The Empire Style - England - Part 2

Thomas Hope was a collector of Egyptian as well as classical antiquities and at his country house, The Deepdene, in Surrey, he furnished an Egyptian room to show them off. But Hope's exoticism did not end there for he also incorporated decorations in Turkish, Chinese and 'Hindoo' styles - with hardly a vestige of comfort in any of them.

His Greek designs were the most lasting influence: anthemion motifs and Greek key patterns were used for decoration, and swans, griffins, caryatids or massive claw feet form supports, while rams' heads, lion masks and classical busts become terminals. Forms such as the X-stool and the klismos chair with sabre legs and often a tablet back were widely adopted  and variations of it persisted into the Victorian period. Hope had been called 'the man of chairs and tables, the gentleman of sofas', and it was probably in these items of non fitted furniture that his influence was greatest. He made widespread use of gilded metal mounts as decoration for furniture, a habit adopted by many cabinet-makers of the time.

The ideas embodied in hope's handmade furniture were distilled by contemporary cabinet-makers into what has become known as the Regency style. Strictly speaking, the Regency period encompassed the years from 1811-1820 when the Prince of Wales (the future George IV) acted as Regent during the illness of his father George III. It was associated with the flamboyant taste of the Prince Regent himself - epitomised by his extravagant pleasure dome, the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. However, the term Regency is now generally used to describe furniture of the first quarter of the 19th century, often much more restrained in design than anything associated with the Prince Regent and much less pedantic than the designs of Thomas Hope, but still influenced by both of them.

Brighton Pavilion was an oriental fantasy; its architecture was vaguely Indian and much of its interior decoration was Chinese. The furnishings included chairs, sofas and tables of bamboo, and this provoked a general fashion for bamboo furniture, much of it simulated from stained or painted beechwood, which persisted for several decades.

One style which hope avoided in Household Furniture but which found its way intermittently into all kinds of Regency furniture was the Gothic. Often mixed indiscriminately with the Neoclassical or the Oriental, the Gothic taste was associated with romanticism. Its most important champion in the early 19th century was William Beckford, a rich a reclusive eccentric whole Fonthill Abbey, a vast folly built at ruinous expense by the architect James Wyatt (and rebuilt several times when it fell down in the course of construction), towered above the Wiltshire countryside. People flocked to see this Gothic extravaganza, and artists like Turner painted it but, like the Gothic taste itself, it had insecure foundations, and it crashed magnificently to the ground only 25 years after it was built.