Hanging Cabinet From Thomas Hope’s ‘Third Vase Room’

January 5 2011, 12:04pm

This cabinet, with its Grecian temple-pediment and stepped plinth, was designed to serve as a shrine for the display of a number of smaller items from Thomas Hope’s collection of Etruscan and Greek cinerary urns. “Despite the fact that it has no documented history, it seems logical to speculate that this small-scale, idiosyncratic, and beautifully manufactured piece,…originally formed part of Thomas Hope’s furnishings at Duchess Street.” The projecting pilasters of its façade are hollowed with small arched recesses, while a shelf divides its central compartment. Its form resembles that of antique marble cippuschests, such as featured in an engraving of a “Roman columbarium (a chamber likened to a dovecot) for the reception of cinerary urns” illustrated in Hope’s Costume of the Ancients, 1812 (figure 1). Its pediment and arched corner acroteria are finely sculpted with whorled tendrils of acanthus foliage issuing anthemia. The latter “bas-reliefs” would have echoed the painted ornament of the red and black Etruscan and Greek terracotta vases, with which the niches were filled.

Figure 1

The cabinet was illustrated in Household Furniture where it appeared in the arched chimney-piece recess of the Third Vase Room, while a separate line-drawing showed it furnished with a total of nineteen items (figure 2). The latter served as a pattern- book for the antiquities and furnishings introduced since 1799 with assistance from the architect Charles Heathcote Tatham (d.1842). In his description, Hope noted that with its “Recesses,” it resembled the “….ancient [Grecian] hypogea, or niches for cinerary urns, destined for the reception of small sepulchral vases.” The “Vase Rooms” at Duchess Street were a series of four rooms that contained Hope’s vast collection of Greek vases.

Figure 2

Rather than display the vessels in one large gallery, the small rooms provided more intimate settings for these pieces, akin to the tombs in which they were found (figure 3). Amongst his collection of “Greek Fictile Vases” were some that he had acquired in 1801 from the second collection of Sir William Hamilton (d.1803), who had assembled them during his service as George III’s Special Envoy to the court at Naples.

Figure 3

Some of Hope’s finest furniture was probably executed by the Flemish sculptor Peter Bogaert, who appears to have been assisted by the sculptor Francis Chantrey (d.1841) in the early years of the 19th century. Bogaerts’ merits as a carver were noted by George Smith in The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide, (1826), where it was recorded that he was “equally happy in his designs for furniture and other branches of interior decoration.” Bogaert also traded in partnership with silversmith Paul Storr (d.1844) as carvers and gilders of Air  Street, when they supplied carved furniture in 1807 for the palatial Carlton House residence of George Prince of Wales, later George IV.

This hanging cabinet forms part Philip Hewat-Jaboor’s collection of Regency furniture and decorative objects by Thomas Hope, and will be featured in out upcoming exhibition, Inspired By Antiquity, which will run from January 20 – February 18, 2011.