For centuries, in their designs for buildings, furniture and pyramidal tombs, Westerners have been borrowing forms and motifs from ancient Egypt. Each era’s approach is different, but the Egyptian Revival styles of the 1700s and early 1800s in particular evince a deep fascination with the culture’s decorative elements and themes.
“Thomas Hope: Regency Designer,” an exhibition opening on Thursday at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan, has a few imaginative examples of Egyptian Revival furniture that Hope designed about 1802 for the Egyptian Room in his house (since dismantled) in London. Hope (1769-1831), heir to one of the wealthiest banking families in Europe, was a designer, patron, collector and novelist who lived in England.
Among the approximately 140 pieces lent to the show are a Regency settee and two armchairs in ebonized black beech and gold that Hope created to accommodate Egyptian bronzes he bought in Rome while on the Grand Tour. The shapes of the furniture are not Egyptian; the pieces are designated Egyptian Revival because Egyptian bronzes are affixed to them.
The arms of the settee are decorated with recumbent lionesses inspired by ancient examples. Below these are bronze appliqués of the Egyptian god Anubis, with a jackal head, and the god Horus, with a hawk head. On the chairs statues of crouching Egyptian priests support the armrests, while appliqués of the winged goddess Isis adorn the fronts.
“The appeal of ancient Egypt was more than just exoticism,” said Philip Hewat-Jaboor, an art consultant and the editor, with David Watkin, a professor of architecture history at Cambridge University, of the 525-page Bard exhibition catalog. “It had to do with the mystery of hieroglyphs, the spookiness of tomb culture, the precious materials and impressive buildings. Nothing on the scale of ancient Egyptian pyramids was then known; they were like something from outer space.”
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