Hedvig Győry: Mélanges offerts a Edith Varga „Le lotus qui sort de terre” (Bulletin du Musée Hongrois des Beaux-Arts Supplément 1. Budapest, 2001)

JOACHIM SLIWA: Egyptian Hall and the Exhibition of Egyptian Art in London, 1821-1822

exhibition hall this place became very popular. In years 1815 - 1816 it was visited in crowds, because Bullock was exhibiting here Napoleonic relics, including luxurious bullet-proof carriage which formerly belonged to the Emperor. In such function, under the name of the London Museum, it existed till 1819, when the remainder of the Egyptian Hall's contents were disposed by auction. In 1820 this building was hired by Benjamin Haydon as a place to show his picture "Christ's entry into Jerusalem". The following event was the exhibition of the Egyptian relics between 1821 and 1822, organized by G. B. Belzoni ( we give some more attention to this exhibition below). In the following years there were organized here among other things such shows as "Ancient and modern Mexico", "A family of Laplanders complete with house reindeer", "18-years-old Siamese twins", "The skeleton of a mammooth", "A moving panorama of the Missisipi painted on 3 miles of canvas". In 1844 the Egyptian Hall was hired by Ph. T. Barnum for the American dwarf, General Tom Thumb. But soon the building has had his day. In 1904 it was demolished and the office block at Nos. 170-173 Piccadilly was built on the site. Basing on the quite extensive preserved iconographie material we can still easily ascertain the main features of the edifice, first of all its façade, although there also exist some sources that enable the reconstruction of internal hall appearance. Designed in 1811 by Peter Frederick Robinson (1776-1858)

5 egyptianizing façade was based on the plan of the squat pylon topped with cavetto cornice and enclosed with characteristic winded torus (Fig.l). On this such conceived surface the architect introduced some additional divisions. One of them consisted in partition of ground floor storey, isolated from the next floor with the successive, a little bit narrower cavetto cornice. The main entrance was leading inside between two bud-capitaled lotus columns, while on the right and on the left from the said portico there were the windows with the stepped corbelled arches. The following, also triple division was connected with the second storey. Its surface was decorated with three more slender pylon façades that had some smaller analogous constructions put inside. Each of them was topped with cavetto cornice and torus moulding (they created the moulding of wins Cfr. DNB (note 3), vol. XVII, London 1921-1922 (repr. ), pp. 36-37; Thieme-Becker, Allgemeines Lexicon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Vol. 28, Leipzig 1934, p. 439 (C. Dodgson).