Thomas Hope and Interior Decoration

Thomas Hope. “Statue Gallery,” plate 1 from Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807. 124 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00285 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00285 by guest on 28 September 2021 Economies of the Interior: Thomas Hope and Interior Decoration TIM AINSWORTH ANSTEY In the years around 1800, countries and continents had interiors; domestic apartments did not. That is, while the French word intérieure and the English word interior began to be used during the eighteenth century to describe distant geographical spaces, the use of interior as a noun to describe particular rooms within houses—“an interior”—was virtually unknown. Egypt had an “intérieure,” containing “secrets mystérieux,” already in Jean- Baptiste Le Mascrier’s Description de l’Égypte, printed in Paris in 1735.1 The English philologist and poet Sir William Jones described the lands of the Arabs, Persians, Indians, and Turks in terms of their “interiour” in 1772, relating the idea to foreign climate, landscape, and space.2 Africa had an association for the discovery of its interior based in London by 1785; France a Ministre de l’Intérieur based in Paris from 1790; and European books on the interiors of Canada and Brazil were in train soon after 1800.3 But when it came to architecture, intérieure and interior were generally used only adjectivally, to qualify descriptions of decorative elements. In Jacques-François Blondel’s De la distribution de maisons de plaisance (1737), the use of the word was purely adjectival.4 Robert Adam (who never talks of “an interior”) describes “interior” columns in the plate captions for his Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian in 1764.5 Germain Boffrand’s Livre d’architecture (1745) and Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières’s Le génie de l’architecture (1768) discuss “décorations intérieures” extensively and refer briefly to three architectural configura- tions as possessing interiors—one an external courtyard; the second, a sacred dome; the third, a university institution.6 But no use is made in any of these texts of “interior” as a noun denominating domestic architectural space. Although qualifications and counterexamples could surely be adduced, this article instead pursues a thought experiment.7 It asks, What becomes perceptible through focus on the shift- ing semantic field of interior in the wake of the extraordinary geopolitical events circa 1800? Newly highlighting the signif- icance of distant lands for domestic economies in Northern Europe, that post-Revolutionary moment also witnessed key developments in the architectural conception of “interior.” Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, “Napoleon’s architects,” produced designs for internal spaces that were fundamentally colored by their task of representing French aspirations to exer- cise power abroad.8 Their Recueil de décorations intérieures Grey Room 78, Winter 2020, pp. 124–145. © 2020 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 125 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00285 by guest on 28 September 2021 was published as a series of plates with descriptions in 1801 and republished with an introductory text in 1812.9 Thomas Hope’s Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, which presents a series of exotic rooms created in the author’s own house, was published in 1807.10 In both cases, the lexical use of interior appears poised exactly between its sense as a general descriptive term and its sense as a specific kind of architectural space.11 And in that inflection, the interiors that are described relate, immediately, to the geographical and to the geopolitical: Hope’s rooms identify distant countries he had visited; Percier and Fontaine’s relate to lands visited by the French revolutionary and imperial armies.12 By investigat- ing this connection—between the domestic and architectural on one side and the geographic and political on the other— this article suggests that the early nineteenth-century inven- tion of the architectural interior had a geopolitical dimension and, consequently, that this identity must nuance existing understandings of the architectural interior as a construct. For focus, the analysis is made by considering Hope’s Household Furniture and Interior Decoration and is then contextualized with brief observations on the historiography of scholarship in this field. Duchess Street and Interior Decoration William Guthrie. Hope was an heir to the fortune of Hope & Co., one of the most An Accurate Map of Europe from the important financial houses of late-eighteenth-century Europe, Best Authorities, operating out of Amsterdam and, later, London.13 Rather like 1795. Overlaid with Aby Warburg a century later, Hope used a family fortune Thomas Hope’s travels, 1790–1798. amassed through merchant banking to fund the study of what we today would call material culture. As well as becoming a successful advisor and collector, he became a designer primarily of furniture and domestic spaces. He was also a vora- cious traveler. From 1790 to 1794 he made a series of journeys in southern Europe, primarily in Italy and the Spanish penin- sula, and ventured into Northern Africa. He was in northern Europe in 1794 during the period in which the Hope bank transferred its operations to London (on account of the threat posed by the French occupation of Amsterdam). In 1795, he was in Rome and traveled into the Ottoman Empire, living in Constantinople for a year and visiting Athens. Finally, he traveled through the Levant via the coast of Lycia in modern- day Turkey, reaching Cairo in 1797. In 1798, shortly before the French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in the Egyptian capital, he returned to London and settled as part of the network around the transferred Hope bank. His uncle, Henry Hope, ran the operation and was established at Hopetoun House on the newly developed Cavendish Square in London’s West End. From 1799 Thomas lived at No. 10 Duchess Street, a building designed by Robert Adam two streets away.14 Household Furniture and Interior Decoration used a description of rooms and furniture in this house to cre- ate a new sensibility about the design of domestic space. 126 Grey Room 78 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00285 by guest on 28 September 2021 Household Furniture and Interior Decoration has a striking tone. Its author sounds to the modern ear uncannily like Sir Walter Elliot, the pompous paterfamilias of Jane Austen’s 1817 novel Persuasion, and there are reasons to believe that contemporaries found Hope’s demeanor both provocative and overbearing.15 In the introduction to the book, he complains how “In England much more attention is generally paid to the perishable implements of the stable than to the lasting decoration of the house.”16 Hope’s targets are the flashy phaetons and curricles of London society: he admonishes those who are “disposed yearly to lavish enormous sums in the trifling and imperceptible changes which every season produces in the construction of these transient vehicles.”17 For Hope, investment in interior decoration should not be identified with either the frivolity or the transience of fashion, a posi- tion that qualified the judgments of certain of his contemporaries.18 Indeed, he suggests that household furnishings and the decoration in buildings have a lasting, sober, and instructive potential. Anticipating a similar moralizing tone in the later commentaries of Percier and Fontaine, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration claims it will communicate “attributes of elegance and of beauty conducive . above all, towards forming the entire assemblage of productions of ancient art and of modern handicraft . into a more harmo- nious, more consistent, and more instructive whole.”19 To accomplish this aim, in the first section of the book Hope describes some of the rooms in his house with short textual commentaries on a series of central perspective plates. Although the building is long gone, the British architec- Anstey | Economies of the Interior: Thomas Hope and Interior Decoration 127 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00285 by guest on 28 September 2021 tural historian David Watkin, in preparing the exhibition on Hope at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Bard Graduate Center in New York in 2008, reconstructed the plan of the actual spaces Hope created.20 Number 10 Duchess Street was constructed like a Parisian hôtel particulier, with a screen wall to the street, two side wings behind, a main block span- ning the width of the site behind them, and private gardens at the rear. Hope remodeled this plan and interiorized it. The façade to the street took on a fortified quality, somewhat out- landish in early nineteenth-century London, although not unlike façades Hope had drawn in Eastern capitals such as Constantinople and Cairo. The entrance sequence took the visitor through a low opening in the otherwise blank street façade, across the courtyard, through a vestibule in the center of the main block, and up a grand stair to the living spaces on the first floor. A series of rooms encountered in sequence on this level displayed objects from Hope’s collection, and both the geographies associated with these objects and the decoration of the rooms they occupied mirrored the development of Right: Ten Duchess Street, first floor plan, ca. 1804. Opposite: Center: “Drawing- Room,” plate 6 from Thomas Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration,

Load more