Mr Thomas Hope's Picture Gallery

Interior view of 'Mr Thomas Hope's Picture Gallery, Duchess Street, London', the Egyptian Room with high coffered ceiling supported by huge columns. Hope (1769-1831) belonged to a rich family of Amsterdam bankers who fled to England in 1794 when Holland was invaded by France. Hope coined the phrase 'interior decoration' and designed his own furniture, ceramics, wallpaper and paint schemes. (NPG website)
'Hope had started to collect by 1795 when in Rome. Then, and on his many subsequent tours through southern Europe, he purchased sculpture, vases, and other antiquities. There were examples of the very best Greek and Egyptian sculpture and, on a much smaller scale, Renaissance and baroque paintings purchased at London sales. The sculpture included magnificent Greek statues of Hygeia and Athene. Hope's collection was exhibited at his town and country houses for the instruction of visitors. His Duchess Street mansion, originally designed by Robert Adam, was greatly altered and extended with the ground and first floors being equipped with large galleries of neo-classical design; one visitor referred to the house as a ‘temple of art’. It was, in fact, neither home nor museum, more a place where the rich and informed were to be influenced. The rooms and galleries were lined with sculpture and paintings, vases, and other antiquities, all of exquisite quality. So systematic was Hope's approach to the use of his collection as a didactic tool that entrance, at least to Duchess Street, was by admission ticket. He issued his first tickets in 1804. The recipients were sixty Royal Academicians who would be permitted, along with three friends each, to enter Duchess Street between February and March. Duchess Street was demolished in 1851, most of its contents were retained at Deepdene and in a new house in Piccadilly. The major dispersal of Hope's collection occurred in 1917, when his descendants sold Deepdene and disposed of its contents by auction at Christies.' (DNB online)