, Percier and Fontaine's Recueil de décorations intérieures, brought out in parts from 1802 through 1812. Such outline draftsmanship was a classical reaction ca. 1790 against chiaroscuro engravings imitating wash rendering. Instead, the line art imitated the chaste draftsmanship of Greek vase painting. Hope himself had a good hand for linear work, and books on all of the subjects he published through the 1830s were rendered this way.

Watkin takes us through the rebuilding process of the Adam house and then leads a room-by-room tour by way of the engraved views in Household Furniture. Other chapters in the richly illustrated catalogue, and objects on view at the Bard Graduate Center, allow us to flesh out a sense of place. The drawings do not convey the actual bulk and deep coloration of a gold-leaf pier table with caryatid supports, for example. Catalogue item 68 is published with a photograph of its original location, the Aurora Room, as reconstructed in 1972 for an exhibition, "The Age of Neo-Classicism." The black-and-white photograph gives a greater sense of tonality than the line engraving can. Watkin reminds us that the silk curtains were orange satin edged with black. This room was partially reconstructed again for the Victoria & Albert exhibition, but such complex mise-en-scene, to say nothing of the superb John Flaxman statue, Aurora Abducting Cephalus, will not be transferred to the Bard's showing. On the other hand, we can see much of the furniture and many of the decorative objects from Duchess Street at the Bard.

The arrangements at Duchess Street must have changed in real life ca.1810 from what we see neoclassically frozen in Household Furniture. Those indelible ideas were transformed with Hope's maturity into something more freely eclectic and vibrant in the Deepdene, his country house in Surrey. In "The Reform of Taste in the Country," David Watkin winds our way into a three-dimensional palette that transmogrified from a Tuscan Campagnan villa to Pompeian third-style, to machicolated Gothic around the corner, blending again into a third-style conservatory, stopping short with a new theater for the arts that perhaps evoked memories of a Byzantine/Islamic mélange from his youthful travels in the Near East. The Mediterranean cavalcade of styles masked a stolid brick country house built concurrent with Adam's house on Duchess Street, but in a retardataire Baroque mode. The site was spectacular and the pastoral isolation from London snobbery allowed Hope to be, "occupied with my tulips…our countryside is truly beautiful."

Hope did not merely prolong the tulip-mania, however. He again worked with an unacknowledged architect, William Atkinson. Most likely, gardeners and others actually planted the tulips and sculpted the landscape. American aloes, as well as more fragile exotic specimens were prized. Hope transferred large quantities of his statuary, paintings and furniture to the Deepdene and he commissioned new works and interior decorations.

Like Household Furniture, a book about the Deepdene was to have been published. In anticipation, a superb group of small and loosely drawn watercolors were prepared by two young topographical painters. Penry Williams specialized in luminous interiors and William Henry Bartlett painted exterior views and landscapes. Only two drawings of rooms can be directly compared to Household Furniture. One is a "Boudoir" with vibrant orange, rose and vermillion furnishing fabrics, a Welsh-sourced "Mona" marble fireplace and a mahogany monopodium table. The table was probably transferred from Duchess Street, but a French side-chair of the modest, post-Imperial type was likely to have been newly imported. Although much of the character of the room reminds one of the Percier influence in Household Furniture, the demeanor is intimately asymmetrical and one expects Elizabeth Bennet and Miss Bingley to take a turn. One could stretch himself out on the sofa in this room. The view of the "Circular Conservatory" does indeed catch Mrs. Hope striding out of the "New Library," in front of Thorvaldsen's Psyche, a chaste, half-draped figure standing before a mirror at the back of her niche. Compared to the severely formal Aurora Room in Household Furniture, the similar composition by Penry Williams is relaxed and animated. This does not simply come from Williams' lively and painterly technique in such a small compass: it also reflects Hope's maturity as a confident designer by the age of 50, open to a more fluent eclecticism than the thematic partitions evident in the segregated Duchess House rooms.

I was able to contribute to the Hope exhibition by making an exterior model of the Deepdene with the help of students, especially Jonathan La Cross and Miriam Zamora. Since the house was radically altered by Hope's son, Henry Thomas Hope, and demolished in 1968 during the decade of David Watkin's monograph, Thomas Hope and the Neo-Classical Ideal, I consolidated the three-dimensional representation from William Henry Bartlett's effervescent watercolors and other scraps of evidence. The model shows the building in all its vitality and contradiction.

David Watkin said in a recent conversation that reading a brief reference to the Deepdene in Christopher Hussy's The Late Georgian Country House piqued his interest in Thomas Hope. Clearly, the cruel hands of neglect and suburban expansion struck at the same moment Watkin's ambitious monograph introduced a serious agenda – to discover the man's accomplishments. Now, 40 years later, hundreds of people, inspired by a small band of leaders, have published a definitive book and mounted an exhibition we are privileged to learn from and enjoy.  

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