HOPE, Thomas

Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, executed from designs by Thomas Hope.

      T. Bensley London, 1807. Folio, half title, engraved title and 59 full page engravings, early owner's inscription dated 1868, some scattered foxing and a little dusted at the margins; otherwise a fresh copy in recent paper boards, retaining engraved large section of descriptive wrapper pasted to front board. A very good copy of the first edition of one of the first major works to document the Regency style, and an important sourcebook for many nineteenth-century painters: William Michael Rossetti's copy.Thomas Hope (1769-1830), the Regency collector, writer and decorator, was from a family of influential merchant bankers known. Supported by enormous private wealth, his family was renowned for their estate at Groenendaal Park, the extensive public gardens of which were opened to the public by Hope's father. Hope himself was interested in the arts from a very young age, and his taste encouraged during his Grand Tour of Europe, Greece, Turkey and Egypt. He bought his London home in Duchess Street in 1799 and early decided to make it a showpiece for his new design aesthetic. The attractive perspective and plan engravings here actually illustrate the furniture and interiors of the house. The interiors, which depict not only classical styles but also the modern taste for Egypt, India, and Moorish Spain, were intended to influence public taste. One of the plates depicts Hope's famous Regency Egyptian Revival style armchairs: the actual chairs have been since 1984 been a centrepiece for the collection of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.This copy has an early ownership inscription by William Michael Rossetti, the English writer and critic. Rossetti, the brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina Georgina, was one of the seven founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, and became the movement's unofficial organizer and bibliographer. It is interesting to note that Dante Gabriel Rossetti was known to have drawn widely from Hope, underlining just how this was a core work for the Pre-Raphaelites (see Frances van Keuren, 'Thomas Hope's costume of the Ancients and the painters George Cooke and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Magazine Antiques, July 2008, online). It is known that Dante Gabriel Rossetti had the work in an 1841 reprint, and that he borrowed a copy of the original edition from Algernon Charles Swinburne (who complained how about how long Rossetti was in returning it).