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Category Archives: Architecture
Thomas Jefferson on Monticello
What is your “dream setting” for a house?
And our own dear Monticello: where has nature spread so rich a mantle under the eye? Mountains, forests, rocks, rivers! With what majesty do we there ride above the storms! How sublime to look down into the workhouse of nature, to see her clouds, hail, snow, rain, thunder, all fabricated at our feet! And the glorious sun when rising, as if out of a distant water, just gilding the tops of the mountains, and giving life to all nature!
Thomas Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 1786, 5506
Patrick Lee’s Explanation
Jefferson had been in France and away from his beloved Monticello (Italian for “little mountain”) two years when he wrote this. He was as smitten with his home as he was with the recipient of this letter, the married woman he met in Paris. Widowed four years, he was captivated by the intelligent, perceptive, artistic Mrs. Cosway.
His infatuation with Cosway would fade. His love for Monticello never did. Just a year after this letter, he wrote to Dr. George Gilmore (5508), “All my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello.”
Learn more about Monticello and many other things Jeffersonian.
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Thomas Jefferson on his French “mistresses”
If only all mistresses were as innocent as these!
Here I am gazing whole hours at the Maison quarrée, like a lover at his mistress. The stocking weavers and silk spinners around it consider me a hypochondriac Englishman, about to write with a pistol the last chapter of his history. This is the second time I have been in love since I left Paris. The first was with a Diana … a delicious morsel of sculpture, by M. A. Slodtz. 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, madame, it is not without precedent in my own history. While in Paris I was violently smitten with the Hotel de Salm, and used to go to the Tuileries almost daily, to look at it.
Thomas Jefferson to Madame La Comtesse De Tesse, 1787, 442
Patrick Lee’s Explanation
The “Maison Quarrée” was built in the south of France in the era of the Caesars. Jefferson called it, “without contradiction, to be the most perfect and precious remain of antiquity in existence.” (TJ to Buchanan & Hay, 1-26-86)
The Hotel de Salm, also known as the Palace of the Legion of Honor, was a new building completed in Paris the same year Jefferson wrote this letter. Although new, it employed the time-honored classical look he found so appealing.The first building inspired his design for the state capitol of Virginia. Portions of the second found their way into his re-design of Monticello upon his return to America.
I could not find a rendering of Diana that I knew to be Slodtz’ work.
See images of Maison Quarréehere andhere.
See a narrated slide show of Hotel de Salm
