Egyptian figure

This statuette, showing an Egyptian figure striding forward and proffering an incised tablet, is ultimately based on Egyptian statues and reliefs from the Ptolemaic period (330-305 BC). Similar figures were reproduced in Rome in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, catering for the popular taste for Egyptian style. It is one of a number of objects which formed part of a bequest to the Museum from the 7th Duke of Wellington, who had apparently acquired it in the 1930s with a provenance from Deepdene, the former country house of Thomas Hope.

Hope was an Anglo-Dutch refugee banker who used his fortune to furnish and decorate his homes at Duchess Street in London and subsequently Deepdene. As a young man he went on the Grand Tour and was known to have travelled to Egypt. Hope collected ancient artefacts, placing them alongside his own designs to create his interiors.