This golden Homeric seat with palm-wrapped 'bacchic' panther feet appropriate for a music-room/picture gallery, was designed by the connoisseur Thomas Hope (d.1831), for his Duchess Street mansion/museum. The settee with its Roman-couch ends fretted in the form of a bacchic kitharus (Grecian lyre), featured in Hope's Duchess Street guide, entitled Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807, plate 19, (no.2); together with his kithara-ended 'Music-room table', plate 15 (no.2). Its form also related to a mahogany chair with an ebony-inlaid kitharus splat, illustrated in his Greek vase room, plate 5. Its embossed rail, combined with the stripes of the original upholstery, complimented the settee's 'lyre' effect. The engraving of this settee includes its roll 'pillow' cushions but omits its antique striated ends. It is likely to have been designed around 1803, when a French edition of Homer's Odyssey was published with illustrations by John Flaxman R.A. (d.1826), who was patronised by the Hope family. The particular kytharus that no doubt inspired Thomas Hope's design is likely to have been the one featured on an 'Etruscan' vase in Sir William Hamilton's collection and illustrated in D'Hancarville, Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Hon. William Hamilton, Naples, vol.III, p.31. It was from this that Flaxman executed his 'Apotheosis of Homer' bas relief manufactured at this time by Wedgwood and Bentley. (D. Bindman, John Flaxman, London, 1979, no.32). Concerning Hope's novel designs, Flaxman commented 'Mr. Hope..is the first in this country, who had produced a system of furniture, collected from the beautiful examples of antiquity, whose parts are consistent with each other, and the whole suited to domestic ease and comfort'. (D. Watkin, Thomas Hope and the Neo-classical Idea, London, 1968.