Thomas Hope

Thomas Hope may refer to:

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Thomas Hope (1769–1831)

Thomas Hope (30 August 1769 – 3 February 1830/1831) was a Dutch and British merchant banker, author, philosopher and art collector, best known for his novel Anastasius, a work which many experts considered a rival to the writings of Lord Byron. His sons included Henry Thomas Hope and Alexander Beresford Hope.

Early years in Amsterdam and Heemstede

The eldest son of Jan Hope, Thomas was descended from a branch of an old Scottish family who for several generations were merchant bankers known as the Hopes of Amsterdam, or Hope & Co. He inherited from his mother a love of the arts, which the efforts of his father and grandfather made possible by acquiring an enormous wealth. His father spent his final years turning his summer home Groenendaal Park in Heemstede into a grand park of sculpture open to the public. After he fled to London with his brothers to avoid the French occupation of the Netherlands from 1795–1810, he never returned.

Grand tour

In 1784, when young Thomas was fifteen, his father died unexpectedly in the Hague just after purchasing Bosbeek on the grounds of Groenendaal Park, the house that was to house his large art collection. He shared his art collection as part of the Hope & Co. partnership with his cousin Henry Hope. This cousin was just completing work on his Villa Welgelegen further up the road. Missing his father and grandfather, and preferring the company of his mother and brothers to his uncles in Amsterdam, Thomas did not enter the family business. Instead, at the age of eighteen, he began to devote more and more of his time to the study of all the arts, especially the architecture of classical civilisation, during a series of tours to other countries. During his grand tour through Europe, Asia and Africa, Hope interested himself especially in architecture and sculpture, making a large collection of artefacts which attracted his attention (e.g. the Hope Dionysus).

Thomas Hope (architect)

Thomas Hope (December 25, 1757 – October 4, 1820) was an English-born American architect and house joiner, active primarily in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Trained in London, Hope moved to Knoxville in 1795, where he designed and built several of the city's earliest houses. At least two houses built by Hope— the Ramsey House (1797) in East Knoxville and Statesview (ca. 1806) in West Knoxville— are still standing, and have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Biography

Hope was born in Kent, England, in 1757, and learned the house construction trade in London. During the 1780s, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where he had been hired to build a house for South Carolina planter Ralph Izard. This house stood on Broad Street in Charleston for several decades. During the early 1790s, Hope lived in Cheraw, South Carolina, where he married his wife, Elizabeth Large, in 1793. Hope then moved to Knoxville, which at the time was the capital of the Southwest Territory, in 1795.