University of Virginia Library

V. Taste for Architecture

Jefferson was always interested in every department
of the Fine Arts. While serving as Visitor of the College
of William and Mary during his Governorship, he
had been instrumental in adding a course of that character
to the professorship of ethics; and in his scheme of
education addressed to Peter Carr, in 1814, instruction
was to be given in civil architecture, painting, sculpture,
and the theory of music. He played on the violin with
skill; had been a patron of Caracchi; and it was at his instance
that Houdon was employed to model the full
length statue of Washington and the bust of Lafayette.
He was a sympathetic correspondent of Peale and Trumbull,
and an active member of the Academy of Fine Arts
in Philadelphia.

But it was in architecture that he felt the most penetrating
interest, and it was also in this art that he displayed
an original talent almost comparable to the genius
which he evinced in political science; indeed, it has been
said of him by several critics of distinction that his influence
in this more or less private province has been just

as notable as in the public province of either statesmanship
or education. There was perhaps not an architect
in the colonies when Monticello was planned, who possessed
either his ability or his technical knowledge as
a draftsman. His drawings, which began about 1769,
have been pronounced to be unexampled in American
history down to a much later period; and form, with
those of the White House and the Capitol, the principal
source of our knowledge of colonial architecture. In
his autobiography, he makes an interesting reference to
his "passion for architecture," a term exactly pertinent
to his feeling for the art. Nowhere is this passion so
gracefully yet so fervently expressed as in the playful
letter to Comtesse de Tesse written from Nimes in 1787.
"Here I am, Madam, gazing whole hours at the Maison
Carrée like a lover at his mistress. ... This is the
second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The
first was with a Diana at the Chateau de Sage Espanage
in Beaujolais. This you will say was in rule to fall in
love with a female beauty. But with a house! It is
out of all precedent! No, Madam, it is not without a
precedent in my own history. Whilst in Paris, I was
violently smitten with the Hotel de Salm."

But it has been correctly said of Jefferson that he used
his talent for architecture for other purposes besides the
mere gratification of his sense of beauty. A sense of
practical fitness too was reflected in all his designs, which
ranged from the Capitol at Richmond and the temples
and cloisters at the University of Virginia, to the jails of
Cumberland and Nelson counties; and from the mansions
of his friends at Bremo and Farmington to a chicken
coop at Pantops, his outlying farm. What had nourished
this taste in the beginning? He had visited Annapolis,
Philadelphia and New York, in 1766, before the

cornerstone of Monticello had been laid, but there is no
evidence that his observations, during his sojourn in those
cities, directly shaped his original aptitude as designer,
draftsman, and builder. Certainly there was little in
the houses of his native colony that appealed to that
spirit of innovation, as well in architecture as in politics
and education, which animated him even in his youth.
Westover, Gunston Hall, Carter's Creek, Brandon,
Sabin Hall, Shirley, and the old Virginian manor-house
of Stratford, the residence at Mt. Airy,—though some
were inspired by classic models,—were not looked upon
by him as worthy of praise, or even of incidental mention.
In the Notes, he remarks on the homely construction of
the dwelling houses in his native State. Few were built
of brick; still fewer of stone; they were merely wooden
cottages made of scantling and boards, with walls plastered
with coarse lime. There were, in his opinion, but
four structures deserving of notice,—the Palace, the
College, the Capitol, and the Hospital at Williamsburg.
Of these the College and the Hospital were held up as
rude misshapen piles, "which might easily be mistaken
for huge brick-kilns, were they not covered with roofs."
The churches and courthouses had been designed with a
blind eye to elegance; but this general want of architectural
beauty was not surprising, he said, when it was recalled
that there were no workmen in Virginia who possessed
even a moderate degree of artistic judgment and
mechanical skill. The existing styles of architecture
were, in his judgment, "a malediction, not a blessing to
the land," although it cost no more to build a beautiful
structure than to build an ugly one of the same size.

Jefferson was the son of a planter, and had come into
the world in a plain house, in a sparsely inhabited neighborhood,
removed only by a few years from the secluded

days of the pioneer. There was nothing in that early
environment to cultivate a taste for architecture. All
his friends of his own age and social standing had been
carefully drilled, like himself, in the ancient classics, but
they, no more than himself, perhaps, had been led by that
fact to acquire an insight into the art. There was no
chair of fine arts at the College of William and Mary
to increase any natural leaning which he may have had
towards it; nor is there any proof that either Small, or
Wythe, or Fauquier, who so deeply colored his character
while a student there, encouraged him to pursue
its study. Both in Williamsburg, and in the homes of
such men as William Byrd of Westover, he found illustrated
books relating to architecture, and it is possible
that access to them for casual reading ripened what was
at first merely an idle liking for the art. But the bare
taste itself very probably sprang, not from any extrinsic
influence, but from his own versatile, inquisitive, and cultured
personality, which happened to find, in that particular,
a congenial reflection in the plates of Palladio, a
copy of which he looked upon even at the age of twentyseven
as the principal treasure of his library.

The first monument of his genius was the most beautiful;
the house at Monticello was pronounced by a cultivated
and travelled French nobleman to be the handsomest
private residence in America. The environment at
the time of its foundation offered such extraordinary
obstacles to a builder that they would have discouraged
any one who lacked the sanguine and resourceful temper
of Jefferson. The nearest point from which he could
obtain supplies of any sort was a small village; and even
this afforded but a paucity of the rarer materials for
construction; and no skilled mechanics at all. He created
substitutes for the latter by training intelligent

negroes of his own to be cabinet-makers, carpenters,
blacksmiths, masons, and bricklayers. Nails were manufactured
in his own smithy by his youthful slaves; and
his bricks were made of clay dug up out of beds on his
own land. He applied his own tests to different woods
to detect their relative fitness, strength, and durability,
and chose only those varieties that stood these tests
most successfully. The mortar used by him was obtained
only after long and laborious experiments.

In those times, there were no professional architects
at work in America. All building, even along the most
ambitious lines, was in the hands of handicraftsmen who
were guided by principles that had been brought in with
the early emigration,—to be later on, perhaps, modified
by novelties which had been introduced by the most
recent comers. Not elegance, but utilitarian and economic
purposes were alone kept in view. Jefferson, however,
had beauty, utility, and economy all in his vision;
and he was fully competent to serve as his own architect,
whether design or practical specifications were demanded.

Monticello is the most remarkable of all his structures
because it was the fruit of his taste and discernment
before either had been broadened and chastened by a
study, on the ground, of the splendid architectural monuments
of Europe. It is true that the mansion was not
finished until after his return from his foreign mission,
but already in 1782, the Marquis de Chastellux, a visitor,
was so impressed with its charm that he thought it deserving
of a minute description in the general record of
his travels. Mr. Jefferson, he said, was the first American
who had consulted the fine arts to find out how to
shelter himself best from the weather. The house was
begun in 1769, and completed in 1801, and during that
long interval, the original design was modified in one important

particular only; which, however, cannot be hunted
down to any suggestion which came to him abroad. It
was to Greek and Roman concepts that he turned when
he first framed that design; and to those concepts he continued
loyal to the end. He passed by the models then
standing in Virginia and in New England, which he might
have used, and took his cue from Palladio, who had
drafted the best existing representations of the surviving
monuments of ancient times. But in his drawings of
private houses, that architect had been forced to rely on
the descriptions of certain Roman predecessors. It is
an interesting fact that the country homes of the Venetian
merchants, his principal patrons, called for at least
one detail which was common to the country homes of
the Virginian planters: both sets of estates, being productive,
required a grouping of service quarters alongside
the owners' mansions. It was Palladio who solved this
problem by clothing the utilitarian outbuildings with a
decorative garb of columns at the very time that he subordinated
them to the main building.

This great master had influenced the grouping of many
planters' residences in Virginia, previous to Monticello,
through the style of architecture known by his name,
which had been transmitted from England to colonial
builders; but there was no such example of his work
there, even in an extremely modified form, as was presented
later in the design and structure of Jefferson's
mansion. As a matter of fact, there was no exact representation
of that mansion to be found in the plates of
either Palladio, or his English disciple, Gibbs; it was,
in reality, a reversion to the owner's early studies because
it fulfilled the purpose he had in view better than any
specific plan already in shape for immediate use in the
drawings of his favorite architect, for whom he was

afterwards to show his preference in the buildings of the
University of Virginia.[2] During his sojourn at home,
after his temporary retirement in 1793, he derived a
very kindly satisfaction from drafting plans for new residences
for his wealthy friends in Virginia, or in suggesting
alterations for the improvement of those already
standing. His advice and services were eagerly and
gratefully received, and in such houses as Bremo and
Farmington, already referred to, the impression of his
taste and skill remains to this day to delight the visitor.
He was consulted by Benjamin Harrison, of Brandon,
and by James Madison, of Montpelier, and on application,
supplied designs for the projected courthouses for
Buckingham and Botetourt counties, and for additions
to the Episcopal church in Charlottesville.

It was always the public building that aroused the most
enthusiasm in him as an architect. As early as 1776, he
brought in a bill in the General Assembly which provided
that, when the State Government should be removed to
Richmond, six entire squares of ground should be reserved
there as sites for the Capitol, a great Hall of
Justice, the offices of the Executive Board, and the additional
structures intended for other public purposes.
This combination of squares, broad streets, and noble
buildings was expected by him to serve as an imposing
monument that would always hold up before the eyes
of the Virginian people the most splendid examples of the
architectural art. Such a scheme was altogether unexampled
in American history up to that date; and not
until recent years has it been carried out by any foreign
or domestic community to the degree projected in the
mind of Jefferson.

He was very solicitous, while in France, to give all the
assistance then in his power to improve the taste of his
countrymen as reflected in their public buildings; his plan
for doing this was to send over the drawing of some
noble model whenever such an edifice was to be erected;
and in order to inform himself of the wide range of
models of that kind in European countries, he was not
content to study those in Paris alone, but travelled
through England, Holland, Italy, and Southern France
on a tour of inspection. In the course of these journeys,
he gathered up a large collection of books on architecture,
which further increased the weight of his advice.
Among the notable structures that are to be credited to
him is the Capitol at Richmond, which, at his suggestion,
was built along the lines of the Maison Carrée at Nimes,
one of the most "beautiful morsels" of architecture, in
his opinion, if not the "most precious," surviving from a
remote antiquity. The Capitol is said to be the first
direct imitation of a classical edifice to be found in the
United States; and while it did not conform exactly to
the model sent over by him, it has, nevertheless, always
remained a permanent memorial to the purity of his
taste.

There was now perceptible, in different parts of the
young Republic, a tendency to erect public buildings of
large dimensions. Naturally, this was most obvious in
the plans for the national capitol at Washington. Jefferson
was, at this time, Secretary of State, and the location
of the new District of Columbia fell within the
jurisdiction of that department. A trace of his early
scheme for the squares and public buildings in Richmond
is to be detected in his suggestion as to the use to be
made of the area of land set apart for the Capitol,
the President's House, and the Town Hall. The plan

chosen by L'Enfant, to whom Washington submitted
Jefferson's plan, was the Jefferson plan modified; and it
was further altered by Washington also. Jefferson's advice
was afterwards sought by the same great official as
to the style of architecture to be adopted for the projected
city, and his reply had an important influence on
its character as finally determined upon. He thought of
sending on a design which he had drawn for the President's
House; but he must have decided it to be impracticable,
either because it was too expensive, or pitched on
too large a scale. The model which he had proposed
for the Governor's House at Richmond failed of success
in the competition. His indirect recommendation of the
temple form for the Capitol at Washington was not received
with favor, for this style also was decided to be
too costly and too incommodious.

He was able to make his predilections more distinctly
felt after he assumed the Presidency, since the Capitol,
the White House, and the Department buildings were
still unfinished. He chose as architect a man who was
even more of an admirer of classic models than himself,
for Mr. Latrobe favored a return, not simply to classicism
in general, but to the original Greek form of it.
Jefferson, through this appointment, not only stamped his
own taste on the Capitol and the White House as far as
possible in their incomplete state, but in the public edifices
afterwards built in the other cities of the Union, he
was able to carry out his architectural preference without
obstruction or interference. His aim now, as formerly,
was to make the architecture of the classic era
the characteristic architecture of America; and in this
ambition, which he pursued consistently, he, fortunately
for his own success, had the support of a public opinion
which he himself had done so much to confirm and expand.

This, the distinctive bent of his genius as designer
and builder, found perhaps its most complete expression
in the edifices of the University of Virginia; and their
origin cannot be understood without a full knowledge of
their author's previous achievements as an architect.