Egyptian figure : en salle — Victoria and Albert Museum

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.

This statuette was probably designed by Hope originally for his Egyptian Room in Duchess Street (open to the public from 1804 onwards), as a closely related figure appears in one of his designs. The contents of his London home were later moved to Deepdene.