Etext of Thomas Jefferson and the First Monument of the Classical
Revival in America  
by  Fiske Kimball  
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS
Vol. III SEPTEMBER, 1915 No. 9 

Thomas Jefferson and the First Monument of the Classical Revival
in America      
By FISKE KIMBALL, Ph.D., M. Arch. University of Michigan

There can be little doubt that the first monument of the classical
revival in America is the Capitol of Virginia, at Richmond.
Conceived in 1785, in conscious imitation of the Maison Carr‚e, it
was essentially complete in 1789, when the next work in the
Roman manner, Bulfinch's triumphal column on Beacon Hill, in
Boston, was erected. Easy to verify as is this priority, it has been
little recog- nized, and the building itself and the question of its
authorship still await scientific study. Though it is well known that
Thomas Jefferson and the French architect, Cl‚risseau, each had a
share in its design, the exact nature and relative extent of their
services remain to be defined. Unpublished material now brought
to light, in connection with published docu- ments which this
material will place in clearer perspective, will be found to estab-
lish, beyond much dispute, the real de- signer of this building, and
thus the pioneer of our classical revival in architecture. The
reactions and methods of an architect at the critical moment
between the aca- demic and the Romanist supremacies appear with
rare distinctness in these papers. Further documents and drawings,
Column 2  many of them likewise unpublished, per- mit the
original form of the building itself to be re‰stablished, and give
other impor- tant evidences concerning early American architects
and architecture.

The writers who have treated the subject have failed to give the
full and exact study, both of contemporary documents and of the
executed fabric, which the epochal character of the design
requires. Concern- ing the authorship and circumstances of the
original design there are two brief special studies, that of Colonel
Sherwin McRae, of the Virginia State Library, published in the
Old Dominion Magazine,   July 15, 1871,1 and that of Alice M.
Tyler, which appeared in the Richmond  Times- Dispatch for July
7, 1912.2 The authors rehearse Jefferson's published statements in
regard to the building, and accept them as establishing his
influence in the selec- tion of a model and in the final adoption of
a design based on it, but are prevented by lack of material from
assigning the credit for this design in its final form. The same is
true of the early account of Jefferson's architectural work by James
Kevan Peeb- les.3 Other writers, who have treated his architectural
activity as a whole,4 make but passing mention of the building, or
none at all, feeling perhaps that Jefferson's share in its design must
necessarily have been secondary to that of Cl‚risseau. This was the
outspoken opinion of the late Montgomery Schuyler, who voiced
the current skepticism of many practising architects when he said,
in an incidental reference,5 "Jefferson is erroneously re- puted to
be the author... his own account overthrows the attribution," and
again,6 "the architect was, in fact, a French- man." With only the
evidence adduced by these writers, the question would indeed be
insoluble, and opinions on it would necessarily remain a priori.

Until now, to be sure, it may well have seemed less probable, a
priori, that Jeffer- son was the architect than that Cl‚risseau should
have been. Cl‚risseau was a former pensioner of the Academy at
Rome, who had spent nineteen years in drawing the re- mains of
ancient architecture, -- a friend of Winckelmann, and teacher of
Robert Adam and the Freiherr von Erdmannsdorf, --  leaders in the
classical revivals of England and Germany. When the Empress
Cather- ine II of Russia requested of the French Academy a man
fitted to realize her project of a palace like those of the Roman em-
perors, it was Cl‚risseau who was desig- nated. Though he
belonged to the Acad- emy of Painting and Sculpture as "peintre
d'architecture," and though his only exe- cuted architectural works
are decorations of interiors, there can be no question of his
architectural knowledge and skill.7 With Jefferson, on the other
hand, the prevailing belief has been until recently that a man of his
political activity could not have been the actual designer of
buildings demanding trained knowledge and technical skill. It is
hoped that this presumption has been re- moved, however, by the
demonstration that Jefferson was, in fact, already an accomplished
designer long before the Capitol was undertaken.8 

Of documentary material concerning the genesis and character of
the original design there are, first, passages in Jefferson's collected
writings, already utilized in the previous studies. There is also a
wealth of manuscript documents of which these studies have given
no hint. The Library of Congress possesses a number of letters,
especially those between Jefferson and the Virginia
Commissioners of Public Build- ings, which throw unexpected
light on Jefferson's share in the authorship of the Capitol and on
the circumstances of its building. The Virginia State Library has
his accounts with the state accompanied by important letters and
vouchers, as well as the original plaster model of the building,
made in France by Jefferson's order. Sur- passing all these in
importance are the original studies for the Capitol, preserved, with
the main bulk of Jefferson's architec- tural drawings, among the
papers of the late T. Jefferson Coolidge, Jr., in Boston. The
authenticity of these as papers which belonged to Jefferson is
beyond question. The collection was already seen before 1834, by
William Dunlap, the historian of early American art,9 and it has
never left the hands of Jefferson's descendants. The authorship of
the Capitol sketches is established by correspondence of material
and technique with other draw- ings which form part of the
integral series, unmistakably by a single hand, dating from 1770 to
Jefferson's death in 1826. These drawings have always been
affirmed by his descendants to have been his own, and some bear
notes to that effect by members of his household. The papers on
which they are drawn are shown by their watermarks to be
identical with those of Jefferson's corres- pondence. From the
variety of circum- stances under which they were produced, as
well as from their absolute dependence on marginal calculations in
Jefferson's hand, they can have been made only by the man
himself.

For the form of the building as origi- nally completed, the lack of
any detailed description, based on a thorough structural
examination of the Capitol as it stood until recent years, is the
more unfortunate because the recent remodeling has greatly
impaired the historical testimony offered by the building itself.
Although there was an attempt to preserve the original arrange-
ment and spirit, and even to return toward Jefferson's antique
model, from which the original builders had departed, radical
changes were made in the interior, and the arch‘ological
authenticity of all the forms was rendered uncertain. It thus
becomes more than usually necessary to study the transformations
which the building has undergone, and the documentary evidences
concerning its original form. Here the principal sources of our
knowledge are earlydescriptions and drawings, the vouchers for
the original construction, measured drawings and photographs
made before the remodeling, the official report on the remodeling
itself,10 and the oral testimony of the architects in charge of it.

In this first appraisal of the new mate- rials, the necessity for
detailed criticism of the evidence precludes a simple chrono- 
Column 2  logical narrative. The method imposed requires
consideration of documents and groups of documents individually
before the responsibility for the design can be distributed, or the
relation of the building to it can be established. The conclusions
reached make possible, finally, a re-study of conditions at the time
the Capitol was built, and of its influence on American
architecture.I. The First Proposals for the Public Buildings

The germ of the Virginia Capitol at Richmond is contained in
Jefferson's draft of a bill to remove the seat of government from
Williamsburg, presented to the House of Delegates on October 14,
1776. As the first proposal in any of the independent American
states to make adequate pro- visions for the new form of
government, its terms are of more than immediate in- terest. It
provides 

"that six whole squares of ground surrounded each of them by four
streets... shall be appropriated to the use and purpose of public
buildings. On one of sd squares shall be erected one house for the
use of the General Assembly, to be called the Capitol, which sd
Capitol shall contain two apartments for the use of the Senate &
their clerk, two others for the use of the house of delegates and
their clerk, and others for the purposes of Conferences,
Committees, & a Lobby, of such forms & dimensions as shall be
adapted to their respective purposes. On one other of the sd
squares shall be erected another building to be called the Halls of
justice... and on the same square last mentioned shall be built a
public jail... One other of the sd squares shall be reserved for the
purpose of building thereon here- after a house for the several
executive boards and offices to be held in. Two others with the
interven- ing street shall be reserved for the use of the governor of
this commonwealth for the time being to be built on hereafter. And
the remaining square shall beappropriated to the use of a public
market. The said houses shall be built in a handsome manner with
walls of brick, or stone & Porticos where the same may be
convenient or ornamental, and with pillars and pavements of
stone."

For the selection of grounds, the choice of plans and building
materials, five per- Page 374   Column 1  sons to be called the
directors of the public buildings were to be appointed by the
assembly.

Although the bill failed of passage in 1776, another bill following
its wording was introduced by Harvey in 1779 and passed, making
Richmond the Capitol after the last day of April, 1780.11 In an act
for loca- ting the public squares on Shockoe Hill, passed in the
first session of the assembly held at Richmond, the directors are
named, beginning with his excellency Thomas Jefferson, then
Governor of the Common- wealth.12 The importance of
Jefferson's proposals from the architectural standpoint lies in the
provision of separate buildings for the legislative, judicial, and
executive branches of the government, the executive building
being for the several executive boards and offices, and distinct
from the Governor's residence. Such a strict divi- sion was hitherto
unknown in America, and indeed in Europe. European
governments generally were not organized in such a way as to
permit this separation; they occupied for the most part remodeled
palaces not specifically designed for their functions.13 The
colonial capitols or state houses had contained all three branches
of their govern- ments, and this arrangement was continued when
the states became independent. In Virginia the superior court of
the colony consisted merely of the Governor and council, and held
its sessions in the capitol.14 The old court-house at Williamsburg,
still standing, was used only by the town and the county;15 the
Governor's palace, of course, did not correspond to the executive
building which Jefferson proposed. Under the state government,
although an inde-pendent judiciary was organized, its courts 
Column 2  still sat in the capitol, while they remained at
Williamsburg.16 Jefferson's scheme, as enacted, would have
produced not merely a monumental grouping new to America, but
individual buildings of a novel character, anticipating in type the
great independent parliament buildings and palais de justice  of
modern Europe.

The plan was beyond the ideas and re- sources of the time. No
sooner was Jeffer- son out of the country, on his mission to France,
than the law was modified. An act passed at the session of
October, 1784, pro- vided that, 

"Whereas it hath been represented to the general assembly, by the
directors of the public buildings that apartments can be provided
for the use of the legislative, executive, and judiciary, to greater
advantage and with less expense, by uniting them under one roof,
than by erecting separate houses ... that it shall be in the discretion
of the said directors to cause apartments to be provided for the
uses aforesaid under one and the same roof; any law to the
contrary notwithstanding."17

The proposal for independent buildings was thus stillborn, and the
colonial pre- cedent, still closely followed in America, was
perpetuated.II. The Original Design of the Capitol A. Written
Documents Concerning the Design.

The familiar account of Jefferson's later connection with the
building of the Vir- ginia Capitol is the one given in his Mem- oir,
set down in 1821:

"I was written to in 1785 (being then in Paris) by directors
appointed to superintend the building of a Capitol at Richmond, to
advise them as to a plan, and to add to it one of a Prison. Thinking
it a favorable opportunity of introducing into the State an ex-
ample of architecture in the classic style of antiq- uity, and the
Maison quarr‚e of Nismes, an ancient Roman temple, being
considered as the most perfect model existing of what may be
called cubic archi- tecture, I applied to M. Clerissault, who had
pub- lished drawings of the Antiquities of Nismes, to have me a
model of the building made in stucco, only changing the order
from Corinthian to Ionic, on Page 375   Column 1  account of the
difficulty of the Corinthian capitals. I yielded, with reluctance, to
the taste of Clerissault, in his preference of the modern capital of
Scamozzi to the more noble capital of antiquity. This was executed
by the artist whom Choiseul Gouffier had carried with him to
Constantinople, and employed, while ambassador there, in making
those beautiful models of the remains of Grecian architecture
which are to be seen at Paris. To adapt the exterior to our use, I
drew a plan of the interior, with the apart- ments necessary for
legislative, executive and judi- ciary purposes; and accommodated
in their size and distribution to the form and dimensions of the
building. These were forwarded to the directors, in 1786, and were
carried into execution, with some variations, not for the better, the
most important of which, however, admit of future correction."18

Among the letters which Jefferson wrote, urging delay until the
plans should arrive from abroad, are several passages of which the
tenor might be expected to give a hint on his own part in their
preparation. They have the advantage over the memoir in having
been written at the time the events occurred. On September 1,
1785, Jefferson says, in a letter to Madison:

"I have received an application from the Directors of public
buildings to procure them a plan for their capitol. I shall send them
a plan taken from the best morsel of ancient architecture now
remaining. It has obtained the approbation of fifteen or sixteen
centuries, and is, therefore, preferable to any design which might
be newly contrived. It will give more room, be more convenient
and cost less than the plan they sent me. Pray encourage them to
wait for it and execute it. It will be superior in beauty to anything
in America, and not inferior to anything in the world."19

On September 20, he wrote to Madison again:

"... I received this summer a letter from messrs. Buchanan and
Hay, as Directors of the public buildings, desiring that I would
have drawn for them plans of sundry public buildings, and, in the
first place, of a capitol. They fixed, for their receiving this plan, a
day which was within about six weeks of that on which their letter
came to my hand. I engaged an architect of capital abilities in this
business. Much time was requisite, after the ex-  Column 2  ternal
form was agreed on, to make the internal dis- tribution convenient
for the three branches of gov- ernment. This time was much
lengthened by my avocations to other objects, which I had no
rightto neglect. The plan, however, was settled. The gentlemen had
sent me the one which they had thought of. The one agreed on
here, is more con- venient, more beautiful, gives more room, and
will not cost more than two-thirds what that would.

"We took for our model what is called the Mai- son quarr‚e of
Nismes, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful and
precious morsel of archi- tecture left us by antiquity. It was built
by Caius and Lucius Caesar, and repaired by Louis XV, and has
the suffrage of all the judges of architecture who have seen it as
yielding to no one of the beautiful monuments of Greece, Rome,
Palmyra and Balbec, which late travelers have communicated to
us. It is very simple, but is noble beyond expression, and would
have done honor to any country, as present- ing to travelers a
specimen of taste in our infancy, promising much for our maturer
age.

"I have been much mortified with information I received two days
ago from Virginia that the first brick of the Capitol would be laid
within a few days. But surely the delay of this piece of a summer
would have been repaired by the savings in the plan preparing
here, were we to value its other supe- riorities as nothing. But how
is taste in this beautiful art to be formed in our countrymen unless
we avail ourselves of every occasion when public buildings are to
be erected, of presenting to them models for their study and
imitation? Pray try if you can affect the stopping of this work. I
have written also to E. R.20 on this subject. The loss will be only
of the laying of the bricks already laid, or a part of them. The
bricks themselves will do again for the interior walls, and one side
wall and one end wall may re- main, as they will answer equally
well for our plan. This loss is not to be weighed against the saving
of money which will arise, against the comfort of lay- ing out the
public money for something honorable, the satisfaction of seeing
an object and proof of na- tional good taste, and the regret and
mortification of erecting a monument to our barbarism, which will
be loathed with execrations as long as it shall endure. The plans
are in good forwardness, and I hope will be ready within three of
four weeks. They could not be stopped now, but on paying their
whole price, which will be considerable. If the undertakers are
afraid to undo what they have done encourage them to do it by a
recommendation of the Assembly.

"You see I am an enthusiast in the subject of the arts. But it is an
enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve
the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to recon-
Page 376   Column 1  cile to them the respect of the world, and
procure them its praise."21

The letter of the same date of Edmund Randolph contains a similar
passage, withsome omissions and slight changes of wording. In all
of these statements, it will be seen, Jefferson says nothing
unequivocal of any personal responsibility for the de- sign, but
writes, "I engaged an architect of capital abilities in this business,"
and em- phasizes the merit of the model selected.

One other published document bears on the question of authorship
-- the "Account of the Capitol of Virginia" published among
Jefferson's miscellaneous papers. As numerous references to it will
be necessary, it may be reprinted here in full:

"The Capitol in the city of Richmond in Virginia is on the model
of the temples of Erectheus at Athens, of Balbec and of the Maison
quarr‚e of Nismes, all of which are nearly of the same form and
proportions, and are considered as the most perfect examples of
Cubic architecture as the Pantheon of Rome is of the Spherical.
Their dimensions not being sufficient for the purposes of the
Capitol, they were enlarged, but their proportions rigorously
preserved. The Capitol is of brick, one hundred and thirty- four
feet long, seventy feet wide, and forty-five feet high, exclusive of
the basement. Twenty-eight feet of its length is occupied by a
portico of the whole breadth of the house, shewing six columns in
front, and two inter-colonnations in flank. It is of a single order,
which is Ionic; its columns four feet two inches diameter, and the
entablature running round the whole building. The Portico is
crowned by a Pedi- ment, the height of which is two-ninths of its
span.

"Within the body of the building, which is one hundred and six
feet long, are two tiers of rooms twenty-one feet high each. In the
lower, at one end, is the room in which the Supreme Court sits,
thirty by sixty-four feet, with a vestibule fourteen feet by
twenty-two feet, and an office for their clerk, four- teen feet by
thirteen feet. In the other end is the room for the House of
Delegates, thirty feet by sixty-four feet, with a lobby fourteen feet
by thirty- six feet. In the middle is a room thirty-six feet square, of
the whole height of the building, and receiving its light from
above. In the center of this room is a marble statue of General
Washington, made at Paris by Houdon, who came over to Vir-
ginia for the express purpose of taking his form... A peristyle of
columns in the same room, six feet  Column 2  from the wall, and
twenty-two and a half feet high with their entablature, support a
corridor above, serving as a communication for all the upper apart-
ments, the stairs landing in it. In the upper tier is a Senate chamber
thirty feet square, an office for their clerk, five rooms for
committees and juries, an office for the clerk of the House of
Delegates, a chamber for the Governor and Council, and a room
for their clerk. In the basement of the building are the Land office,
Auditor's office and Treasury.

"The drawings of the fa‡ade and other eleva- tions were done by
Clerissault, one of the most correct Architects of France, and
author of the Antiquities of Nismes, among which was the Maison
quar‚e. The model in stucco was made under his direction, by an
Artist who had been employed many years in Greece, by the Count
de Choiseul, ambassador of France at Constantinople, in making
models of the most celebrated remains of ancient architecture in
that country."22

The purpose and circumstances of com- position of this document,
which would determine the weight to be accorded its statements,
have been hitherto unknown. These points are cleared up,
however, and fresh light is thrown on the main question by an
exchange of letters, preserved in manuscript, between Jefferson
and G. Douglas, a bookseller and publisher, of Petersburg,
Virginia. On October 15, 1800, Douglas, writing Jefferson
concerning a proposed republication of Douglas' " Reg- ister" for
1800, says:

"...to render it more acceptable to the people of Virginia, I propose
to have a frontispiece to it representing a view of the Capitol in
Richmond, the plate of which is now actually engraved in
Philadelphia....

"When in Richmond for the purpose of having the drawing taken, I
endeavour'd, but in vain, to find some person who could give me
an account of the building -- the intention of this letter, therefore,
is to request (having been informed, that you, Sir, were the original
& principal mover in having the building undertaken and
executed) that you will have the goodness to give me a short
account of it --  such as, from what original the design is taken,
from Greece or Italy, of what order, the drawer or build- er's
names, when the work was commenced and when finished, & the
expence, with some account of the inside apartments, &c...."23
Page 377  

  Column 1 

Jefferson replied from Washington, December 21, 1800:

"Your letter of Oct. 15 came to my hands on the 3d of November
when I was so engaged in prepar- ations and arrangements for my
departure to thisplace that I was only able to put up some notes on
the subject of the Capitol that I had made when I gave the plan of
it to Monr. Clerissault. these have enabled me to make out the
enclosed account of it. whether the execution conformed to the
original plan I do not know. still less can I say anything of the
expence: but that I presume might be obtained from Mr. William
Hay who was one of the Directors and principally attended to
it."24

The description enclosed is substantially identical with the
published version, differ- ing only in a few minor points of
phrasing. The importance of Jefferson's accompany- ing letter lies
partly in its explanation that the account applies to the original
plan and not necessarily to the building as executed, but especially
in its statement that the account was compiled from notes made
when the plan was given to Cl‚risseau. If so, the fullness of the
description and dimen- sions would suggest that the design had
already been carried to an advanced state by Jefferson himself.

Superior to all these letters in interest is the unpublished series
between Jefferson and the Directors of Public Buildings of
Virginia. It is given at length, with omission only of the parts
referring to the proposed prison, which are reserved for subsequent
treatment elsewhere.

The correspondence may be prefaced by a letter to Jefferson from
William Short, afterward Jefferson's secretary in Paris, and a
sharer of his interest in architecture:Letter Richmond, July 28th,
1784.  Dear Sir  

...

The Assembly voted at the last session the Sale of the public
Property here -- in Order to begin the Buildings on the Hill -- The
Directors have con- tracted with an Undertaker -- & Roy Randolph
is to draw the Plan -- I wished them very much to send to some
Part of Italy for a Design & Workmen -- A good model I think
would be a very great public Utility -- & the Example of importing
Work- Column 2  men, would unquestionably be followed -- & be
attended with very good Consequences -- But I do not think the
Directors believe it is possible to build a more magnificent House
than the Wmsburg Capitol -- It seems impossible to extend their
Ideas of Architecture beyond it --  ........ Yours &c.   W. Short. 25  

Though Short thus appears as the original proponent of a design
from abroad, his fears concerning the Directors were not realized,
as we see from their own first letter to Jefferson:Letter Richmond
March 20th -- 1785.  Sir  

The active part which you took before your departure from
Virginia, as a director of the public buildings, leads us to believe,
that it will not be now unacceptable to you, to co-operate with us,
as far as your engagements will permit.

We foresee, that in the execution of our com- mission, the
Commonwealth must sustain a heavy expense, and that we can
provide no shield so effec- tual against the censures which await
large disburse- ments of public money, as the propriety of making
them. For this purpose we must intreat you to con- sult an able
Architect on a plan fit for a Capitol, and to assist him with the
information of which you are possessed.

You will recollect, Sir, that the first Act directed seperate houses
for the accommodation of the differ- ent departments of
government. But fearing, that the Assembly would not
countenance us in giving sufficient magnificence to distinct
buildings, we obtained leave to consolidate the whole under one
roof, if it should seem adviseable. The inclosed draught will show
that we wish to avail ourselves of this licence, But, altho' it
contains many particu- lars, it is not intended to confine the
Architect exceptas to the number and area of the rooms.

We have not laid down the ground, it being fully in your power to
describe it, when we inform you that the Hill on which Gunns
yellow house stands, and which you favoured as the best situation,
continues to be prefered by us: and that we have located 29 half
acre lots including Marsdens tenement, and Minzies' lots in front
of Gunns; The Legislature have not limited us to any sum, nor can
we, as yet at least, resolve to limit ourselves to a precise amount.
But we wish to unite economy with ele- gance and dignity -- at
present the only funds sub- mitted to our order are nearly about
£10,000 Virga. Currency.Page 378  

  Column 1  

We have already contracted with Edward Voss of Culpepper, for
the laying of 1500 thousand Bricks. He is a workman of the first
reputation here, but skilful in plain and rubbed work alone. We
suppose he may commence his undertaking by the beginning of
August,... This circum- stance renders us anxious for expedition in
fixing the plan: especially too as the foundation of the Capitol will
silence the enemies of Richmond in the next October session.

........

We shall send to Europe for any Stone which may be wanted.

The roof will be covered with lead, as we conceive that to be
better than Copper or tiles.

In the remarks, which accompany the plan, we have requested a
draught for the Governor's house and prison. But we hope that the
Capitol will be first drawn and forwarded to us, as there is no
hurry for the other buildings.

We trust Sir, you will excuse the trouble which we now impose on
you, and will ascribe it to our belief of your Alacrity to serve your
country on this occasion. Etc. etc., Etc. etc.,  James Buchanan
Wm. Hay on Behalf of the Directors 26  

Jefferson's immediate reply is lost to us, but subsequent letters
permit us to recover its contents, and to follow the later pro-
ceedings:Letter Paris Aug. 13, 1785  Gentlemen  

Your favor of March 20. came to hand the 14th of June, and the
next day I wrote to you acknowl- edging the receipt, and apprising
you that between that date and the 1st of August it would be im-
possible to procure & get to your hands the draughts you desired. I
did hope indeed to have had them prepared before this, but it will
yet be some time before they will be in readiness. I flatter myself
however they will give you satisfaction when you receive them and
that you will think the object will not have lost by the delay. I was
a considerable time before I could find an architect whose taste
had been formed on a study of the ancient models of this art: the
style of architecture in this capital being far from chaste. I at
length heard of one, to whom I immediately addressed myself, and
who perfectly fulfills my wishes. he has studied 20 years in Rome,
and has given proofs of his skill & taste by a publi- cation of some
antiquities of this country. you intimate that you should be willing
to have a work- man sent to you to superintend the execution of
this work, were I to send one on this errand from hence,  Column 2 
he would consider himself as the Superintendent of the Directors
themselves & probably of the Govern- ment of the state also. I will
give you my ideas on this subject. the columns of the building &
the external architraves of the doors & windows should be of
stone. whether these are made here, or there, you will need one
good stone-cutter, & one will be enough because, under his
direction, negroes who never saw a tool, will be able to prepare the
work for him to finish. I will therefore send you such a one, in
time to begin work in the spring. all the internal cornices & other
ornaments not exposed to theweather will be much handsomer,
cheaper & more durable in plaister than in wood. I will therefore
employ a good workman in this way & send him to you. but he
will have no employment till the house is covered, of course he
need not be sent till next summer. I will take him on wages so long
before- hand as that he may draw all the ornaments in detail, under
the eye of the architect, which he will have to execute when he
comes to you. it will be the cheapest way of getting them drawn &
the most certain of putting him in possession of his precise duty.
plaister will not answer for your external cornice, & stone will be
too dear. you will probably find yourselves obliged to be contented
with wood. for this therefore, & for your window sashes, doors,
forms, wainscoating &c you will need a capital housejoiner, & a
capital one he ought to be, capable of directing all the
circumstances in the construction of the walls which the execution
of the plans will require. such a workman cannot be got here.
nothing can be worse done than the house-joinery of Paris. besides
that his speaking the language perfectly would be essential. I think
this character must be got from England. there are no workmen in
wood in Europe comparable to those of England. I submit to you
therefore the following proposition: to wit, I will get a
correspondent in England to engage a workman of this kind. I will
direct him to come here, which will cost five guineas. we will
make proof of his execution. he shall also make himself, under the
eye of the architect, all the drawings for the building which he is to
execute himself -- and if we find him sober & capable, he shall be
forwarded to you. I expect that in the article of the drawings and
the cheapness of passage from France you will save the expense of
his coming here. but as to this workman I shall do nothing unless I
receive your commands. with respect to your stone work, it may be
got much cheaper here than in England. the stone of Paris is very
white & beautiful, but it al- ways remains soft, & suffers from the
weather. the cliffs of the Seine from hence to Havre are all of
stone. I am not yet informed whether it is all liable to the same
objections, at Lyons & all along the Rhone is a stone as beautiful
as that of Paris, soft Page 379   Column 1  when it comes out of
the quarry, but very soon becoming hard in the open air, & very
durable. I doubt however whether the commerce betweenVirginia
& Marseilles would afford opportunities of conveiance sufficient.
it remains to be enquired what addition to the original cost would
be made by the short land carriage from Lyons to the Loire  & the
water transportation down that to Bordeaux  & also whether a
stone of the same quality may not be found on the Loire, in this
and all other matters relative to your charge you may command my
services freely.

will you have any occasion for slate? it may be got very good &
ready prepared at Havre, & a workman or more might be sent on
easy terms. perhaps the quarry at Tuckahoe would leave you no
other want than a workman.

I shall be glad to receive your sentiments on the several matters
herein mentioned, that I may know how far you approve of them,
as I shall with pleasure pursue strictly whatever you desire. I have
the honour to be with great respect & esteem, gentlemen Your
most obedient & most humble servant   Th: Jefferson. 27  Letter
Richmond October 18th 1785  Sir  

Your favour of the 15th June came duely to hand, and we return
you our warmest acknowledgements for undertaking in so
obligiing manner to aid the Directors of the public buildings in
procuring plans and estimates.

Your ideas upon the subject are perfectly corres- ponding to those
of the Directors, respecting the stile and Ornaments proper for
such a work, and we trust the plans will be designed in conformity
there- to... We are sorry we did not sollicit your Aid in the business
at an earlier day, for, from the anxiety of the Public to have the
work begun, we have been obliged to carry it on so far, that we
may be em- barrassed when we are favoured with a more perfect
plan from you. As we expect to hear from you, and perhaps receive
the plans before this can reach you, we deem it proper to inform
you what has been done, that you may judge, how far we shall be
able toadopt the plan, you transmit us -- The foundation of the
Capitol is laid, of the following demensions, 148 by 118 feet, in
which are about 400 M bricks; the Center of the building of 75 by
35 to be lighted from above, is designed for the Delegates; the rest
is divided in such a manner as to answer every purpose directed by
the Assembly; the foundation of the four porticos are not laid, tho'
the end and side walls are contrived to receive them. The pres- ent
plan differs from the one transmitted you, only  Column 2  in the
arrangement, and we hope we shall be able to avail ourselves of
your assistance without incurring much expence. James Buchanan.
28  Wm Hay. Letter Paris Jan. 26 -- 1786  Gentlemen  

I had the honour of writing to you on the receipt of your orders to
procure draughts for the public buildings, and again on the 13th of
August. in the execution of those orders two methods of
proceeding presented themselves to my mind. the one was to leave
to some architect to draw an external accord- ing to his fancy, in
which way experience shows that about once in a thousand times a
pleasing form is hit upon; the other was to take some model
already devised and approved by the general suffrage of the world.
I had no hesitation in deciding that the latter was best, nor after the
decision was there any doubt what model to take. there is at
Nismes in the South of France a building, called the Maison
quarree, erected in the time of the Caesars, and which is allowed
without contradiction to be the most per- fect and precious remain
of antiquity in existence. it's superiority over anything at Rome, in
Greece, at Balbec or Palmyra is allowed on all hands; and this
single object has placed Nismes in the general tour of travellers.
having not yet had leisure to visit it, I could only judge of it from
drawings, and from the relation of numbers who had been to see it.
I determined therefore to adopt this model, & to have all it's
proportions justly drewed. as it was impossible for a foreign artist
to know what number& sizes of apartments could suit the different
corps of our government, nor how they should be connected with
one another, I undertook to form that arrange- ment, & this being
done. I committed them to an Architect (Monsieur Clerisseau) who
has studied this art 20 years in Rome, who had particularly studied
and measured the Maison quarree of Nismes, and had published a
book containing 4 most excel- lent plans, descriptions, &
observations on it. he was too well acquainted with the merit of
that build- ing to find himself restrained by my injunctions not to
depart from his model. in one instance only he persuaded me to
admit of this. that was to make the Portico two columns deep only,
instead of three as the original is. his reason was that this latter
depth would too much darken the apartments. oeconomy might be
added as a second reason. I consented to it to satisfy him, and the
plans are so drawn. I knew that it would still be easy to execute the
build- ing with a depth of three columns, and it is what I would
certainly recommend. we know that the maison quarree has
pleased universally for near 2000 years. by leaving out a column,
the propor- Page 380   Column 1  tions will be changed and
perhaps the effect may be injured more than is expected. what is
good is often spoiled by trying to make it better

The present is the first opportunity which has occurred of sending
the plans. you will accordingly receive herewith the ground plan,
the elevation of the front, and the elevation of the side. the archi-
tect having been much busied, and knowing that this was all which
would be necessary in the begin- ning, has not yet finished the
Sections of the build- ing. they must go by some future occasion as
well as the models of the front and side which are making in
plaister of Paris. these were absolutely necessary for the guide of
workmen not very expert in their art. it will add considerably to the
expence, and I would not have incurred it but that I was sensible of
it's necessity. the price of the model will be 15 guineas. I shall
know in a few days the cost of the drawings which probably will
be the triple of the model: however this is but my conjecture. I will
make it as small as possible, pay it, and render you an account in
my next letter. You will find on exami- nation that the body of this
building covers an area but two fifths of that which is proposed
and begun;of course it will take but about one half the bricks; and
of course this circumstance will enlist all the workmen, and people
of the art against the plan. again the building begun is to have 4
porticos; this but one. it is true that this will be deeper than those
were probably proposed, but even if it be made three columns
deep, it will not take half the number of columns. the beauty of
this is ensured by experience and by the suffrage of the whole
world; the beauty of that is problematical, as is every drawing,
how- ever well it looks on paper, till it be actually exe- cuted: and
tho I suppose there is more room in the plan begun, than in that
now sent, yet there is enough in this for all the three branches of
govern- ment and more than enough is not wanted. this contains
16. rooms. to wit 4. on the first floor; for the General court,
Delegates, Lobby, & Conference. eight on the 2d floor for the
Executive, the Senate, & 6 rooms for committees and juries: and
over 4. of these smaller rooms of the 2d floor are 4. Mezzaninos or
Entresoles, serving as offices for the clerks of the Executive, the
Senate, the Delegates & the court in actual session. it will be an
objection that the work is begun on the other plan. but the whole
of this need not be taken to pieces, and of what shall be taken to
pieces the bricks will do for inner work, mortar never becomes so
hard & adhesive to the bricks in a few months but that it may
easily be chipped off. and upon the whole the plan now sent will
save a great proportion of the expence. in my letter of Aug.13. I
mentioned that I could send workmen from hence as I am in hopes
of receiving your orders precisely in answer to that letter I shall 
Column 2  defer actually engaging any till I receive them. in like
manner I shall defer having plans drawn for a Governor's house
until further orders, only assuring you that the receiving and
executing these orders will always give me a very great pleasure,
and the more should I find that what I have done meets your
approbation. I have the honour to be, [etc.etc.] Th: Jefferson 29  

On the following day Jefferson wrote to James Monroe, then in the
Virginia Legislature:

I send by this packet drawings for the Capitol & prison at
Richmond. they are addressed to the Directors of the public
buildings. if you have a curiosity to see them, open the second
package whichgoes herewith, only being so good as to do them up
again in the same way & send them off by the first post. I think
they will be a gratification to yourself and such members as like
things of that kind.30

The progress of the plaster model can be traced in subsequent
letters. On June 15, 1786, Jefferson wrote to Messrs. Buchanan &
Hay: "The model of the Capitol being at length finished, I heve
sent it down the Seine to Havre, it being necessary that it should go
by water..."31 Finally, on December 26, he explains an additional
delay, and incloses the bill of lading for the Atlantic voyage.32 

The impression already given by Jeffer- son's Memoirs that he
himself dictated the style of the building, selected the precise
model, and drew the plans of the interior, is greatly strengthened
by these letters. His " [unclear: ] respecting the stile and Orna-
ments proper for such a work" were ex- pressed immediately on
the receipt of the first letter from the directors, a " consider- able
time" before he could find "an archi- tect whose taste had been
formed on a study of the antient models of this art." He not only
states that he decided on fol- lowing the Maison Carr‚e before he
went to Cl‚risseau, but he constantly resisted Cl‚risseau's
suggestions to depart from it in this or that respect. Jefferson's
letters Page 381   Column 1  in which these statements occur are,
to be sure, not wholly ingenuous, being colored by his desire to
secure the adoption of the design through invoking the authority of
antiquity and the professional reputation of Cl‚risseau. For this
very reason, how- ever, we may be confident that he does not
overstate his own contribution, and may conclude that he was
responsible for at least as much as has just been outlined.

Evidence on the light in which both men viewed Cl‚risseau's
service is given by their accounts and correspondence in the Vir-
ginia archives. In Jefferson's account with the Commonwealth of
Virginia, datedDecember 9, 1789 occurs the entry: "1786 June 2,
Pd. Cl‚risseault for his assistants in drawing the plans of the
Capitol and Prison, 288 livres." The voucher accom- panying this
is a bill in Cl‚risseau's hand- writing, as follows:Letter  Debours‚
pour Monsieur Jefferson  

  les plans de prizons coupe et elevation 2 Louis   les plans du
model premier et Rez de chauss\da\e 2 Louis   I'\da\elevation de la
fa\de\cade 2 Louis   \da\elevation Lat\da\erale 2 Louis   les
antiquit\da\es de Nimes 3 Louis   toutes les mesures et profil pour
lex\da\ecu- tion du modele 1 Louis 

il faut observer que tous les dessins ont et‚ oblig‚ d'etre fait deux
fois avant de les dessiner proprement

I do certify that the above Acct Amted to 288 Livres. J. Latil  9 dec
89 

Cl‚risseau's letter of acknowledgement bearing the same date,
likewise speaks only of payment of expenses and makes it certain
that he regarded the transaction as Jefferson did, rather as a loan of
his draughtsmen for the drawing up of Jeffer- son's design, than as
regular professional services:Letter  Monsieur,  

je suis sensible a la complaisance que vous avez eu de m'envoyer
mes debours‚s. quant a la maneire obligeante avec la quel vous
vous ex- prim‚, j'en suis des plus satisfait. je suis enti‚re- ment
satisfait lorsque je suis assur‚ que vous estesatisfait du zele avec
lequel jai second‚ vos inten-  Column 2  tions. qu'il me soit permis
de me trouver tres honor‚ de trouver quelque moien pour pouvoir
meriter votre confiance et votre amiti‚. I'amour que jai pour mon
art est tel que je ne puis vous exprimer combien il m'est
satisfaisant de trouver un vrai amateur de I' antiquit‚. j'aurai
I'honneur de vous voir pour vous entretenir et vous prouver que le
plaisir que j'ai eu de vous obliger est super- ieur a mes peines. je
suis avec toute la consideration que vous merite. Monsieur Votre
tres humble tres obeissant serviteur  Clerisseau  a Auteuil ce 2 juin
1786 

A further entry in Jefferson's account with the state, "June 3, 1789,
Pd Odiot for coffee pot as a present to Clerissaut for his trouble
with the drawings &c, of public buildings for 23 livres" shows that
Cl‚ris- seau's own personal services and advice were also
handsomely acknowledged, but in a way which only confirms our
view of their advisory character.

Two later letters from Cl‚risseau to Jefferson are preserved, one,
of March 16, 1792, by the Massachusetts Historical Society, the
other, of May 23, 1797, in the Library of Congress; they testify,
how- ever, merely to Cl‚risseau's confidence in Jefferson's
friendliness. The first recom- mends a compatriot who is
emigrating to America; the second, written in poverty during the
Revolution, offers his library for sale. Among the polite formul‘
with which this second letter opens, he says:

"je conserve toujours les sentiments les plus sensibles pour une
personne qui a bien voulu m'hon- orer de sa confiance et qui a
daign‚ estre satisfait de mes productions."

As the productions referred to might well include his book, which
Jefferson had bought, his drawings of antiquities, and other
architectural works, no inference is to be drawn that Cl‚risseau
was the de-singer of the Capitol. On the contrary, the study of all
the written documents gives a strong presumption that Jefferson's
part was the larger, a presumption which the study of the drawings
will confirm and enlarge. (To be continued)

  Page 421  Column 1  Thomas Jefferson and the First Monument
of the Classical Revival in America By FISKE KIMBALL, Ph.D.,
M. Arch. University of MichiganII. The Original Design of the
Capitol33 B. The Design as Proposed by the Directors.

With the letters of the Directors at hand, it is possible to recognize
as their "inclosed draught" a drawing preserved in the Coolidge
collection in Boston. (Fig. 1.) The remarks which accompany the
plan have disappeared, but the plan itself bears manifest evidences
of being a sketch intended to convey the require- ments for the
building projected. Its suggestive character appears in the lack of
windows, and the note, "the windows to be plac'd as found most
convenient in the Ellivation." The building shown is rec- tangular,
having a relatively small portico placed against each of the sides,
as appears by notes in the margin. It thus corres- ponds with
Jefferson's statement, cited on page 38034, that the building begun
was to have four porticos. A central hall traverses the building in
each of two stories, with rooms ranged on either side in rather
accidental fashion, answering closely in number and relative
importance to those named in Jefferson's description of his
design.C. Jefferson's Studies for the Design.

The Coolidge collection includes also a group of drawings, the
general agreementof which with Jefferson's description, and with
the Capitol as it stood until 1906, leaves no doubt that they have
reference to the building. As variants one of another, still bearing
suggestions for further modi- fication, they are evidently
preliminary  Column 2  studies, and the identity of paper and
technique with earlier and later drawings of Jefferson's establishes
with certainty that they were drawn by his own hand.

There are seven sheets in the group, four of plans on red-lined
co”rdinate paper, three of elevations on paper with co”rdi- nate
lines embossed without ink. The drawings themselves are executed
with a finely pointed pencil, the elevations in line only, the walls
in plan filled in with a solid pencil tone. Neither co”rdinate paper
nor lead pencil was used in drawings made by Jefferson before his
residence in France; on the other hand, both were his preferred
media after his return.35 

Of the red-lined sheets, three are engraved, with main division
slightly less than the English inch, and divided into ten parts. The
total shortage below English measure in the length of the plate,
about twelve and a half inches, varies from three-sixteenths to
three-eights of an inch, which conforms to what might be expected
from the shrinkage of the paper after impression. There is no
water-mark or other indication of the origin of the paper except
what may be furnished by its English sub-division. Many other
drawings on this paper exist in the Coolidge collection, of which it
will suffice to men- tion one as having no connection with
Cl‚risseau -- a plan of one of the pavilions for the University of
Virginia, which must have been made as late as 1817. The fourth
sheet with red lines was ruled by hand none too carefully. Of the
embossed paper used for the three elevations, only Page 422  
Column 1 one other sheet exists among Jefferson's drawings, but it
bears a drawing of which Jefferson's authorship can be in little
doubt, -- a plan for the grounds at Mon- ticello, evidently
preparatory to the re- modeling of 1796, but bearing later notes,
one of them dated May 23, 1808.

This coincidence of materials, of course, is not sufficient to
establish Jefferson's authorship of the Capitol sketches. Their
identity of technique with other drawings of Jefferson's, however,
is equally striking. Self-taught as a draughtsman, and approaching
architecture with geometric and formal preconceptions fostered by
his allegiance to Palladio, Jefferson's manner was calculated,
mechanical, and precise, --  the very antithesis to the free and
intui- tive method of men of artistic training,  Column 2  like
Cl‚risseau. The exactness and Pallad- ian detail of the elevations
of the Capitol repeat verbatim the language of corres- ponding
drawings made by Jefferson before his European journey.36 

Before studying the design as exhibited in these drawings it will be
well to examine their possible sources on the formal side, the
drawings of the Maison Carr‚e which were accessible to Jefferson.
The building is figured in Book IV of Palladio's " Archi- tecture,"
Jefferson's prime authority in previous years; it is shown with
greater detail and exactness in Cl‚risseau's "Monuments de
Nismes," which Jefferson mentions in his Memoir. We have seen
that he purchased a copy from the author, Page 423   Column 1 
charging it to the state; an entry, whether for this copy or another,
appears in the catalogue of his private library. Jefferson also
acquired an additional copy of Pal- ladio while in Paris,37 but the
dates of these purchases we do not know. In Palladio's engraving
the dimensions of the building are rationalized to conform to
themodular system which the author, follow- ing Vitruvius,
everywhere introduces. The lower diameter of the column being
taken as a module, the height of the column and entablature are
given as ten modules and as two and a half modules respectively,
the [unclear: ] as one and a half modules, or "pycnostyle" -- the
close spa- cing of Vitruvius. In Cl‚risseau's plates, on the other
hand, all the dimensions, even those apparently corresponding to
each other, are given minutely in French feet and inches.
Frequently differing in abso- lute size from the measures as stated
by  Column 2  Palladio, they result in a somewhat dif- ferent set of
proportional ratios, less con- veniently integral. Column and
entabla- ture, to be sure, are of nearly the same proportional
height, but the space between the columns averages about one and
three- fourths modules, instead of one and a half, a spacing
justified by no classical theory. Since the number of columns and
spaces are the same in each case, it follows that the total
proportions of the length to the width vary substantially in the two
representations.38 It should therefore be relatively easy, provided
Jefferson did, in fact, rigorously observe the propor- tions, to see
which authority he followed, and ascertain which study in the
series, from its closer relations with the prototype, seems to have
been made first.

There can be no question that the first project was the plan
reproduced in Fig. 2, and that it was derived from the engravings
of Cl‚risseau's "Monuments de Nismes." Page 424   Column 1 
The spacing of the exterior ordonnance is, with a negligible
percentage of error, exactly on the same proportions as in
Cl‚risseau's plan (see Table, page 434). The scale, however, was
much greater, the total length being 153 feet 9 inches, against
about 85 English feet for the Maison Carr‚e; the module -- the
diameter of thecolumn -- 5 feet 5 inches, against about 3 feet.
Neither of these important dimen- sions is in round numbers, and
it becomes a question what did determine the size. The answer
would seem to be furnished by a striking coincidence between
Jefferson's study and the Directors' sketch. If the depth of the
porticos there stated be added to the scaled length of the main
mass, the total length amounts to 153 feet 6 inches, identical with
the total length of Jeffer- son's study. The exterior of Jefferson's
first scheme, then, was determined by the  Column 2  proportions
of the Maison Carr‚e as given by Cl‚risseau, and, very naturally,
by the extreme dimension furnished by the Directors.

The interior disposition, in contrast with that shown by the
Directors, is clear and largely handled, corresponding in general
with Jefferson's description and with the building as executed. A
monu- mental hall, square, running through two stories, and
focusing on the pedestal for Washington's statue, occupies the
center of the cella, between two principal rooms at the ends and
the shallow rooms, one containing the stairs, at the sides. The
precise relative sizes of these rooms was determined by the
fenestration, two bays of the side going to each of the end rooms
and three to the central hall. This gave a very large central space,
permitting a peristyle of six columns each way, but Page 425  
Column 1  made the end rooms comparatively nar- row,
twenty-five feet by seventy. The cutting off of galleries supported
on columns, and the further subdivision by railings, do not
noticeably improve this disproportion. The second story (Fig. 3)
has the same main divisions as the first, with a second order of
columns in the central hall, and smaller rooms separated by light
partitions over the long rooms at the ends. The various rooms in
the first-floor plan were indicated by capital letters, referring to
some legend not to be found. The distribution of these letters is
identical with that on later plans, which will be found to permit a
readier identification.

The two remaining plans (Figs. 4 and 5) show little or nothing
outside the ashlar lines of the cella, and obviously embody
attempts to improve the proportions of the individual rooms. Each
divides the length of the cella into three equal parts, with the
central hall square, and the length of the end rooms twice their
breadth. Here the inspiration is evidently from a passage in
Palladio, Book I, Chapter 21:  Column 2  "In the length of halls I
use not to exceed two squares, made from the breadth; but the
nearer they come to a square, the more convenient and
commendable they will be." Among "the most beautiful and
proportionable manner of rooms" Pal- ladio names those which are
square or of two squares. The difficulty of these schemes in which
the interior was deter- mined first was that of afterwards fitting the
exterior order to it. With neither of the schemes in hand is it
possible to place either columns or pilasters along its sides, no
matter what their proportions, and have five spaces on the end and
seven on the side, all equal, as in the original. Even had the
spacing been different on the end and on the side, the new
proportions of the interior would not have permitted a symmetrical
position of the windows in the end rooms. These difficulties might
have been overcome by the omission of the exterior order along
the sides, as in the studies for the elevations, and may well have
given the first suggestion for the omission, though the possibilities
of free- Page 426   Column 1  dom thereby secured were
ultimately left unutilized.

The interior arrangement of the firststory is substantially identical
in the two studies, the second story is shown only in the one on
hand-ruled paper (Fig. 5). The reduced central hall has now four
columns on a side in the first story, and none in the second, a
simple railing being substituted there. In one of the end rooms,
however, the greater width secured is used to elaborate the
subdivision, a basilican arrangement of columns being introduced,
leading up to the railed exedra at the end. The stairs are moved
into the aisle of the central hall, but otherwise the arrange- ment,
both upstairs and down, follows the general lines of the first study.
The basili- can colonnade, just mentioned, now gives us the clue to
the arrangement of the rooms mentioned in Jefferson's lists, for it
can denote nothing else but the court- room, for which Palladio
himself recom- mends and illustrates a form on the antique model
(Book III, Plate XVII). The same  Column 2  holds for the room
with the corresponding letter A in the first study. D must then be
the House of Delegates; F, the central hall, must be the Conference
Room; E, the House Lobby; B, the vestibule to the court-room; and
C, the office for its clerk. Upstairs, the Senate Room is certainly
the large room with a gallery, situated over one end of the
court-room. All this corresponds perfectly with the indica- tions
given by Jefferson in his formal description of the design, and in
his letter of January 26, 1786.

The principal difference between the two studies under discussion,
and a very notable one, lies in the intended relation of the columns
to the cella. On the one shown in Fig. 4, instead of the single deep
portico, a portico at each end, only one bay deep, is suggested, -- a
radical departure from the prototype, whether made in the interest
of formal symmetry or of expression of the balance of legislative
and judicial func- tions in the interior. The external walls of the
cella are left incomplete to permit Page 427  Column 1 
adjustment of the fenestration, but the faces of the corner columns
project so little beyond the outer face of the walls as to make it
evident that only pilasters could have been intended, and they per-
haps only at the corners. The diameter of the columns shown
would result in an intercolumniation of about two and a half
modules, against one and three-quarters for Cl‚risseau's Maison
Carr‚e and Jeffer- son's first study. The eustyle intercol- umniation
of two and a quarter modules is indissolubly associated in
Palladio's formul‘ with the Ionic order (Book I, Chapter 13), and
is used in Jefferson's studies for the elevations with Ionic columns.
There can be little question, then, that the change from Corinthian
to Ionic was already proposed when the plan in hand was made.
The third plan shows not even a vestige of colonnade, yet it may
safely be assumed from the position of the cella on the paper that a
single deep por- tico was again intended. That this draw- ing was
made later in order may now be proved. The other plans, including
first study, were made on one kind of engraved  Column 2 
co”rdinate paper, the elevations which embody the final version
are on another kind, likewise engraved. The drawing just
considered, on an improvised sheet, imitating the style of the
earlier engraved ones, must obviously fall between the two groups,
and hence proves to be the latest study for the plan.

The elevations do not correspond exactly to any of the plans, but
show further changes of dimensions and proportion of the same
sort as those between one plan and the next. This may point to a
certain interval between the dates of composition, and possibly to
the making of intermediate studies, now lost; but it must not be
forgotten that Jefferson's mathematical methods made it possible
to derive an ele- vation without drawing the corresponding plan.
The difference of paper is not sig- nificant, as we know that
Jefferson hadtemporarily run out of the red-lined paper even
before he made the latest of the plans.

One of the elevations (Fig. 6) shows the side of the building with a
portico at each end, one bay deep, as in the intermediate plan. The
Ionic order is of the conven- Page 428   Column 1  tional Palladian
proportions, with a module of 4 feet 2 inches. As in the
intermediate plan again, pilasters only respond to the columns;
they occur merely at the corners of the building, and are moved
away from the end windows in an effort to widen the rooms inside
while keeping the windows symmetrical in the rooms. The model
and the building show that the experiment with two porticos was
not considered successful, and that the accepted studies are the
draw- ings reproduced in Figs. 7 and 8. The equality of modules
and heights between these two drawings proves that the front
elevation here belonged with this side elevation, and not with the
previous one.

The scheme shown retains the single portico of the original, but
this is two columns in depth instead of three, and the cella has no
ordonnance but a single pilaster next to the portico. The build- ing
is laid out on a module of 4 feet 4 inches, with the column nine
modules high, the entablature one and four-fifths, and the
intercolumniation two and a quarter modules, all as recommended
by Palladio (Book I, Chapters 13 and 16). The total length of the
building is almost exactly what would be obtained by figuring the 
Column 2  length of a columnar building of the same number of
bays and the same module. The relation of the pilaster-respond to
the end window is not changed as in the rejected study, and the
fenestration is such that pilasters might be added without any
change in the windows (as they actually were added when the
building was erected). The proportions of the endrooms,
approximately calculable on the assumption that they were still
based on the fenestration, lie between the long-and- narrow form
of the first study and the two- to-one ratio desired.

The forms of detail -- doors, windows, cornice, and capitals -- are
all forms shown by Palladio, which Jefferson had already used
with equal literalness in his designs for Monticello.39 Certain
problems met here for the first time, such as the Ionic capital on
the angle and the return of the corner pilaster, are handled in a
tentative and unsuccessful way, but in general the design is well
studied and consistent. As in Jefferson's earlier work, the classical
forms are still rationalized according to Palladian rules; the height
of the pediment, for instance, is determined by Palladio's general
formula, two-ninths of the span, instead of the proportions given
for the Maison Carr‚e. Indeed we now see clearly that Jefferson's
insistence on the exactness with which he had followed the
Maison Carr‚e was largely to prevent further tampering with his
design, and that the design really departed from its model in
almost every way, -- in dimensions, in proportion, in ordonnance,
and in detail. For the first time in Jefferson's work, however, the
whole effect is not merely Palladian; the temple form appears -- it
is Palladianized Roman.

The relation of Jefferson's description to the studies now becomes
clear. The notes from which it was worked up, since lost, must
have included calculations similar to those which we have in his
note-books Page 429   Column 1  for Monticello, with the parts of
the order figured out on a modular basis. In re-deriving the
dimensions of the build- ing after a long interval, it is not
surprising that certain discrepancies should have crept in, and the
correspondence between the description and the final studies (see
Table, page 434) is sufficient to remove any doubtthat the
description refers essentially to the building as shown by them. Its
dif- ferences from the first study are wide, and the most precise
coincidence of the module and heights with the rejected elevation,
otherwise very different, is apparently accidental. There can be no
further doubt that the drawings given to Cl‚risseau at the time the
notes were made were those we have identified as the final studies.
Jefferson's authorship of them and his own essential completion of
the design are thus given another confir- mation.

That Cl‚risseau did make some positive contributions to the
design, however, is also certain. What some of these were appears
in the soft-pencil lines added with professional facility to
Jefferson's labori-  Column 2  ous and precise elevations. They
occur in the front view and the final side view, the rejected side
view having none. The prin- cipal changes affect the
enframements of the doors and windows and the slope of the
pediment. Consoles were added at the sides of the doors and
beneath the window-sills, panels were introduced below the sills of
the first-story windows and between the upper and lower ranges,
and minor changes in the size and projection of the
cornice-members were indicated. The apex of the pediment was
lowered so that its proportions, instead of being Jef- ferson's
favorite, 2:9, corresponded to the slope of the Maison Carr‚e as
shown in Cl‚risseau's engraving. Pedestals were suggested to
buttress the steps which were necessary to reach the side doors.D.
The Model Preserved at Richmond.

The interpretation of the studies which has been given is
confirmed by the model preserved in the Virginia State Library.
(See frontispiece in the Journal for Septem- ber.) Because of
differences between this and the building as executed, doubts have
Page 430  Column 1  sometimes been expressed as to whether it is
the original model sent from France. In fact these very differences
should have precluded any idea that the model could have been
made subsequently, unless for some remodeling. Its exact
correspondence with Jefferson's drawings, as corrected, now
removes this last possibility. As a further check on the authenticity
of both, however, we have with the vouchers at Richmond, the
directions for unpacking the model in the handwriting of
Bloquet,40 its maker. They say; "le fond de la petittes quesse est
attacher au plateaux du modelle avec 6 visse en fer pour le rendre
immobile dans la quesse." The holes for these screws, just six in
number, still exist in the under side of the platform.

The model shows the design essentially as in Jefferson's final
studies, with the modifications indicated upon them by Cl‚risseau.
There are some further changes of relatively slight importance: the
frieze and cornice of the second-story window- caps are removed
and small oblong win- dows are placed over them; the pediment of
the side door is replaced by a horizontal cornice, the steps at the
side are turned along the building, the columns and pilas- ters are
fluted. The actual dimensions of the model are, in general, with
great exactness, twice the corresponding dimen- sions of
Jefferson's final studies. The scale of the model then must be five
Eng- lish feet to the English inch. That Cl‚ris- seau made
practically no change in Jeffer- son's dimensions is further
evidence of the correctness of our conclusion that his part was
secondary.E. The Drawings Prepared by Cl‚risseau's Assistants.

The final drawings sent to Virginia are not preserved at Richmond
and a thorough search has failed to discover them else- where. The
"ground plan, the elevation of  Column 2 the front, and the
elevation of the side," which accompanied Jefferson's letter of
January 26, 1786, arrived safely, as we know from their
acknowledgement. The second-story plan was probably also
included, as it appears with the others in Cl‚risseau's bill to
Jefferson. The sections referred to in Jefferson's letter of trans-
mission were probably never completed, as no item in payment for
them appears in any of the accounts, and as the Commis- sioners'
letter which crossed Jefferson's must have made him skeptical of
the adoption of the plan.

The subsequent fate of these drawings is made clear by the
following letters. On July 11, 1791, David Stuart, one of the
commissioners for the new Federal City on the Potomac, wrote to
Governor Beverly Randolph, of Virginia:

"... Major L'Enfant is about drawing a model for the house of
Legislature. I have mentioned to him the one sent in by Mr.
Jefferson, which he desires to see. If there is no impropriety in it, I
would beg you to send it to him by stage. His resi- dence is at Geo.
Town. If not adopted it shall be returned immediately."41

Two weeks later the Governor replied:

"... Your favor of the 11th inst was duly received and would have
been immediately an- swered but for the absence of Mr. Hay one
of the directors of the public Buildings -- I did not suppose that
you expected the model of the Capitol in plaister of paris to be
forwarded by the Stage. I therefore called upon Mr. Hay for such
drafts of the house as had been sent from France by Mr. Jefferson.
You will receive enclosed in a small tin case a Draft of the Ground
plot, together with a side and front view of the Building which I
beg may be returned as soon as Major L'Enfant can take copies of
them as I am told they are essentially necessary for the Completion
of some work here..."42

On August 5 Stuart again wrote:

"I have received your letter accompanied by the draft of the Public
Buildings, and return to you my thanks for your kindness. As soon
as Major L'Enfant is done with it, I will return it..."43 Page 431  

 Column 1  

The promised return was never made, however, as we learn from a
letter of March 18, 1799, written to Governor James Wood by
William Hay, then retired from the Directors of Public Buildings:

"At the time the late Beverly Randolph, Esq., was Governor, the
Plans and Drawings of the Capitol and the Public Prison, which
were sent from Paris by Mr. Jefferson, were delivered to him, and
were by him transmitted in a tin case to the Directors of the Public
Buildings in the Federal city. Since that time I have never seen
them..."44

The reason for this is not far to seek. L'Enfant was dismissed from
the govern- ment service in February, 1792 -- about six months
after the time the Capitol draw- ings were entrusted to him,
leaving the custody of his papers in dispute. The Com- missioners
claimed that he declined to pass over the papers of his office; he
protested that they were stolen by order of the Commissioners
during his absence.45 Many of L'Enfant's personal papers are now
the property of James Dudley Mor- gan, Esquire, of Washington,
but the Virginia drawings are not among them, nor do they appear
to be preserved in the Library of Congress nor in the office of the
Commissioner of Public Buildings and Grounds.

Fortunately the lack of the final draw- ings of the Virginia Capitol
makes no seri- ous gap in our information. There is no reason to
question their exact corres- pondence to the model prepared from
them. If the model had been corrected from the drawings in any
important respect, Jef- ferson would have undoubtedly called
attention to it, as he did to his desire for a deeper portico. The
executed building, as we shall see, itself gives no evidence con-
trary to the assumption of identity, which may thus be taken as
established.

More to be regretted is the absence of the discarded set of
drawings referred to by Cl‚risseau in his bill to Jefferson, which 
Column 2 says "Il faut observer que tous les dessins ont et‚ oblig‚
d'estre fait deux fois avant de les dessiner proprement." These
might throw further light on the development of the design and on
the relative contribu- tions of Jefferson and Cl‚risseau, but so far
they have not been located. There exist at the Winter Palace in
Petrograd twenty volumes of Cl‚risseau's Roman architectural
drawings bought by Cath- erine II.46 If these were purchased
during his stay in Russia in 1778 -- 82 they cannot, of course,
include the drawings of which we are in search. It is possible,
however, that the purchase was made or supple- mented in 1797
when, as we have seen, Cl‚risseau sought to dispose of his library.
A letter addressed to the curator in Petrograd has brought no reply.

The necessity for a complete re-drawing while the matter was in
Cl‚risseau's hands is difficult to explain, if Cl‚risseau had in hand
from the start Jefferson's final studies with which the model
agrees. It might imply merely that Jefferson changed his own
ideas, or it might be thought to indicate that some of the changes
which we have traced in the course of his studies resulted
themselves from suggestions from Cl‚risseau, prior to those
indicated on the elevations. While these questions cannot be
decided with certainty, a number of statements, not wholly
consistent, may be brought to bear upon them.

In his letter to Douglas, Jefferson states that his description is
written from notes made when he gave the plan to Cl‚ris- seau, yet
the dimensions given in it cor- respond so closely with those of the
final elevations as to make it improbable that a drawing was
undertaken merely for the sake of changes so slight. The notes,
how- ever, may well have been made on Jeffer- son's giving
Cl‚risseau a second, revised plan.

Jefferson says in his letter of January 26, Page 432  Column 1 
1786 that it was Cl‚risseau who suggested that the portico be made
only two columns deep, yet this arrangement appears already in
Jefferson's final side elevation. He says, however, that this was the
only instance in which Cl‚risseau persuaded him to depart from
the prototype.47 Numerous others remain, some of which at least
seem more consonant with French methods of thought than with
Jeffersonian methods. The complete omission of an engaged order,
while it had ample precedent in other classic temples and might
have resulted solely from economy, suggests the puristic ideas of
eighteenth century architecture raison‚e. This appears above all in
the rejected side elevation with its shallow porticos at both ends,
so much better than the single deep portico for the expres- sion of
two rooms of equal importance, yet so contrary to Jefferson's
declarations concerning the dangers of departure from the antique
precedent.

Possibly a clue may be found in certain passages hitherto
unstressed. Jefferson's Memoir says: "I applied to M. Clerissault ...
to have me a model of the building made in stucco, only changing
the order from the Corinthian to the Ionic." Cl‚ris- seau's bill uses
the words, "les plantes du model," for the plans of the building. It
would seem that in the first instance a close approximation had
been wanted, doubtless with engaged columns and windows
between, as in Jefferson's earliest plan; and that a set of drawings
along these lines was begun under Cl‚risseau's direction.
Meanwhile, however, Jefferson doubtless discussed the matter
with Cl‚risseau, who  Column 2  may well have made criticisms
and sugges- tions which Jefferson canvassed, along with fresh
ideas of his own, in further studies, --  the two later plans and the
elevations, which now first became necessary. He ap- parently
decided not to use the two por- tico scheme, but determined to
substitute the other modified study for the scheme already under
way. He must now be as- sumed to have made the notes on which
thedescription sent to Douglas was based, and given the drawings
to Cl‚risseau, who re- vised their detail, but had his assistants draw
them up otherwise unchanged, pro- ducing the final drawings sent
to Virginia.F. Growth of the Design and Responsibility For It.

The growth of the design and the respon- sibility for it should now
be fairly clear. Jefferson's statements in his Memoir are
substantially accurate, but understate his own part; his letters,
though doing better justice to his share, purposely exaggerate the
responsibility of Cl‚risseau and the imi- tation of the antique. In
the letters to Madison and Randolph this is easily ex- plained as
due to delicacy in claiming credit for a design whose adoption he
was urging on grounds of superior merit; in the letters to the
Directors, as calculated to prevent departures from the scheme.
The drawings and the model show that the design, though a classic
adaptation developed with some criticism, was essentially his own.
The idea of such an adaptation was itself his; the Directors' sketch
gave only the prac- tical requirements and a limiting dimen- sion.
Cl‚risseau's attempts to rationalize the plan show that it can
scarcely have been he who suggested the literal imita- tion of the
temple form. Jefferson not merely selected a model for the
exterior, and determined the arrangement of the interior, but fixed
every principal dimen- sion, both inside and out, after elaborate
study and the rejection of many alterna- tives, -- the final result
having nothing in Page 433   Column 1  common with its
prototype except the general form. The Ionic order, with the
changed proportions which its adoption necessitated, was
apparently his idea. The omission of the order along the sides of
the building may or may not have resulted from a suggestion by
Cl‚risseau, but the new fenestration was his own. To Cl‚ris-seau
are due, beside the reduced depth of the portico, certain minor
changes, and the final forms of the details, which influence the
stylistic aspect of the body of the building but not its mass,
subdivis- ion, proportions, or interior arrangement. If one man is to
be designated as the architect, it must unquestionably be Jef-
ferson.

The plan, which is wholly his, is boldly and logically conceived,
with the principal rooms occupying the axial positions, the minor
elements well subordinated. The major balance is not between the
two branches of the legislature, as in the typical capitol of today,
but between the judicial branch and the legislative, as represented
by the House of Delegates. Perhaps the democratic tendencies of
Jefferson account for this identification of the legislature with its
popular house, for, in practice, the court scarcely needed a larger
room than the Senate. The conference-room, as the central hall is
called, is a feature which cor- responded with the existing Virginia
Con- stitution, according to which the ballots of  Column 2  each
house for governor, and so forth, were to be deposited and
examined "in the conference-room."48 

The exterior is an interesting compound of classicism and French
academicism. The consoles and garlanded panels of the cella
recall rather the manner of Gabriel than of Palladio, as suggested
by the earlier studies. Whatever the motive was in omitting them,
the lack of pilasters along the sides, though it weakens the unity of
portico and cella, conforms at once to classical and French
structural purism. The exterior has the sleekness and
accomplishment self-understood in eighteenth-century France,
with nothing of the unstudied artlessness of colonial America, and
with a grandiose classic quality still relatively novel abroad -- 
admirably symbolizing the aspirations of the new republican state.
The glaring defects in the relation of the portico to the interior
resulted from the antithesis which lay in the very program. As in
the Romantriumphal arch and in Perrault's colonnade of the
Louvre, it was the civilization and majesty of the State which were
to be symbolized, and the columns were used not only as elements
of intrinsic magnifi- cence but as trophies of the classical cul- ture
of the builders. The portico was a frontispiece to all Virginia.

  Column 1  Thomas Jefferson and the First Monument of the
Classical Revival in America By FISKE KIMBALL, Ph.D.,
M.Arch. University of MichiganIII. Executive Building49

THE Capitol building as executed did not conform entirely to the
design sent from abroad; Jefferson's fore- doomed attempt to
furnish his country with a perfect example of classic archi- tecture
was frustrated in part. He spoke in his "Memoir," as we have seen,
of "some variations, not for the better, the most important of
which, however, admit of future correction." Much the same
phrases occur, amid the pardonable expressions of triumph, in his
letter to William Short on first seeing the building after his return
to America, 

"Our new Capitol, when the corrections are made of which it is
susceptible, will be an edifice of first rate dignity. Whenever it
shall be finished with the proper ornaments belonging to it (which
will not be in this age), it will be worthy of being exhibited
alongside the most celebrated remains of antiquity."

Before we can ascertain in what the changes and incompleteness
consisted, and how far, consequently, Jefferson's ideas could make
their desired effect on con- temporaries, we must examine the evi-
dences concerning its original form and its later history.A. Sources
of Our Knowledge.

The early views of the Capitol are taken from such a distance or
drawn at such small scale that they furnish but little information.
The earliest, in a sketch ofRichmond from the banks of the James
River in 1796 by the architect Latrobe,50 shows the main lines of
the building essen- tially as they were until recent days, with 
Column 2  pediment roof, and pilasters along the side walls.

The same is true of the engraving on the Bishop Madison map of
Virginia, 1807,51 and of later engravings known to me, or to the
authorities of the Virginia State Library.

The drawing mentioned by Douglas in his letter to Jefferson seems
never to have been published, perhaps for the reasons explained in
the following letter:

"Agreeable to my plan, I had a drawing or front elevation of the
Capitol taken by a person in Rich- mond, and I got it engraved by
one of the most eminent artists in Philadelphia. The work was
completed in the month of December & I had every reason to
expect the copies or impressions, here in January. After writing
two months for them, in March they sent me the plate itself, but
the copies, by some unlucky accident or other, were lost or
mislaid, & have not yet been found..."52

Further particulars relating to the build- ing, however, are given by
the descrip- tions of early travelers. The Duc de la
Rochfoucauld-Liancourt, an accurate and cultivated observer,
gives this account of the Capitol in 1797:

"This edifice which is extremely vast, is con- structed on the plan
of the Maison Quarr‚e at Nismes, but on a much more extensive
scale. The attics of the Maison Quarr‚e, have undergone an
alteration in the Capitol, to suit them to the con- venience of the
public offices of every denomination, which, thus perfectly secure
against all accidents from fire, lie within reach of the tribunals, the
executive council, the governor, the general assembly, who all sit
in the Capitol, and draw to it a great Page 474   Column 1  afflux
of people. This building which is entirely of brick, is not yet
coated with plaster: the columns, the pilasters, are destitute of
bases and capitals: but the interior and exterior cornices are
finished and are well executed. The rest will be completed with
more or less speed: but, even in its present unfinishedstate, this
building is, beyond comparison, the most noble, the greatest in all
America. The internal distribution of the parts is extremely well
adapted to the purposes for which it is destined. It was Mr.
Jefferson who, during his embassy in France, sent the model of it.
Already it is said to have cost a hundred and seventy thousand
dollars; and fifteen thousand more are the estimated sum requisite
for completing it and remedying some defects which have been
observed in the construction."53

In the same year, Isaac Weld, a critic less sympathetic as well as
less competent, makes this comment on the Capitol:

"From the opposite side of the river this building appears
extremely well, as its defects cannot be observed at that distance,
but on a closer examina- tion it proves to be a clumsy ill-shapen
pile. The original plan was sent over from France by Mr. Jefferson,
and had great merit; but his ingenious countrymen thought they
could improve it, and to do so placed what was intended for the
attic story, in the plan, at the bottom, and put the columns on top
of it. -- In many other respects, likewise, the plan was inverted.
The building is finished entirely with red brick: even the columns
are formed of brick: but to make them appear like stone, they have
been partially whitened with common white- wash. The inside of
the building is but very little better than its exterior part. The
principal room is for the house of representatives; this is also used
for divine service, as there is no such thing as a church in town.
The vestibule is circular (!), and very dark.... Ugly and
ill-contrived as this build- ing is, a stranger must not attempt to
find fault with it, for it is looked upon by the inhabitants as a most
elegant fabric."54

Obviously in his remark on the inver- sion of the attic story Weld
is merely revealing his own ignorance of the classical podium and
unconsciously showing how much superior was Jefferson's
knowledge of ancient architecture to the current tradition of the
day.

The description of Bernhard of Saxe-  Column 2  Weimar, who
visited Richmond in 1825, is more intelligent, but careless in some
respects. He says of the Capitol:

"It recalls the maison quarr‚e at Nismes in France. On one of the
narrow sides of the longish rectangle stands a portico of eight Ionic
columns. These columns are however only of wood (!), and have,
seen from close at hand, a rather decayed aspect. The building has
two entrances on the long sides, with flights of steps."55

Samuel Mordecai, an old resident of Richmond, who published in
1856 his reminiscences of early days, says, 

"The Capitol itself, not then stuccoed, exposed its bare brick walls
between the columns or pilasters. The roof was once flat, if I
mistake not, and paved with tiles -- an elevated roof was
substituted."56

More precise and reliable, though frag- mentary, are the
indications furnished by the official letters, accounts and vouchers
preserved at Richmond. Some of these have been published or
summarized in the Calendar of Virginia State Papers, but a far
larger number remain in manuscript, including vouchers for the
smallest items of the original construction and subsequent
changes. It will suffice at this point to signalize their existence and
scope, leav- ing individual documents to be utilized where
necessary in the historical summary to follow.

The same is true of the later evidences, of which the most
important are a set of geometrical drawings signed "Alb. Lybrock,
arch't and supt." and dated 1858. They comprise two parallel
series, showing the building as it then existed, and as it would be if
remodeled by the addition of one bay at the rear and by cer- tain
minor changes. Only the first series need interest us, especially as
this remodel- ing was never carried out. The series includes plans
of each floor, front and side elevations, and sections, all of which
in almost every point where they can still be verified, are of the
greatest accuracy. Page 475   Column 1  (Figs. 10 -- 15.)
Photographs taken before the remodeling of 1905 are an important
supplementary source. (Figs. 16 -- 19.) They give the best idea of
the interior detail, and cover many points not shown by the
drawings. What neither drawings and photographs can show, in
many cases, are the materials of the different parts, and the
evidences of changes prior to 1858 which lieconcealed in various
parts of the building.

The "Report of the Committee on the Englargement, Restoration
and Repair of the Capitol Building,"57 far from clear- ing up these
points, as it might well have done, does not even give a summary
of the alterations made in the old building in 1905. There is
likewise no itemization of the large sums expended by the con-
tract, which might indicate exactly what the changes were, though
certain inciden- tal mentions and items for extra work in the
accounts reveal a few of them. To supplement the bareness of the
legislative report, Messrs. Noland and Baskerville, the Richmond
architects among those asso- ciated in charge of the remodeling,
have  Column 2  kindly given the writer the benefit of their
knowledge of the building before its trans- formation, and of their
exceptional oppor- tunities for observation during the recon-
struction. In general their surveys and written memoranda made at
the time, were not preserved, but their memory is clear on many
points of interest.B. General History of the Building.

Before the arrival of the plans of the Capitol from abroad,
considerable progress, as we have seen, had already been made on
the building. The corner-stone was laid August 18, 1785;58 two
months later the Directors had written: "The founda- tion of the
capitol is laid, of the following dimensions, 148 by 118 feet..."
Their further statement: "The present plan differs from the one
transmitted you only in the arrangement" is obviously incor- rect,
as the draught sent to Jefferson shows Page 476   Column 1  the
body of the building about 120 by 96 feet, a discrepancy later
admitted by them.

Jefferson's plan differed from both; heknew difficulty was bound
to arise over its adoption, as his letters to Madison and Randolph
have attested. He even wrote a second letter to Madison, of the
same tenor as the one already quoted.59 Madison replied to the
first that it did not arrive till February 24, too late for legislative
action with regard to the capitol. A letter from the
Attorney-General, he goes on, 

"takes notice of the plan you had promised and makes no doubt it
will arrive in time for the purpose  Column 2  of the
Commissioners. I do not gather from his expressions that he is
aware of the change which will become necessary in the
foundations already laid, a change which will not be submitted to
without reluctance."60

The outcome of the difficulty on the arrival of the plans, with the
essential adoption of Jefferson's design, appears in the following
letter, July 12, 1786, to Jef- ferson from Edmund Randolph, then
one of the Directors:

"... your favor concerning the capitol came to hand; after the most
painful anxiety at the tardy movement of the plan to Virginia. A
council of Directors was immediately called, and with some
difficulty the plan was carried thro'. But I am exceedingly afraid
that we have committed some blunder even now. I directed Mr.
Dobie, our super- intendent, and an adept in draughtsmanship, to
furnish me with a narrative of our proceedings in technical
language. When completed, it shall be forwarded. At present,
however, I will give you some imperfect idea of it. The plan sent
to you was a mere assay: that adopted by us was very different.
When your plan was examined, it was conceived, that without
adhering precisely to the same front, (i. e. frontage) it would be
enough to follow the same proportions. By this doctrine we were
rescued from a great embarrassment. For the lowland interest and
a strong party of the upland, in the Assembly, are laboring to stop
the progress of the building. To pull up all that had been done
would have been to strengthen the opposition. We have therefore
resolved to pursue your plan in every respect, except the extension
of the front. By this means we have been obliged to remove only
one side wall and a few partition walls..."61

The arrival of the model, and its rela- tion to the progress of the
work are chroni- cled in a letter from William Hay to Jef- ferson,
dated May 3, 1787:

"Your favour of the 26th of December inclosingBill of Lading for
the Model of the Capitol came safe to hand, addressed to Mr.
Buchanan and myself, and have to apologize for answering it in
my private capacity. There has not been a Meeting of the Directors
of the Public Buildings for some considerable Time past and Mr.
Buchanan is now confined by a severe spell of Sickness, so that I
Page 477   Column 1  could have neither the Advice of the
Directors nor the assistance of Mr. Buchanan in the business. No
Delay in the work has been occasioned by the Models not coming
to Hand, last Summer, and I fear it will stop where it is now for
some Time. The Pedestal Basement and the principal Story were
finished by last October, and nothing has been done since. The
fund of the 2 p. c. Additional Duties upon which was charged
£5000 to be applied towards completing the public
Buildings, has proved unproductive, for the Treasurer assures me,
it will not produce the sum which was charged on it in the first
Instance for the support of the members of Congress. The
Directors therefore can make no Contract upon this Fund without
sacrificing too much to the extrava- gance of the Times, and when
the Assembly meets again I fear no further Assistance will be
given on Account of the Distress which is universally com- plained
of through the State. The Capitol may then remain in its present
state for many years. The Directors themselves have been
neglectful, in many things, and in none more than in the want of
Acknowledgements to you, for the great Assistance you have given
them in this Business. Permit me therefore, to return my sincere
thanks, and I am  Column 2  sure they will be those of the
Directors in general, for the Interest you have taken in procuring
proper Plans and a model for the Ornamenting of the Capitol of
your native Country, and to assure you that I have the Honour to be
with perfect Esteem, Sir, your most Obe. Hb. Sier."62

The further progress of the building may be traced indirectly
through the great mass of accounts and vouchers preserved at
Richmond. For our purposes only the most [unclear: ] , those
marking the prin- cipal stages, or having references to changes
from the design, need be cited. The "Report of a Committee to
whom was referred the letter of the Directors of the public
buildings, December 14, 1789, states:

"Samuel Dobie contracted with the Directors in February, 1787, to
put a flat roof on the Capitol which should be tight and durable for
£170, but Page 478  Column 1  after much labor in
honestly endeavoring to fulfil his contract, it was apprehended that
it will be impossible to make the roof a tight one, and said Dobie
is willing to make a reasonable compromise on account of said
contract"... "that it is absolutely necessary for the preservation of
the building from ruin there be a pedimont roof put on it to be
covered with Lead."63

Warrants were authorized for payments on account of this
pediment roof, April 13 and November 11, 1790.

The building of the portico is described in a letter from William
Hay to Governor Beverly Randolph, June 22, 1790:

"Stating... that Edward Voss contracted with the Directors, on May
11, 1789, to build the columns of the Portico, and the vaults under
the portico, of Brick... that the said columns were finished so late
last season that the Directors postponed the vaults till this season.
Upon appli- cation of Voss for permission to begin the vaults, the
Directors excepted to the columns, as being... insufficient... As it
would be unsafe to trust  Column 2  a Lead Cover on the roof of
the Portico until the columns are made sufficient, they (the
Directors) think that the roof should be shingled, and the front and
sides of the pediment sheathed with plank to preserve the timbers
from injury..."64

On Voss' failing to take down and re-erect the columns, they were
finally allowed to stand as they were. On May 8, 1792 the
Directors resolved 

"that Dabney Minor be directed to whitewash the pedestals upon
the top of the Capitol, and the Pil- asters, with Stone Lime, with a
mixture of Lamp black to give it the appearance of stone," and on
June 14 they wrote the Governor, "Mr. Minor will soon furnish the
entablature."65

Not until 1797 was there an appropri- ation for completing the
exterior, which had remained, meanwhile, as La Rochefou-
cauld-Liancourt saw it, without stucco or capitals. Then begins a
series of payments, the last of which, marking the completion Page
479  Column 1  of the building, is attested by a letter to the
Governor from William Fourshee, one of the Directors, October
23, 1798:

"Mr. Henry Robinson, the Undertaker to finish the outside of the
Capitol, having nearly laid on all the coating, etc., I am also
desired to request a warrant for one thousand dollars under the
appro- priation of the last General Assembly for that pur- pose."66

The later history of the building includes no important changes
before the proposed enlargement in 1858. The only interesting
modification recorded is the opening of the window in the
pediment, for additional light in the garret, in 1801.67 As the pro-
posed for enlargement was not followed, the original fabric still
remained substantially intact until 1870. On April 27 of that year
occurred the catastrophe in which 

"the gallery of the Supreme Court gave way and its main floor with
it, into the House of Delegates below. The Supreme Court was
sitting in the room on the North East corner of the third floor...
Reso- lutions were offered to pull down the Capitol and build a
new one, but it was finally decided to repair the old building."68 
Column 2  

As subsequent photographs show, by their agreement with the
drawings of 1858, the architectural members of the House of
Delegates were left as before.

On August 1, 1904, after prolonged agitation and discussion, the
building was turned over to contractors for enlarge- ment and
remodeling, which was com- pleted in the course of 1905. The
archi- tects entrusted with the work were Messrs. John Kevan
Peebles, of Norfolk, Frye and Chesterman, of Lynchburg, and
Noland and Baskerville, of Richmond.69 

The scheme adopted by the legislature involved the building of
separate wings of less height for the House and Senate, connected
with the main block by corridors at the old side doors, and the
cutting upof the old House and Senate Chambers for offices. A
part of the original materials were replaced by new. In mat- ters of
form and detail, the architects, although they apparently ignored
the plaster model, tried to revert to Roman forms and the
proportions of the Maison Carr‚e in cases where these had been
lost by the builders. The columns of the por- Page 480   Column 1 
tico were reinforced, and both capitals and bases were enlarged to
correspond to the increased diameter, terra cotta capi- tals being
substituted for the old capitals of the columns and pilasters. The
archi- trave and the frieze were made of stone and the cornice of
terra cotta. A marble floor was placed in the portico, and marble
treads on the stairs. The niches of the rotunda were executed in
marble instead of wood, and marble bases and wainscoting were
introduced in the halls and rotunda. The belt courses at the
basement sill line and the first floor line were made of stone
instead of stucco.70 Messrs. Noland and Baskerville state also that
the columns were given entasis when the diameter was increased,
that the pediment was lowered somewhat, and that the modillions
were increased in size. These statements are confirmed by a
comparison with earlier drawings and photographs. Column 2  C.
The Building as Originally Completed.

We are now in a position to discount the various changes which
have taken place since the erection of the building, and to
determine how far it conformed, as first erected, to the original
design. That it con- formed in general is as certain as that it
differed in many particulars. The use of the Ionic order, the
number of bays on front and side, the main proportions, the princi-
pal divisions of the interior, and many details agreed with the
model and with Jefferson's intentions. Rather than tospecify
further agreements minutely, it will be simpler to note the points
of differ- ence, which include beside greater size and certain
variations in proportion, the changes in the exterior approaches
and steps, the addition of pilasters to the walls of the cella, and the
change in character of the door and window enframements.

That some differences should have crept Page 481   Column 1  in
through adaptation to founda- tions previously laid, through modi-
fications of the program, carelessness or defects of workmanship,
local practices in building, and lack of understanding of the ideas
of Jeffer- son and Cl‚risseau, is but natural. Some of the stylistic
changes, how- ever, can be assigned to none of these causes; they
are the expression of a different personality, which, like Jefferson
and Cl‚risseau, was in some respects ahead of the time. This, as
we shall see, can be no other than the Samuel Dobie, who has been
men- tioned by Edmund Randolph in 1786 as "our superintendent,
an adept in draughtsmanship." In later times indeed he passed as
the architect of the building, for there is no question that it is he
who is meant when Mordecai speaks in his recollections of one
"John Dobie... the archi- tect of the Capitol."71 

In a letter of William Hay to Gover- nor Beverly Randolph, May
11, 1790,72 Dobie is referred to as "Surveyor of Public Buildings,"
a title afterwards given by Jefferson to the architect of the Capitol
in Washington. Although he was not em- ployed by the Directors
after 1794,73 he was apparently still in Richmond in 1798 when
Hay recommended him to inspect certain work under construction,
"as the best judge I know of work of this kind."74 Con- cerning his
origins and training nothing is said, and inquiries of members of
the Dobiefamily still in Virginia have not brought the desired
information. We know, how- ever, that he was already in the
country as early as 1782,75 and there seems no doubt that he came
of a family which had been long in Virginia. A patent of land was
issued to John Doby in 1683; the name of  Column 2  Dobie
appears on marriage bonds of 1750 and 1761.76 

Dobie submitted in the original competi- tion for the National
Capitol in 1791 a design which throws light on his archi- tectural
knowledge and powers. (Figs. 20-22.)77 It exhibits a square
general mass with four porticoes and a dome over a central
rotunda. The suggestion is obvi- ously from Palladio's Villa
Rotunda, but the scale is much greater and the details are modified
in an interesting way. Two of the porticoes are octastyle and the
rotunda is large enough to have an interior colonnade. The exterior
dome, however, instead of having the semi-circular form shown in
Palladio's plate of the Villa, is of true Roman shape, and implies a
familiar- ity with classical forms very unusual at that time in
America. Dobie was evidently Page 482   Column 1  a man of
some independent knowledge and training, whose influence on the
building of the Virginia Capitol must be reck- oned with.

Among the individual differences be- tween the design of the
Capitol and the execution, the greater size is readily explained by
the necessity of conforming to the foundations already laid before
the design arrived. As one would expect from Edmund Randolph's
letter, the length of the building corresponds to the length of the
foundations, the width is less than that of those foundations but
proportional to the width of the model. The general increase thus
necessitated was of approxi- mately 10 per cent, and the
dimensions ofthe plan conform to this percentage with a very
small margin of error. The heights, however, both of the columns
and of the entablature, are increased in greater ratio, about 14 per
cent. (See Table.) This makes the columns about nine and a half
diameters high instead of nine, and thus the change can scarcely
have been made in an attempt to improve the proportions. It
resulted more probably from increases  Column 2  in the interior
heights, which lengthened the pilas- ters and forced a pro-
portional increase in the entablature. The pediment was raised
again to the Palladian ratio which Jeffer- son had originally used,
2:9, one of which occurs again in Dobie's design for the National
Capitol.

In the interior, the end rooms were widened at the expense of the
center, mak- ing the side windows un- balanced, the basilican
colonnade in the court room was omitted, and the galleries of the
House were rearranged. The colonnade in the central hall was
crowded out, and the gallery above was supported on brackets, the
stairs being again placed in the vestibule. The room next to the
portico was also shortened, as the original cornice and pilas- ters
in the photograph show (Fig. 15); while galleries were placed at
both ends of the House of Delegates, with the Speaker's chair in
the middle of the rear wall. The minor subdivisions of the upper
floors may well have suffered modification before 1858. The uses
of the rooms shown by the plans of 1858 differ in many respects
from those assigned by Jefferson, notably in having the Senate
opposite the House on the main floor, and the Court on the second
floor. The library certainly did not occupy such extensive quarters
at first. Whether the rooms originally followed Jef-ferson's
assignments is not indicated by any document to which I have had
access.

Another group of changes which pre- sents no difficulty is the
omission of the monumental flight of steps before the portico, and
the substitution of single flights at right angles to the building for
the pairs shown on the model. The object Page 483   Column 1 
was doubtless to get more light and more offices in the basement.
It is apparently to the side steps that an item in Samuel Dobie's
account with the State refers: "For drawings... and directing the
workmen in the years 1793 and 1794 in building the stone steps
and stairs..."78 Before 1793 the plans had been sent away to
Washington and it is not surprising that the new plan of the steps
should not have conformed to them. By 1793, also, the building
had already been long enough in use to demon- strate that it was
the side entrances that the interior rendered impor- tant, and that
the steps in front had only an esthetic function, which had to give
way before practical needs. Mr. Basker- ville remembers quite
distinctly that when the exterior plaster was removed from the
sides in 1905, marks of stairs running as in the model were found.
As Dobie speaks of building the stone steps, there may well have
been previous temporary ones of wood, having the form originally
intended.

Another change traceable to Dobie is the addition of a parapet
above the cornice -- a feature not long preserved, but attested by
papers of the Directors. As we have seen, Dabney Minor was
directed in May 1792 to whitewash the pedestals on the top of the
Capitol, and in June of the sameyear occurs an item "3 Tons of
lead for covering the Pedestal Cornice,"79 These statements can
refer only to a parapet of pedestal form, such as Dobie showed
later on his design for the Capitol at Wash- ington.

The use of the Scamozzi Ionic capital on the exterior order,
already mentioned,  Column 2  may likewise be assigned to him on
similar grounds. They appear not only on the design for the
National Capitol but in the interior finish of the building at Rich-
mond, which was not shown in the draw- ings sent from abroad.

The most striking modification, and the one which most clearly
evidences the inter- vention of some other agency than the
ordinary craftsman of the day, is the addition of the pilasters at
each bay along the sides and rear of the building. This was a step
in the direction of closer fol- lowing of the classic prototype, as
well as of Palladian architecture in the grand manner, which we
can attribute to Dobie. The pilasters belong certainly to the orig-
inal construction; they are mentioned in the vouchers in 1792,
were seen by La Rochefoucauld and Latrobe, and are stated by
Messrs. Noland and Baskerville to be bonded into the walls. It is
interesting to note that Dobie's design for the Capitol at
Washington has a pilaster treatment exactly similar even to the
capitals. It might be urged that it is more likely that Dobie derived
this idea from the Virginia Capitol, but as there is not a vestige of
Page 484   Column 1  evidence that the pilasters were ever
included in the original design, and there is ample proof that Dobie
had an inde- pendent knowledge of classic forms and a preference
for them, it must be concluded that they were due to him in both
cases.

One other stylistic change attracts atten-tion, the substitution, for
the Louis XVI doors and windows of the model, of enframements
having an indefinably Greek flavor. These formed part of the work
of finishing the exterior in 1797-8, at the time the stucco was laid
on. At that date Dobie was no longer in the employ of the
Directors; his detail for the Washington Capitol design, moreover,
has nothing of this Greek touch. It may not be a coinci- dence that
there was in Richmond in the employ of the Directors at that very
moment the first representative of the Greek Revival to come to
America, Ben- jamin Henry Latrobe. A man who had refused the
post of Surveyor General to the Crown, he was well versed in
Greek forms, as his design for the corps de garde  of the United
States Capitol, 1807, makes clear.80 His first important
commission in this country was the design of the Vir- ginia
Penitentiary at Richmond, on which he was employed during 1797
and 1798. With the original drawings of the Capitol lacking,
nothing could have been more natural than that the authorities
should have applied to the best qualified person at hand for a
design for the missing details.

To complete our study of the executed building it remains only to
examine those points not covered by the original drawings and the
model, which, in the absence of sections, the builders were forced
to decide for themselves. Most important of these was the method
of covering the central hall. A dome was adopted, accommodated
to the square room by flat triangular soffits, naively unstructural
but not unsat- isfactory (Fig. 17). The surface of the dome itself is
decorated with segmental  Column 2  gores, which recur in Dobie's
Washington Capitol. The interior detail for the most part presents
nothing unexpected in late Colonial woodwork. The Doric and
Ionic orders of the House and Senate Chambers (Figs. 18, 19), are
of the stereotyped Pal- ladian form, with no trace of Adam influ-
ence, and few of the ordinary native adap- tations to the material.
Only in the con- soles of the doorways in the central hall is there
evidence of the more direct clas-sical influence sometimes
appearing else- where in Dobie's work.

A curious evidence, to which there is now no danger of attaching
too much significance, is offered by the railing about the rotunda
opening. When the paint was removed from this at the time of the
remodeling, there was found, according to Mr. Baskerville, the
name "Thomas Jef- ferson," very neatly carved, as if by a
workman. In the absence of any other obvious motive for this, it is
scarcely too hazardous to assume that it was a testi- mony to the
common knowledge of Jef- ferson's part in the design.

The materials used in the building did not conform entirely to
Jefferson's informal suggestions in his letter of August 13, 1785,
but that was hardly to be expected. He had proposed that the
columns and external architraves should be of stone, the external
cornice of wood, and the interior cornices and trim of plaster. As
constructed, the columns were of brick, and according to Messrs.
Noland and Bas- kerville, hollow like a well-curb. The main
entablature was all of wood, the enframements of the openings
were mod- eled in the stucco, and the interior orders were of wood.

Considering the executed building as a whole, it is evident that
much had been lost from the original design with very little
compensating gain. The proportions of the columns were greatly
injured by the increase in relative height, the relation between the
rooms and the fenestration Page 485   Column 1  suffered, the
majestical columnar sub- division of the interior was abandoned
without securing the delicate charm of typically colonial
woodwork. The scale, to be sure, was further increased, the
pilasters tended to restore the unity of cella and portico, the Greek
doors and windows were more in advance of stylistic fashion, but
the elegance and consistencyof the original design were lost. In
their pre-destined attempt to reach the classic ideal set them,
Dobie and his comrades failed to strike fairly either their own goal
or the less ambitious mark of the humbler craftsmen. So far as the
building suc- ceeded, it was due to the underlying quali- ties with
which Jefferson had endowed it at the first, which make the
building itself as truly his as the finished design. The use of the
simple and crystalline temple form, the colossal order, the
monumental disposition of the interior -- the chief remains of his
ideas -- are what give the building its novel dignity, its expressive-
ness of the majesty of the new and sover- eign republican state.IV.
Influence of the Design

In the colonies during the Revolution, building came practically to
a standstill. In the chronology of American buildings given in "The
Georgian Period," a few dwelling houses only are listed during the
years 1775-83, against a rich assemblage of important buildings
during the decades before and after.81 In the table in Mr. Aymar
Embury's "Early American Churches,"82 not a single building
appears between the years 1775 and 1787, although nine buildings
each fall in the twelve-year periods before and after these dates.
Although these tables are not without errors, the condition which
they indicate is too patent to be mistakable. Column 2  

Few civil buildings prior to the Revolu- tion surpassed the old
State House in Philadelphia, or the State House at Annapolis,
which well represent the pre- vailing style. In the planning of the
interiors there was evident a primitiveness of analysis which would
have been serious had the requirements been more complex.
Architectural treatment of the exterior was generally confined to
the openings, cornice, and cupola, sometimes with quoins at the
angles. The portico appears in but few instances, notably in the
Redwood Library at Newport, although porticoes,even extended
through two stories, were already beginning to appear on the more
ambitious churches and residences. These porticoes were
invariably less in width than the building, so that they have at most
an academic, not a classical aspect. Exceptional buildings only --
Christ Church in Philadelphia, the two churches at Charleston, the
old Charleston Exchange, and Faneuil Hall in Boston, -- showed
any attempt to give an architectonic member- Page 486   Column 1 
ing to the wall surfaces, or to unite them with the portico by a
pilaster treatment. Although in all these points they may have been
unconsciously superior in frankness of expression, they were, none
the less, backward in relation to the stylistic move- ments in
Europe which furnished their received ideals. Foreign taste and
foreign architecture had themselves undergone a transformation in
the second half of the eighteenth century -- a transformation which
German scholars have rightly char- acterized as a second
Renaissance.83 The discovery of the buried cities, the engrav- ings
and writings of Piranesi, the publica- tion of the Greek
monuments, had opened an era of classical building, in which the
Adams in England, Soufflot in France, had already created new
standards. Column 2  

The character of the colonial buildings no longer satisfied the
founders of the independent states of America and the new
national government. Although the traditional method of buildings
were resumed in churches and ordinary domes- tic buildings with
scarcely a change, a new feeling for largeness of scale and
architec- tonic quality began to manifest itself in public and
semi-public buildings. The buildings successively prepared for
Con- gress and for the President at New York, Philadelphia, and
Washington evidenced this in varying measures. Federal Hall in
New York, remodeled by L'Enfant in1789, with its portico and
high basement, had a new and studied elegance.84 The
Government House, in New York, built for Washington, 1789-91,
surpassed the private residences of the day by its size Page 487  
Column 1  as well as by its tall pedimented portico.85 The
Congress Hall in Philadelphia, built for another purpose, was
confessedly inade- quate, but the house built by the State for the
President, 1793-97, though still Col- onial in its detail, was of a
scale and mag- nificence hitherto unapproached.86 For the
buildings at Washington a determined attempt was made, under
Jefferson's lead- ership,87 to secure designs which should be
worthy of a great nation and conform to the best architectural taste
of Europe. The individual states were not backward in this
movement. The new state house of South Carolina, designed by
Hoban and erected after 1786, had a heavy tetrastyle portico in the
Tuscan order (Fig. 23);88  Column 2  the State House in Boston,
built in 1795-8 on a liberal scale, showed a mixture of colonial and
classic forms. Of many of these buildings no plans are preserved.
The plans of the national Capitol, how- ever, and, in a less degree,
the Massachu- setts State House, show a monumentality and logic
immeasureably superior to the naivet‚ of the earlier designs.

Before all these in date stands Jefferson's Virginia Capitol, which
anticipates their qualities of monumental planning and external
treatment, and outdoes them in its prophetic announcement of the
return of the antique. Virginia preceded the other states as well as
the nation in providing new quarters for its administration; its
capitol was the first building to be des- tined specifically for a
modern republican government, and the first to give such a Page
488  Column 1  government, a monumental setting.89 The uniting
of legislative, judicial and execu- tive departments under one roof,
in a con- scious attempt to secure greater magnifi- cence, became a
universal precedent in America, occasioning many difficulties in
later days of more elaborate requirements. Although the
combination was not of Jef- ferson's making, he accepted it, and
sought to give clear distinction to the various parts within the plan
by logical analysis and balance of co”rdinate branches, thus
establishing the principle, though not necessarily the formula, for
later solutions. The external forms were not less novel. The
hexastyle portico was not only unap- proached in scale, but bore a
new relation to the building, united with it by a single unbroken
entablature. The temple form, with its unrivaled abstract unity
blinding observers to faults of relation, here made its first
appearance in America.

Innovations so striking could not be  Column 2  wholly without the
effect which Jefferson so much desired. The testimony of con-
temporaries, already cited, makes it clear that, in spite of
inadequacies of execution, the building was considered very
notable. More concrete effects were also not lack- ing. Within the
pervasive movement of which it was the leader, it is easy to point
to specific instances in which it exercised a direct influence.

The first of these appears during the preliminary studies for the
national Capi- tol. It has already been mentioned that Cl‚risseau's
drawings were sent to L'En- fant to serve as references in the
designing of the Federal buildings with which he was then
charged. Jefferson wrote after L'Enfant's dismissal "Major L'Enfant
had no plans prepared for the Capitol or Government House. He
said he had them in his head. I do not believe he will pro- duce
them for concurrence..."90 In consequence a competition was
instituted,Page 489   Column 1  the program of which, revised by
Jefferson, itself bears striking evidence of the estab- lishment of
precedents by the Virginia Capitol.91 The drawings at first sent in
were unsatisfactory, others were invited; finally, the plan of Dr.
Thornton was selected, Stephen Hallet was given second place and
engaged to supervise the execu- tion. Among the studies which
Hallet made, one is still preserved which has a parti strikingly
similar to that adopted by Jefferson for the Capitol at Richmond
(Fig. 24).92 Like that, it has the form of a temple, but has a free
standing portico all about. With its octastyle front and four- teen
columns on the side it surpassed Jef- ferson's design in scale,
though its interior arrangements fall behind those of his.

The impression made by such a design is shown by letters
concerning Hallet's competitive drawing, with which this design
can be identified.93 The Commis- sioners wrote Hallet on the
receipt of his plan: "The Stile of Architecture of yours has
attracted, the Distribution of Parts, is not thought sufficiently
convenient." Washington wrote the Commissioners "Could such a
plan as Judge Turner's be surrounded with Columns, and a colon-
ade like that which was presented to you by Monsr. Hallet (the
roof of Hallet's, I confess does not hit my taste)...it would, in my
judgement, be a noble and desirable structure."94 Letters
preserved at the Department of State make it clear that the
suggestion of a temple form came to Hallet from Jefferson, to
whom he had previously shown a design of a different character.95 

Jefferson did not insist on the temple form, merely demanding that
the accepted  Column 2  design should be classical, and cordially
recommended Dr. Thornton's plan with wings and a central
rotunda -- doubtlessas being a model of "spherical architec- ture"!
It was this form, rather than the "cubical," which, with the prestige
of its adoption in the national Capitol, became the accepted form
for state capitols down to our own day.

Its victory was not without a struggle, which was rendered more
severe in conse- quence of a certain lack of relation to the use of
the building which became evident with time. The rotunda of the
National Capitol like the central hall at Richmond, was originally
intended as a room for con- ference for both houses, but unlike the
hall at Richmond, it had an external expres- sion out of all
proportion to the use which it proved to receive. In the long years
before the Rotunda was completed, indeed, the intended use was
lost sight of, and to Page 490   Column 1  this day the conference
of both houses is held in the Hall of Representatives. There exists
thus a lack of practical function in the Rotunda, which the
monumental expressiveness of the great dome has not prevented
foreign architects from remark- ing. For commonwealths of the
limited means of the States just after the Revolu- tion the
Washington plan had the draw- back of greater size, complexity,
and expense.

From whatever causes, a number of the earlier state capitols
followed the temple form by preference, and in some of these, at
least, a direct influence from the Vir- ginia Capitol can be traced.
The Capitol of Kentucky erected at Frankfort, 1827-31, was an
Ionic temple having, like the one at Richmond, a hexastyle portico
in front only (Fig. 25).96 Later date and greater means resulted in a
Greek character in the order and an execution entirely in marble;
an incongruous addition was the small domed lantern over the
stairway. Al- though there had been two previous capitols of less
ambitious form, built about 1794 and 1816, the intimate relations
of Kentucky with her parent state, together with the Column 2 
close correspondence of the forms, leaves little doubt that it was a
case of germination deferred until the soil was prepared.

In the same series belongs the Capitol of Tennessee, built from the
designs of William Strickland about 1850, and still intact.97 This
was a rationalization of the temple type, similar in general scheme
to Jefferson's rejected studies with the por- ticoes at both ends.
Here these porticoes are eight columns wide and one deep, and
there are two other porticoes of six columns to mark the entrances
on the sides. The Ionic order is again employed, but over a full
basement story instead of a podium. A reminiscence of the
colonial scheme with its cupola appears in the tower over the
center, crowned with the inevitable Monu- ment of Lysicrates. The
relation of inter- ior and exterior, the expression of the plan is
much superior to that of Jefferson's design, in just the measure that
the adher- ence to the classical type is less strict.

With this design we reach a point where the influence of Jefferson
may be thought subordinate to other forces, yet it will be Page 491  
Column 1  found that even these forces may be traced in part to
him. Strickland had been a pupil of Latrobe, and had completed
Latrobe's design for the second United States Bank in Philadelphia,
a prostyle version of the Parthenon, in 1824. Latrobe was an
Englishman of the highest professional training, received in the
office of S. P. Cockerell, the father of the arch‘ologist; he was the
first to employ Greek forms in America.98 It might well be
thought that the use of the temple type by him and his pupils was
independent of Jef- ferson's example. An examination of the
revivalist architecture of England, how- ever, gives no
encouragement for such a view. Although individual Greek forms
began to appear as early as 1760, the tem-ple seems not to have
been imitated in its entirety in any monumental construction until
after 1830.99 Even then there was but a single important building
of temple form actually executed, the Birmingham Town Hall,
1831-50100 It would seem then that Latrobe got his
encouragement to literal imitation elsewhere, nowhere else than
from the Virginia Capitol.

It was to the statesmen and rulers, like Jefferson, Napoleon,
Catherine II, and Ludwig I, rather than to the professional
architects, that the direct imitation of classical models made its
appeal, -- the Vir- ginia Capitol and the Madeleine are parallel
instances of their creation. Whereas in France, however, the
fidelity of acad- emic architects to functional requirements left the
copy isolated, in America, without this restraint, it was multiplied
as nowhere else. The sophmoric analogy of the young republic
with Rome was on the lips of everyone. Encouraged by Jefferson's
exam- ple the builders adopted the temple form not only for
government buildings but even for dwellings. The old State House 
Column 2  at Hartford,101 and the Sub-Treasury in New York,
both designed by Ithiel Towne, are among the chief of the
buildings which may be traced thus indirectly to the Virginia
Capitol.

Aside from stimulating the literal imita- tion of the temple forms,
the building must have given a powerful impulse to more classical
treatment generally -- above all to the adoption of porticoes of the
full height of buildings. Dobie's design for the National Capitol
shows an early use of such a portico, which soon became almost
universal for public buildings, and, in Virginia at least, for private
residences as well. For these last, to be sure, Jefferson gave more
direct models in his designs for the rebuilding of Monticello, for
Farming- ton, and other houses; yet these were not only later in
date but far less conspicuous than the Capitol of the State. Its
portico dominated the architecture of Virginia.

Directly or indirectly, American classi-cism traces its ancestry to
Jefferson's Capi- tol at Richmond. Though it was inevitable that
the pervasive classical movement should ultimately reach
America, the direction it would take was uncertain. Jef- ferson,
who provided the means of intro- duction, turned it in a definite
channel. At his first opportunity to design a monu- mental
building, he broke with his earlier Palladian tendencies in a way
which proved decisive for American architecture. Though
impressions of Europe had doubt- less accentuated his native
classical leaning, the fundamental character of the design is not to
be ascribed to French influence. Jefferson's provincial insistence
on the support of classic authority anticipated by twenty years the
attempt of Napoleon to gain the same sanction for his own Empire.
Not merely in America, but in the develop- ment of modern classic
architecture as a whole, the Virginia Capitol is a landmark of the
first importance. 

1 Virginia State Capitol -- An Historical Account of the Erection
of the Capitol, and a Review of the Question of its Preservation.
Separately reprinted. 8 pp. 

2 The Capitol Square a Century Ago and the Capitol Square
Today. Illustrated. 

3 Alumni Bulletin of the University of Virginia, Vol. 1, pp. 68-74,
reprinted in the American Architect, 1895, Vol. xIvii, pp. 28-30. 

4 W. A. Lambeth and W. H. Manning: Thomas Jeffer- son as an
Architect and Designer of Landscapes. 1913. Mildred Stapley:
Thomas Jefferson the Architect.  Archi- tectural Record, 1911,
Vol. 29, pp. 177-185. N. M. Isham: Jefferson's Place in Our
Architectural History, Journal of the American Institute of
Architects, May, 1914, Vol. 2, pp. 230-235. 

5 The Old Greek Revival, American Architect, Vol. 98, p. 125. 

6 Same, Vol. 99, p. 84. Cf. also his History of Old Colonial
Architecture, Architectural Record, Vol. 4, p. 348. 

7 Notice and Bibliography of Cl‚risseau, by F. Noack, in
Thieme-Becker: Kunstler-Lexicon. Cf. article in Grande
Encyclop‚die. 

8 Fiske Kimball: Thomas Jefferson as Architect:Monticello and
Shadwell. Architectural Quarterly of Harvard University. June,
1914. Cf. The Nation: March 4, 1915, p. 259. 

9 History of the Origin and Progress of the Arts of Design in
America, 1834, Vol. 2, p. 225. 

10 Senate Document No. III. Appendix to Journal of the Senate of
the Commonwealth of Virginia, Session of 1906. 

11 Senate Document No. III. p. 106, note. The act is published in
W. W. Hening: The Statutes at Large, Vol. 10, 1822, p. 85 ff. 

12 Hening, Vol. 10, p. 318. 

13 Cf., for instance, P. Klopfer: Von Palladio bis Schin- kel, 1911,
pp. 94-100. Justiz und Verwaltungsbau. 

14 F. H. McGuire, in Report of the Virginia State Bar Association,
1895, p. 98. 

15 L. G. Tyler: Williamsburg, The Old Colonial Capitol, 1907, p.
240. 

16 Hening, Vol. 9, p. 434, 557; Vol. 10, p. 99. 

17 Hening, Vol. 11, p. 496. 

18 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by A. A. Lipscomb
and A. E. Bergh, 1903, Vol. 1, p. 70. 

19 Bergh, Vol. 5, p. 107. 

20 Edmund Randolph. 

21 Bergh, Vol. 5, p. 134 ff. 

22 Bergh, Vol. 17, p. 353 ff. 

23 Library of Congress, Jefferson Papers. 2d Series, Vol. 27. 

24 Jefferson Papers. 1st Series, Vol. 7. 

25 L. C., Jefferson Papers, 2d Series, Vol. 75, No. 8. 

26 L. C., Jefferson Papers, 2d Series, Vol. 4, No. 28. 

27 L. C., Jefferson Papers, 1st Series, Vol. 1, No. 155. 

28 L. C., Jefferson Papers, 2d Series, Vol. 4, No. 28a.  29 L. C.,
Jefferson Papers, 1st Series, Vol. 2, No. 22. 

30 Bergh, Vol. 5, p. 272. 

31 Bergh, Vol. 4, p. 346. 

32 Calendar of the Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson. Part 1, p.
54. 

33 Continued from the September Journal. 

34 Journal for September. 

35 Cf. the drawings reproduced and studied in the article on
Monticello, already cited. 

36 Cf. especially the Ionic portico of the garden pavilion, bearing
the date, April 23, 1779, reproduced in the article on Monticello,
Fig. 18a. 

37 The entries for the Cl‚risseau and for De Chambray's edition of
Palladio occur in his MS Library catalogue (at the Massachusetts
Historical Society) in the darker ink and finer hand which
characterize the entries for his foreign purchases. 

38 For full details concerning these and other dimensions and
proportions, see the table on page 434. 

39 Kimball: Monticello, esp. Figs, 22, 25, and p. 128. 

40 The entries in Jefferson's accounts give the name as Fouquet,
but the vouchers are signed unmistakably Bloquet. 

41 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, Vol. 5, p. 342. 

42 Letters of the Commissioners of Public Buildings, 1791 -- 93,
Vol. I, p. 20. 

43 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, Vol. 5, p. 356. 

44 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, Vol. 4, p. 10. 

45 Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Vol. 2, pages 139
-- 142 and passim. 

46 F. Noack in Thieme-Becker: K�nstler-Lexikon,  Article
Cl‚risseau. 

47 In Jefferson's Memoir he mentions also the substitu- tion, at the
instance of Cl‚risseau, of "the modern capital of Scamozzi" for the
"more noble capital of antiquity." The capital of Scamozzi, with
four pairs of volutes, placed diagonally on the corners, was indeed
used in the buildingbut the capitals were not added as we shall see,
until a late date, after the original drawings had been lost. The
model shows the Roman Palladian capital which Jefferson had
used in his studies and elsewhere. As Jefferson makes no mention
of a discrepancy between the model and the draw- ings in this
respect, as he certainly would have done had he troubled to have
the model corrected, it is reasonable to believe that the final
drawings showed this also, and that Jefferson's memory was
deceived by the change in execu- tion. 

48 The Constitutions of the Several Independent States of
America... 2d edition. Boston, 1785, p. 126. 

49 Continued from the Journal for October. 

50 Journal of Latrobe, 1905. p. 73. 

51 Reproduced in H. A. Christian's "Richmond, her Past and
Present," 1912. 

52 Library of Congress, Jefferson Papers, 2d series, vol. 27 No. 16.
No copy, either of the original register of 1800 or of the proposed
republication is known to me, nor is either listed in Sabin or
Growoll, or in the partial list of Virginia copyright entries for the
period, printed in the reports of the State Librarian. 

53 Travels through the United States of North America, London,
2nd edition, 1800. Vol. 3, p. 61. 

54 Travels through the States of North America and the Provinces
of Upper and Lower Canada during the years 1795-1796, and
1797. London, 1799. vol. 1, pp. 189 -- 190. 

55 Reise, vol. 1, p. 300. 

56 Richmond in Bygone Days, 1856. pp. 59 -- 60. 

57 Senate Document No. III, Session of 1906. 

58 Christian: Richmond, p. 27. 

59 Feb. 8, 1786. Bergh, vol. 5, p. 282. 

60 Writings of James Madison, edited by Gaillard Hunt, vol. 2, p.
224. 

61 Library of Congress, Jefferson Papers, Series 6, vol. 2, No. 95. 

62 Library of Congress, Jefferson Papers, 2d Series, vol. 41, no.
46.  63 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 5, p. 77. 

64 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 5, pp. 174 -- 5. 

65 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 5, p. 593. 

66 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 8, p. 522. 

67 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 9, pp. 229, 235. 

68 Christian: Richmond, pp. 317 -- 320. 

69 Report, pp. 2 -- 3. 

70 Report, passim. 

71 Richmond in Bygone Days, p. 87. 

72 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 5, p. 150. 

73 Ib. vol. 8, p. 316. 

74 Ib. vol. 8, p. 507. 

75 Ib. vol. 8, p. 317. 

76 Cf. William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 12, p. 105; vol. 20, p. 22;
vol. 11, p. 270. 

77 Glenn Brown, History of the United States Capitol, 1900-1902,
pls. 10-12. 

78 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 8, p. 319. 

79 Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. 5, p. 594. 

80 The Georgian Period, being measured drawing of Colonial
Work, 1898 -- 1902, vol. I, p.i; vol. 3, p. i. 

81 The Georgian Period, being measured drawing of Colonial
Work, 1898 -- 1902, vol. I, p.i; vol. 3, p. i. 

82 1914, pp. 186, 187. 

83 O. Benndorf: šber die j�ngsten geschichtlichen Wirk- ungen
der Antike, Wien, 1885. A. Sch”ne: šber die beiden
Renaissance-bewegungen des 15. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Kiel,
1903. 

84 Columbian Magazine, 1789, p. 504; J. Winsor; Narra- tive and
Critical History of America, vol. 7, 1888, p. 331. 

85 Cuts in N. Y. Magazine, 1795, front., and in Magazine of
American History, vol. 16, 1886, p. 222.  86 Engraving by George
Strickland, 1828, kindly furnished me by Mr. T. W. Jordan, of the
Pennsylvania Historical Society. 

87 Cf. his letter to L'Enfant, April 10, 1791. Bergh, Vol. 8, p. 162. 

88 Destroyed in 1865. Reproduction of Richardson's pen drawing
from "Columbia, South Carolina, 1786-1913," facing p. 25, kindly
called to my attention by Mr. A. S. Salley, State Archivist. 

89 Neither in Switzerland nor in Holland does the repub- lican
form of government seem to have given rise to special types of
buildings before the nineteenth century. 

90 Letter to Messrs. Stuart, Johnson & Carroll, Mar. 8, 1792.
Bergh, vol. 19, p. 88. 

91 Brown, U. S. Capitol, vol. 1, p. 5. 

92 Ib., Vol. 1, pl. 18. 

93 The sequence and relationships of Hallet's designs is to be fully
treated in a forthcoming study by Mr. Wells Bennett, who kindly
enables me to utilize his conclusions. 

94 Documentary History of the United States Capitol, 1904, p. 18. 

95 Cf. especially Hallet's letter to Jefferson, Sept. 21, 1792.
District of Columbia Papers, vol. 1. 

96 L. Collins, History of Kentucky, Enl. ed. 1882, p. 248. 

97 Frequently published, e. g. by E. Leslie Gilliams: A Pioneer
American Architect. Architectural Record, v. 23, 1908, p. 135. 

98 In his design for the corps de garde of the National Capitol,
1807. Brown: U. S. Capitol, pl. 44. 

99 A. E. Richardson, Monumental Classic Architecture in Great
Britain and Ireland, 1914, passim. 

100 The Architectural Magazine,...conducted by J. C. Loudon, v.
II, 1835, pp. 16-27, 237-239. 

101 Demolished 1887, Cf. The Connecticut Quarterly, v. I, p. 320.