Thomas Hope: Regency Designer

The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture of New York is currently exhibiting Thomas Hope: Regency Designer.

The NY Times also ran a review of the exhibition. . The NY Times article states "The name Thomas Hope may not be familiar, but his furniture designs are: American craftsmen have been reinterpreting Hope prototypes — in the neoclassical style known as English Regency — for 200 years." Click HERE to read the full NY Times review of the exhibition.

Partial Press Release from the Bard Graduate Center follows:

July 17, 2008--November 16, 2008

From July 17 to November 16, The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture is presenting Thomas Hope: Regency Designer. This exhibition was on view first at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London from March 22 to June 22, 2008; it is the second in a series of exhibitions organized by the Bard Graduate Center to be shown at the V&A.

Designer, patron, collector, and author Thomas Hope (1769 - 1831) is one of the major figures in the history of British design who had a profound impact in Britain. Hope helped shape and define what became known as the British Regency, a mode of design and decoration that continues to be influential. Despite the key role he played in the fields of interior decoration, design, and decorative arts, however, Hope’s significance has been largely overlooked. This exhibition examines his incomparable contribution and the remarkable works of art that were created under his patronage. It also further extends the Bard Graduate Center’s international reputation for organizing exhibitions on under-recognized aspects of British design culture and history.

The exhibition conveys how Hope fostered the Regency, a fascinating amalgam of decorative details, ornament, and influences from antiquity and British and Continental European art, architecture, and design. The approximately 140 loans on view reveal the outstanding scope and complexity of Hope’s contribution to the Regency. They include furniture inspired by models from antiquity designed by Hope as well as antique and neoclassical sculpture (by Thorvaldsen and Canova, among others, as well as several Roman-Egyptian sculptures); a group of classical vases from the Sir William Hamilton collection; fascinating silver and other metalwork; and the exquisite portrait by Sir William Beechery, Thomas Hope, now in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Background
Thomas Hope, of Scottish descent, was born in Amsterdam to one of the wealthiest banking families in Europe. At the age of 18 he embarked on an extensive Grand Tour throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, that lasted nearly ten years. Along the way he made careful studies of architecture and sculpture and assembled a remarkable art collection. He moved to London in 1794, fleeing Amsterdam ahead of the French revolutionary forces.

Hope installed his collection in the extraordinary interior of his Duchess Street home, designed by Robert Adam, which he would extend and remodel. Duchess Street became a hallmark of quality and craftsmanship and a full-scale remedy to what many 19th century theorists believed was the debasement of British design through the advent of mechanization. In 1804 Hope, like his contemporary Sir John Soane, opened his house to the public. The dissemination of his ideas expanded further in 1807, when he published Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, which contained line drawings of the house’s interiors and furnishings. Like William Beckford, he himself designed and had made furniture and works of art to demonstrate what he considered to be a new and purer design form. (Also like Beckford, he published a novel [1819] that was very successful at the time, Anastasius, or Memoirs of a Modern Greek (1819).