"One of the most splendid routs that has taken place this season was given by Mr Thomas Hope at his house in Mansfield Street on Friday night last," reported the London Times in May 1802. In attendance were "nearly one thousand persons of the first rank and fashion in the country," and 16 rooms were open, illuminated by "two hundred and fifty wax lights, many of which exceeded in weight two pounds and a half" (a lavish extravagance in a period when most tolerated the stench of candles made from animal fat). Carriages so crammed the streets that many great nobles had to venture on foot to reach the hubbub and, as on the many, many other nights when Hope entertained in London, some went home disappointed.

Born in Amsterdam in 1769, Thomas Hope was the scion of a family of Dutch and Scottish extraction whose bank, Hope and Company, funded everything from the Napoleonic Wars to the Louisiana Purchase. Thomas, though, showed no aptitude for banking, and instead transformed himself into a prolific dilettante—a patron, connoisseur, designer, writer and novelist—the preeminent tastemaker of the Regency age and a polestar of London society. Yet what drew crowds to his door was not the prospect of meeting the man himself (Lord Glenbervie, a politician, diplomat and scholar, described him as "far from the most agreeable man in Europe"), nor his wife, Louisa, though she was thought glamorous. They came to see his house.

Originally built by Robert Adam in the 1770s, it was remodeled after 1799 by Hope, who filled it with extraordinary collections of art and antiquities. Three rooms had Greek vases; another room showed Egyptian antiquities alongside modern furnishings they had inspired; the Picture Gallery was designed to echo one that was thought to have existed on the Acropolis. Finally, as the coup de grâce, Hope fashioned a room devoted to John Flaxman’s "Aurora and Cephalus" (1789–90), a figure sculpture that depicted a sequence in the Metamorphoses in which Ovid describes "saffron-robed Aurora, dispelling the darkness with her morning light." The walls of the room were sheathed with mirrors trimmed with black velvet and draped with curtains of orange and black satin; and where the curtains parted, the sculpture—which was itself flanked by candelabra, each made to look like a lotus flower issuing from a bunch of ostrich feathers—doubled and redoubled in the mirrors.

Tragically, the London house was demolished in 1851; a century later, Hope’s country retreat, The Deepdene, in Surrey, also fell to the wrecker’s ball (Penry Williams’s roseate watercolors are the only remaining record). Hope’s personal papers and drawings have also disappeared, and, today the man himself is remembered by most for just one book, Household Furniture and Interior Decoration Executed from Designs by Thomas Hope, which he published in 1807. It was the style bible of its period, a volume that presented itself as an illustrated guide to the author’s London residence, but which really aimed to serve as a pattern book of designs for a revival of classical style. Its success as such has turned Hope into a foundational figure in Neoclassicism, but someone still not widely known. One hopes that that will change now that the Bard Graduate Center in New York has organized a full survey. The show is currently at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (through June 22), where the Vase, Egyptian and Aurora Rooms from Hope’s old London house have been recreated; it will then travel to the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture in New York (July 17–Nov. 16).

Assessing the contribution of individual figures to the classical tradition can be difficult, given its duration and complexity. And the character of Hope’s influence can seem particularly hard to gauge, since he arrived at the close of a full century of attempts to revive the ancient world, and his contribution was preeminently scholarly. Yet scholarship, excavation, collecting and publishing were the chief activities of the Neoclassical movement, at least in its early phase. Hope had the resources to make an impact in this arena. He also had the experience. Starting in 1787, he set out on a vastly ambitious Grand Tour that took in Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria and Egypt. When he returned, eight years later, he was perhaps not quite the fully acclimatized Turkish swashbuckler envisioned in Sir William Beechey’s portrait of 1798, but he was steeped in the classics, fired with strong views, and rich enough to nourish his taste and publish it to the world.