These golden Grecian theatric masks depict Bacchante who participated in the Dionysiac festivites of mysteries. Their ribbon-tied hair, garlanded with ivy and flowers, is arranged in snail-shell ringlets in the manner adopted by the youthful Dionysus, when in the guise of the India sage or Gymnosophist. These ormolu mounts would appear to be the ones that originally embellished, in the French manner, the dining-room mantelpiece, which the conoisseur Thomas Hope (d.1831) designed about 1801 for his Duchess Street mansion/museum of antiquities. They served as 'herm' heads on bold bracket jambs, which displayed 'poetic' garland-bearing nike on the sides and terminated in bacchic panther feet. The mantel supported John Flaxman's Greek-style bust of Philip Hope (d.1839), which was placed in the manner of a charioteer between two life-size heads of horses. Two engravings of the chimneypiece and one of the Bacchae mask, shown wearing berry clusters in place of flowers and lacking a pearled necklace, appear in Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807, pls. L, LI & XXVII. In view of the quality of these bronzes and Hope's respect for the London-based French 'bronze and ormolu manufacturer' Alexis De Caix (d.1819) of 15 Rupert Street, London, who also worked for George, Prince of Wales, later King George IV, it seems likely that he executed these masks. Related masks appear on Hope's krater vase, also attributed to De Caix and now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Duchess Street was demolished in the mid-19th century, but, as an Egyptian-style mount from another of its chimneypieces has survived attached to its original marblised jamb, it is possible that the Dining Room chimneypiece was also executed in marblised wood.