Thomas Hope's house in Duchess Street: the interiors created by Hope to display works of art in his London house were some of the most influential of the Regency age. A fuller story of their evolution can now be told, following the discovery of drawings by Robert Adam and C. H. Tatham

Apollo, March, 2004 by David Watkin

Our understanding of the mansion in Duchess Street, which was the home of Thomas Hope (1769-1831), the celebrated Regency connoisseur, collector, designer, and author, has been transformed by the recent discovery of an album containing drawings for it by Robert Adam, or his office, and by Charles Heathcote Tatham (1772-1842). (1) Known initially as Clerk House or 1 Mansfield Street, and later as the Duchess Street mansion, the house was built by Adam in 1768-71 for his old friend General Robert Clerk, as part of his Portland Place development. It was bounded on the south by Queen Anne Street, on the west by Mans field Street, on the north by Duchess Street, and on the east by the garden and stables of Adam's Chandos House, of 1770-71. Damaged by fire in 1771, Clerk House was rebuilt in 1771-75 by the Adam brothers for Clerk and his wife, the former Dowager Countess of Warwick, at her expense.

This area of London had recently become fashionable, the nearby Cavendish Square being the home of Princess Amelia, and the Earls of Bessborough, Gainsborough, Harcourt, and Winchilsea. (2) After Adam's Lansdowne House, Berkeley Square, begun in about 1762 for the Earl of Bute and completed in 1768 for General Clerk's friend the Earl of Shelburne, Clerk House was his first major, free standing townhouse in London. Work on its construction began in the summer of 1768 for General Clerk and his wife-to-be, the Dowager Countess of Warwick, when she made the first payment of 500 [pounds sterling] to the Adams in July. (3)

Clerk House was unique in Adam's career in taking the form of a Parisian hotel particulier, built entre cour et jardin. General Clerk, a confidential adviser to Lord Shelburne, had lived in Paris in the 1760s, where, according to David Hume, he was a rare instance of a person who acquired a place in French society. (4) He thus may have requested that his house should have this Gallic disposition. Adam's drawings for it in Sir John Soane's Museum show that the entrance front was initially to be on the south side of the site, facing on to Queen Anne Street. (5) This would have followed the pattern of Chandos House, adjacent on the east, but in execution it was reversed so that the entrance front was in Duchess Street, facing north. The drawings include alternative projects for the disposition of the courtyard and its flanking service wings. In one of these, the wings are two storeyed (Fig. 1), and in another three-storeyed (Fig. 2); one scheme features a hemicycle of eight Doric columns forming an impressive porte-cochere (Fig. 3), while the alternative has a simple entrance porch with two Doric columns in antis. (Fig. 4) As built, the wings were three-storeyed but the porte-cochere was not executed.

[FIGURES 1-4 OMITTED]

The idea for such a colonnade, perhaps indebted to that at Burlington House, Piccadilly, recurred on a vast scale in Adam's plan for a London mansion of about 1765, where the hemicycle, one hundred and thirty-four feet in diameter, consisted of twenty columns. This may have been designed for Lord Shelburne, who had considered purchasing a site for a new house at Hyde Park Corner before acquiring Lord Bute's unfinished house in Berkeley Square. (6) Adam also planned a house for the Duke of Portland in New Cavendish Street in about 1770, aligned on to Mansfield Street and approached through a circular, colonnaded courtyard.

The entrance front of Clerk House seems to have been devoid of ornament, with windows cut plainly into the brickwork. A drawing less sophisticated than the others shows the nine bay south or garden front once it had been decided to move the entrance to the north (Fig. 5). The central four bays are separated by Ionic pilasters and decorated with three sculptural roundels. The three flanking bays on each side feature long decorative panels of swags between the first and second floors, but it is not known if these were executed. A simple door gives access from the south front to the garden, for it was scarcely before the Regency that houses were linked with gardens as, for example, in Benjamin and Philip Wyatt's designs of 1825 for the south garden front of the palatial York, today Lancaster, House. (7)

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Since Clerk House was partially built on a reservoir, it had no basement, so that the ground floor, except for the entrance hall and staircase, was reserved exclusively for the servants' quarters, even the wine cellar being on the ground floor. At Lansdowne House, by contrast, Adam placed the principal apartments on the ground floor. >From the sectional drawings, it is clear that all the ceilings at Clerk House, in both the main house and the service wings, were constructed with segmental brick vaults. General Clerk had referred to 'flat arches' as early as May 1765 in a letter to the Earl of Shelburne in which he explained that:

I shall have them in my house. There is but one man who can attempt it. He comes on purpose with French workmen & that only for me. If it succeeds with me, it will be a great service & it is not so expensive as with timber. (8)

This French technique, which had the advantage of being economical as well as lire-p roof, had been promoted by the Comte d'Espie in his Maniere de rendre toutes sortes d'edifices incombustibles (Paris, 1754), a work praised by Laugier. (9)

The only Adam drawings for interiors at Clerk House are nine for the drawing room, dated 'Adelphi June 1779', a surprisingly late date. These include the ceiling (Fig. 6), chinmeypiece (Fig. 7) and an attractive set of designs for details of the shutter panels of the two windows facing south on to the garden (Figs. 8-9). Elaborately ornamented with painted arabesques, these would have added considerable life and colour to this room, described as 'Room for Company before Dinner' (Fig. 13), which was on the north front. It seems that when Thomas Hope acquired the house in 1799, he did not alter this room or the adjacent dining room, except for providing a new chimneypiece in the latter, surmounted by a bust of his brother, Henry, Philip, carved for him by John Flaxman in 1803.