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D.J. Watkin
The Hope family and Neo-Classicism
In this lecture I will try to define the term Neo-classicism and will relate the Hope family to this concept. I well begin by correcting a widespread misunderstanding about Neo-classicism. This is often seen as the product of a passionate belief in and recreation of the antique. I suggest that this cannot be the defining factor because a passion for antiquity has been a recurring feature of western architecture, and not only in the Renaissance: Baroque architects such as Bernini, Borromini, Cortona, and Fontana were keenly interested in Roman antiquity, Bernini's church of 1662 at Ariccia was a purified version of the Pantheon, while Cortona's S. Maria in Via Lata, Rome (1658), owed much to late Roman monuments at Baallbek and Palmyra. What 18th-century architects such as Ledoux brought to the classical tradition was an imaginative expansion of the role of architecture which took further the Renaissance use of emblem and the Vitruvian notion of decorum by which the form of a building should be suited to its function and to the status of its proprietor. Here are narrative designs by Ledoux of the 1770s: a house for the agricultural guardians at Maupertuis, and a bridge in the ideal town of Chaux.
The philosophy of association is central to this new role of architecture as a stimulus by which the imagination is prompted to unlimited speculation. Two key figures for an understanding of 18th-century taste, as exemplified by Piranesi, are the French architectural theorist Claude Perrault (1612-88) and the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). Perrault was important for overthrowing the Renaissance belief in the divinely ordained harmonic proportions of the orders. For Perrault, ‘Beauty has hardly any other foundation than fantasy’, and neither reason nor divine sanction but merely custom lay behind the orders, while The notion that beauty was associational and based on private judgement opened the way for the kind of relativism and eclecticism which coloured the architecture of the Enlightenment from the time of Fischer von Erlach's Entwurff einer historischen Architektur (1721), the first comparative history of world architecture, from which I give you his plates of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and the Colossus at Rhodes. Here are his temple of Jupiter Olympus at Baalbek and an example of Chinese garden
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architecture. They are shown related to scenery, costume and a way of life.
Association was introduced by John Locke in the influential addition which he made in 1700 to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). The power of association was given expression first of all in English garden design and garden buildings. Here in the Elysian Fields at Stowe, Kent produced the Temples of Ancient Virtue and of British Worthies in the 1730s, while at Shugborough from the 1740s architecture became a microcosm of the world, not metaphorically as in the Renaissance use of harmonic proportions, but literally. Indeed, Fischer von Erlach's heady fantasies acted as a stimulus to the creation of gardens such as Shugborough which, with its Chinese, Greek and Roman buildings by ‘Athenian’ Stuart and others, was a theatre of memory, a visual parallel to the circumnavigation of the globe undertaken by its patron, Admiral Anson. In his Treatise on Civil Architecture (1759), Chambers was the first to develop the theory of association in architecture. Here is his wilderness from 1757 at Kew with buildings in a range of oriental styles. With an imaginative sweep worthy of Piranesi, Chambers claimed that, ‘materials in architecture are like words in phraseology...when combined with skill, expressed with energy, they actuate the mind with unbounded sway’. In 1772 Chambers claimed of Chinese gardens that they were full of objects such as ‘statues, busts, bas-reliefs [which] are not only ornamental but by commemorating past events, and celebrated personages...awake the mind to pleasing contemplation...[and] excite a great variety of passions in the mind of the spectator’.
This echoes Piranesi who wrote of those ‘speaking ruins’ which have power to move the mind. It is not an obsession with antiquity that characterises Neo-classicism but the use of it for evocative emotional purposes. Piranesi was the catalyst in the creation of Neo-classical architecture in that he fired the imagination of its inventors: that is, French students at the Académie de France à Rome and also English visitors to Rome such as Robert Adam and Sir William Chambers. Here are views by Piranesi of Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, and one of Piranesi's dramatic Carceri scenes. Piranesi's imaginative force was soon reflected in French theory, especially in the book by Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, Le Génie de l'architecture ou l'analogie de et art avec nos sensations (1780). The emphasis put by Le Camus on the use of light to create an architecture of mood and sensation found expression in the work of Boullee's museum and metropolitan church of 1781, and Soane's Consols Office of 1798 at the Bank of England, and Court of Chancery of 1822.
Piranesi is also relevant to the connection of the Hope family with Neo-classicism. John Hope (1737-84), the son of the Thomas Hope who founded the family banking firm, acquired from Piranesi in the 1760s a
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monumental chimneypiece which is today in the Rijksmuseum. In his influential book, Diverse maniere d'adornare i cammini ed ogni altra parte degli edifizi (1769), Piranesi published an engraving of this as plate no.2 with the caption, ‘Le cariatidi, l'architrave e gli altri pezzi di marmo son avanzi di opere antiche dal Cavaliere Piranesi uniti insieme a formare il presente cammino, che si vede in Olanda nel gabinetto del Cavaliere Giovanni Hope’. This book was far more than a more collection of chimneypiece designs, for it contained Piranesi's proposals for interior design, furnishings and ornament, as well as a preface called ‘Apologetical Essay in Defence of the Egyptian and Tuscan Architecture’. In this boldy anti-Vitruvian design philosophy, he claimed that the modern architect ‘must not content himself with copying faithfully the ancients, but studying their works he ought to shew himself of an inventive and, I had almost said, of a creating genius; and by prudently combining the Grecian, Tuscan and the Egyptian together, he ought to open himself a road to the finding out of new ornaments and new manners’. The Hope chimneypiece is an example of this process, for Piranesi incorporated into it supposed antique fragments, herms and other ornaments, combined with modern work so as to form a rich and beautiful whole.
In acquiring such a work from Piranesi John Hope, though a banker rather than a gentleman of leisure, made a bid to be considered as a patron of equal importance with great English milordi such as the Earl of Exeter who, through the medium of Robert Adam, commissioned a Piranesi chimneypiece in 1767 which was installed in the State Bedroom at Burghley House. Piranesi published this as pl. 1 in his Diverse maniere in which the Hope chimney was pl. 2. In 1776 John Hope wrote grandly to the Earl of Hopetoun, ‘Your Lordship should spend some weeks with me at the Hague...then some weeks at one of my seats in the province’, signing the letter ‘your most affectionate cousin’, though the connection of the Hopes with the Hopetouns was in fact doubtful.
John Hope carried out alterations at the pricely residence and banking headquarters of the Hope firm in Amsterdam from 1758, nos. 444-446, Keizersgracht. The facade of this double house, originally built in 1725, has an unusual amount of Baroque ornament which makes it stand out from many of its neighbours. Unfortunately, the interior has mostly been gutted and the entrance perron removed. John sold it in 1782 to his cousin Henry and bought a smaller house for himself in the Heerengracht. In 1760-3 he built a handsome house for himself from designs by Pieter de Swart in the Lange Voorhout in the Hague, and bought in 1767 the estate of Groenendaal near Haarlem to which in 1784, the year of his death, he added the adjoining property of Bosbeck with its substantial red-brick villa.
On Hope's death at the age of 47 his Piranesi chimneypiece was acquired by his cousin Henry Hope (1735-1811) who had entered the
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family bank with him in 1762 in which year it began trading under the name Hope & Co., instead of Thomas and Adrian Hope. Henry Hope, who had been born in Boston in America where his father had emigrated in 1730, was the real genius in building up the prosperity of the family bank. Here he is in a now lost portrait of him by Sir Joshua Reynolds who visited Amsterdam to paint him and to admire the magnificent collection of Old Master paintings which he had formed. In 1769 Hope had bought a farmstead in the Haarlemerhout which he demolished in 1784, replacing it in 1786-88 with the house known as Welgelegen or Het Paviljoen, today the Provinciehuis Noord Holland. It was in the library in this great museum-house that Henry Hope installed the Piranesi chimneypiece where it was a stylistically appropriate addition to one of the most striking monuments to Grand Tour Neo-classicism. Indeed, the rich plasterwork, probably by Italian stuccadori, in interiors such as the Pompeiian Music Room and the Picture Galleries, has a taut crispness of detail combined with a fertility of ornament which is very close to the decoration shown in in Piranesi's Diverse maniere d'adornare i cammini. The remarkable gilded wrought-iron balustrade in the central gallery is adorned with symbolical ornament including the radiant head and lyre of Apollo, god of the arts, and anchors on a globe symbolising hope. Again we are reminded of the kind of symbolical ornament which features in Piranesi's church of S. Maria del Priorato, Rome (1764-6).
The exterior of Welgelegen looks more like a temple or public building than a private house. Indeed, in the Enlightenment, art had been raised to the status of religion, and some of the key patrons and collectors chose to live in shrines to art. One of the most significant was Cardinal Albani whose Villa Albani in Rome, designed by Carlo Marchionni from 1746-63 as a house-cum-sculpture-museum, was one of the nodels for Welgelegen. Another Roman source was the Villa Borghese which housed the fabulous Borghese collection of paintings and sculpture; in the staircase hall at Welgelegen there is still an enlarged copy of the antique statue of ‘Venus with a shell’ which was at the Villa Borghese until bought by Napoleon in 1807. Also from the world of Roman connoisseurship came a number of neo-antique statues at Welgelegen, made by Francesco Righetti, one of the most popular sculptors in 18th-century Rome and in some sense akin to Piranesi. Hope placed these in the entrance hall but they were later moved to the gardens.
The design of Welgelegen, which I think was not by Viervant but was the outcome of collaboration between Hope, Triquetti and Dubois, went much further than these Italian precedents in the direction of turning a private house into a public museum. The huge picture gallery for Hope's magnificent collection which forms the whole centre of the house is in my view one of the most remarkable rooms of its date in Europe. Totally lacking in domestic atmosphere, it has the scale and character of an
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interior in one of the great public museums of the nineteenth century. On of the few Dutch Neo-classical monuments to echo the scale of Welgelegen was the premises built in the Louis XVI style for Felix Meritis, the scientific society, at 324, Keizersgracht, Amsterdam. Begun in 1788 by Jacob Otten Husly, this echo of Gabriel's twin palaces in the Place de la Concorde, Paris, has always seemed out of scale and incongruous in its setting.
The creator of Welgelegen, Henry Hope, bachelor and collector, probably saw himself as much Anglo-American as Dutch because, as we have seen, he was born in Boston in America in 1735 and was educated in England where he entered the banking firm of Gurnell Hoare & Co. in London. It was to London that he returned on the Napoleonic invasion of Holland. He now bought Lord Hopetoun's house in Cavendish Square, London, to which he shipped 327 pictures in 1794, adding a wing to house them. Deciding not to return to Holland, he made over Welgelegen to his nephew and heir, John Williams Hope, in 1802. In the same year he commissioned a large family portrait group from the American-born artist, Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy. Today in the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, this is a striking memorial to Henry Hope's role as a Neo-classical collector and patron. On the left-hand side is a large architectural model of Welgelegen; before this is a stand supporting a Greek figured vase, while a carved bronze urn stands on an unusual circular table which is bordered with a neo-Egyptian lotus ornament, painted or inlaid in bright red. This ornament also features on the adjacent stand, on the picture frame and on the chest on which the model rests.
This portrait, as well as Welgelegen which it commemorates, will have been known to the third and last member of the Hope family to whom I wish to introduce you, Thomas Hope, the eldest of the three sons of the John Hope who commissioned the Piranesi chimneypiece. John Hope both inherited and collected valuable pictures, books and engravings, which he left, together with a considerable fortune, to his sons. In my book on Thomas Hope, I emphasised the significance of the Piranesi chimneypiece, but I had not then visited Welgelegen which had been built by his second cousin, Henry Hope. I therefore did not take full account of the possible influence of Welgelegen on the house-cummuseum which Thomas Hope created for himself in London in 1800. Here is the plan of it and the title-page of the book in which Hope recorded its appearance in 1807.
Born in Amsterdam in 1769, Thomas Hope never worked in the family bank of which he became a sleeping partner, but devoted his substantial income to furthering his role as connoisseur, collector, patron and designer. In 1787 he left Holland for a remarkable eight-year Grand Tour studying architecture in Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, Spain,
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Portugal, France, Germany and England. Hope's desire to master all the cultures which had contributed to modern civilisation, and to synthesise them in modern design, was the climax of the Enlightenment tradition of conceding validity to the non-classical cultures. For example, the titlepage of Household Furniture is framed within an Islamic border suggesting links between Grecian and Eastern ornament.
Though he left Holland as Welgelegen was nearing completion, Hope probably saw it completed on one of the several return trips he made to Amsterdam between 1787 and 1795 in which year he settled in London. In 1799 he acquired a large mansion in Duchess Street, which is very close to Cavendish Square where Henry Hope lived. In 1800 Thomas Hope completely remodelled his Duchess Street mansion which had originally been built by Robert Adam in the 1760s. After Hope's remodelling it became, like Welgelegen, a museum rather than a house, containing a sculpture gallery, a huge top-lit picture gallery, rooms for the display of Greek vases, as well as a chain of reception rooms in contrasting Indian and Egyptian styles. The philosophy behind Hope's eclectic collection and its display, as well as behind Sir John Soane's, owed much to Piranesi. Indeed, Hope acknowledged his debt to Piranesi's Diverse maniere d'adornare i cammini in the preface to his book, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration executed from Designs by Thomas Hope (1807, in which he recorded his achievements at Duchess Street. Of course, Household Furniture as well as Percier and Fontaine's Recueil de décorations intérieures (1801-1812) which influenced Hope, can both be seen as heirs to the Diverse maniere.
On the left is Hope's sculpture gallery at Duchess Street with a sumptuous antique candelabrum of marble, heavily restored in the manner of Piranesi. The same piece appears on the right after he had moved it to his sculpture gallery at his country house, the Deepdene. The walls of the Duchess Street sculpture gallery were painted yellow to set off the white marble sculpture which he thought was by Phidias of the 5th century BC. Now regarded as Roman copies, his Athena and Hygeia are today in the Paul Getty Museum, Malibu.
The next room the visitor saw was the Picture Gallery, two storeyed like that at Welgelegen. Designed in 1800, this was an early monument of the Greek Revival. The picture gallery had by now become the church of modern man so that this room is designed to resemble the interior of a Greek temple: the organ at the far end resembles an altar and indeed has the Greek Ionic order of the Erechtheum on the Acropolis in Athens. The Doric columns come from the Propylaea; the coffered ceiling from the Temple of Hephaestus, or Theseion, in Athens; and the dwarf columns in the clerestorey from the Tower of the Winds. All this Greek sobriety contrasted oddly with the paintings, discreetly hidden behind veils in this view. The paintings were 16th and 17th Old Masters
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by Guercino and others, typical examples of Grand Tour taste like those assembled at Welgelegen by his cousin Henry Hope.
Hope acquired an important collection of Greek vases from Sir William Hamilton in 1801. Here, again, he followed the example of Henry Hope, as we can see from the vase which appears in the West portrait of him and his family. The scenes painted on these vases, as Hope was quick to realise, constituted an important living link with ancient Greek life which had never been properly studied. The vases had been discovered in columbaria which Hope recreated at Duchess Street, while he also recreated details such as the klismos chairs which figured on the vase paintings. These chair designs show Hope to be at once archaeological, eclectic and modernist.
Along the garden front was a suite of eclectic orientalising rooms, beginning with the Egyptian Room. Though this is in the tradition of Piranesi's Caffe Inglese in Rome of the 1760s, Hope had been to Egypt and his colours are black and gold and bluish green, the Egyptian pigments. Here is a related chair, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and here the sofa from the Egyptian Room, now at Buscot Park. Adjacent was the Indian Room which was Saracenic or Moorish in flavour with a ceiling inspired by one in the summer seraglio in Constantinople. The sofa was crimson, the walls sky-blue and the ceiling yellow; there were incense urns, flowers, and Indian views commissioned from Daniell in 1799-1800.
Next came the Flaxman Room, designed as a narratively appropriate setting for the sculptural group of Cephalus visiting Aurora at Dawn on Mount Ida, which Hope commissioned from Flaxman in Rome in 1792. Where smell and colour featured in the Indian Room, here there was a symbolism related to the iconography of the sculpture. Thus dawn was recalled in the curtains of orange, blue and black in front of mirrors edged with blach velvet. Here is the Egyptian clock with Isis, symbolising the moon, and echoing the imaginative mode of composition of Piranesi, from whose Cammini I here show you another plate. One of the oddest rooms was the Lararium, or room of the Houshold Gods, a neo-classical version of the Wunderkammer common in 16th and 17th-century Europe. Here images from the different religions of the world, ranging from Buddhism to Christianity, were united in terms of their artistic appeal against a background of mirror and beneath a light bamboo canopy, suggesting the origins of the world. Finally, on the staircase hall hung a portrait of Thomas Hope in Turkish dress standing in front of a mosque. Painted by Sir William Beechey in 1798, this is today in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Like the Islamic border to Hope's book Household Furniture, it suggests a dissolution of the cultural barriers between east and west which is quite in harmony with Piranesi's call for a fruitful combination of the Grecian, Tuscan and Egyptian.
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