1820 3 Vols ANASTASIUS Memoirs of a Greek Thomas HOPE

A scarce early edition of Anastasius by Thomas Hope.

Bound in leather with gilt lettering and decoration.

Third Edition.

Scarce.

Thomas Hope, 1769 – 1831, was a Dutch and British merchant banker, author, philosopher and art collector, best known for his novel Anastasius, a work which many experts consider a rival to the writings of Lord Byron. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells of his life, “Hope was admitted to the Society of Dilettanti in 1800 and a year later received his first invitation to the annual dinner of the Royal Academy. Membership of the Royal Institution, the Royal Society, the Society of Arts, and the British Institution, and not least of their influential committees, followed as his reputation as an informed scholar grew… Hope's concerns…were with ‘antique and modern art and with the attempt to influence the character of the latter by promoting knowledge of the former’. At the heart of his ambition was the wish to influence modern design through knowledge of the art of the ancients. Hope mastered the vast knowledge of classical art and architecture accumulated in the eighteenth century in order to interpret and publicize it. He did as much as anyone in England to promote neo-classicism but his interests were wider and more complex; he was equally a proponent of the English picturesque and linked both as valid components of a wider Romantic movement.”

Anastasius is a romantic novel based on the experiences and travels of Hope that he undertook for eight years of his life. During those years, Hope travelled and studied architecture around the Mediterranean. "The austere simplicity of classicism impressed him greatly but he was also infused with the romanticism of Mediterranean culture; in Turkey, for example, he adopted local dress and abandoned his Christianity." (DNB)

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