A Marble Figure of the Capitoline Aphrodite, Roman Imperial, circa 2nd Century A.D., with 18th Century Restorations

after a late Hellenistic work ultimately inspired by the Aphrodite of Knidos, the goddess standing on an oval base with the weight on her left leg, her head turned to her left, her wavy hair falling in long strands over the nape of her neck, the support in the form of a dolphin with its tail resting against a tree trunk; the base, support, and all of the figure's extremities, including the top of the head, restored in marble in the 18th Century.

Thomas Hope (1769-1831), Duchess Street, London, from 1804, and The Deepdene, Surrey, from 1824
by descent to Lord Francis Hope (Christie, Manson & Woods, London, The Celebrated Collection of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian Sculpture and ancient Greek Vases, Being a Portion of the Hope Heirlooms, July 23rd, and 24th, 1917, no. 244, pl. 8)
the art dealer Gaston Bernheim-Jeune (1870-1953), Paris

Thomas Hope, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, London, 1807, pl. 2
T.D. Fosbrooke, The Outlines of Statues in the Possession of Mr. Hope (never published) for which Illustrations were furnished by T.D. Fosbrooke, Victoria and Albert Museum Library, London, 1813, pl. 13
Charles M. Westmacott, British Galleries of Painting and Sculpture, London, 1824, p. 229, pl. I
E.W. Brayley et al., A Topographical History of Surrey, vol. V, 1848, p. 87
Salomon Reinach, Répertoire de la sculpture grecque et romaine, vol. V, Paris, 1924, p. 147, no. 5
Geoffrey B. Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures (Monumenta artis romanae, vol. XIV), Berlin, 1986,  p. 72, no. 12, figs. 4 and 15
David Watkin and Philip Hewat-Jaboor, Thomas Hope, Regency Designer, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and London, 2008, p. 30, fig. 2-8
Arachne, no. 50017

As described; top of head and chin restored in coarser-grained marble, similar to marble used for torso, while other restorations including nose appear to be carved from fine-grained Italian marble. Surface weathered overall. Chips and abrasions overall. Proper left arm repaired at elbow. Torso was drilled in three areas in order to pour lead to secure iron pin connecting torso to restored parts; these holes are located at top of proper right shoulder, on outside of property right thigh two inches above the knee, and through the proper left elbow. Holes later filled with other material. Some shifting of proper right lower leg at ankle. Some restored fingers missing and have been recently replaced.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The present sculpture comes from the collection of Thomas Hope, a writer, collector, designer and presumptive taste-maker of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the period known as the Regency. It was first recorded in 1804, the same year that he completed renovations and installation of the collection at his home on Duchess Street in Cavendish Square in London were complete. Hope purchased the Duchess Street house in 1799 to renovate for the display of his collection, eventually to be made open to the public. When renovations were first completed, admission was restricted to ticket-holders chosen from the Royal Academy, then open to the paying public (Waywell, op. cit. p. 43). The present figure of Aphrodite was installed in the back of the room known as the Picture Gallery, to the left of the pipe organ which Hope designed after the Erechtheion at the acropolis in Athens. Also displayed in this room were a figure of a Peplophoros (now at the Walters Art Museum, inv. no. 23.87) and an Archaistic statue of a maiden, both called priestesses of Isis in Hope's time, a Bacchante, an unusual cinerarium in the form of a basket (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 37.129a,b), a vase cinerarium, and a lotus-form vase. Each sculpture was flanked by a Coade stone chair with sphinx armrests and lotus flowers, one of which is now at Parham House in Sussex (Watkin and Hewat-Jaboor, op. cit. p. 70).

Duchess Street was built in 1768 by the architect Robert Adam (1728-1792) who was greatly influenced by the growing English Neoclassicism movement which stemmed from the influence of the architect Andrea Palladio and the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18^th century. Adam's designs generally took into account both the structure and interior of the room, including wall furniture and decorations. Similarly, when Hope redesigned the house, he conceived of the structure, furniture, and decoration of Duchess Street as a whole. In his development of the Duchess Street design program and the wider British Regency movement, Hope envisioned a reinterpretation of ancient aesthetics, inspired by the spirit of the antique rather than obstinately replicating its form. His aim was the judicious use of high culture, epitomized in the past by antiquity and in his time by French taste, manifested in his own interpretation of a combination of the two. True to his visualization of an interior as a complete work of art, the selection and arrangement of the antiquities in the Picture Gallery are part of the entire effect of the room, from the structural elements to the smallest decorative details. Hope emphasized the decorative and aesthetic spirit of his collection over the art-historical or archaeological significance, which was less important to him. Like most of his sculpture, and fitting with his aesthetics, much of Hope's collection, including this figure of Aphrodite, was Roman in execution but Greek in taste.

The Picture Gallery, where this figure of Aphrodite was exhibited, was designed with a Greek revival interior, employing the Doric order for one of the first recorded times since antiquity. In contrast to the sumptuous and highly-worked forms of the Rococo the conservative Doric forms signaled a revolutionary change in taste. The Picture Gallery was designed to exhibit 17^th century Italian paintings in a space influenced by the architecture of the acropolis in Athens. Indeed each section of the room is lit from above by clerestory windows divided by columns which Hope writes are inspired by those at the Tower of the Winds on the Acropolis (Hope op. cit. p. 21). In his own engraving of the Picture Gallery, included in his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, published in 1807, Hope illustrates the decorative program but shows curtains let down over the walls, and presumably over the paintings hung there. His otherwise deliberate and complete account of the interior design of his house may betray his prioritization of the sculptural and decorative elements over the pictorial in his design conception, although he only notes that the curtains are meant to shield the contents of the room from sun damage (Hope, op. cit. p. 22).

Hope was an active buyer in the London art market and competed with other well-known contemporaries such as John Soane, Charles Townley, Joseph Nollekens, and Richard Westmacott, who would document Hope's collection among others in his British Galleries of Painting and Sculpture (Waywell, op. cit. p. 42). Among his purchases in London was a portion of the extensive Greek vase collection of Sir William Hamilton, purchased from Christie's shortly before they were meant to be sold at auction.

With the end of the Treaty of Amiens in May of 1803 Hope's main period of collecting came to a close as travel abroad became difficult. Shortly afterward, this figure of Aphrodite was moved to the Deepdene, Hope's country estate in Surrey, where it was displayed in a room called the Theatre of Arts, built to imitate the form of a Roman theater. It was recorded in the far left niche in the farthest back row; the figures of a Bacchante and a Peplophoros with which it was displayed in the Picture Gallery at Duchess Street stood in the next niche to the right and the far right niche, directly across from Aphrodite (E.W. Brayley et al., op. cit., p. 87). Busts and cinerary urns occupied the tiers below these figures and the floor was partially paved with a mosaic from Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli (Waywell, op. cit. p. 54). Hope acquired the estate in 1807, enlarging the grounds and the Palladian-style main building over the next 16 years.

Hope died at Duchess Street in 1831 and was buried in the mausoleum at the Deepdene. Both homes and his entire collection were left to his oldest son, Henry Thomas Hope. This figure of Aphrodite was probably displayed at the Deepdene until the theater was demolished between 1849 and 1869. It had been removed from the Deepdene by the time Adolf Michaelis observed the collection for his Ancient Marbles in Great Britain in 1882, and was perhaps brought to Henry Thomas' town house on Piccadilly.

Hope came from a Scottish family, well-established as bankers in the Netherlands by his time, whose family name graces the provenance of no less than the Hope Diamond, in addition to a number of fine examples of ancient sculpture. In addition to the present sculpture, Sotheby's has previously rediscovered and sold the Hope Dionysos, now the centerpiece of the Sculpture Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Hope Isis (Sotheby's, New York, June 20th, 1990, no. 40, and Sotheby's, New York, June 9th, 2004, no. 30).

Thomas Hope, the eldest of three, was deeply influenced by his travels as a young man through Western Europe, the Mediterranean, and farther east into Syria. These great centers of antiquity shaped his taste as a collector and his design aesthetic. Later in life his observations of the Western Asiatic, a land evoking the foreign and mystic to his contemporaries, were fictionalized in his highly successful novel, Anastasius, narrating the adventures of the handsome title Greek throughout the near east.

Hope travelled to Naples and Rome many times, acquiring and commissioning the bulk of his collection there. By 1795, when French forces marched on Amsterdam, the Hope family was forced to flee the Netherlands for London with their collection, established by Thomas' father John and great uncle Adrian and substantially augmented by Thomas' acquisitions. In addition to acquiring genuine antiquities, Hope enjoyed a position as a patron of contemporary artists, commissioning sculptures from 1792 onwards, perhaps most notably from the Italian neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova, but most often from the British artist John Flaxman. In addition to the present example, Hope's collection included other ancient figures of Venus of other types, but the sculpture of Aphrodite known as the Hope Venus was one executed by Canova and delivered to Duchess Street in 1822.