Jefferson: Taste of The Founder

By ROBERT HUGHES

The man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, made the Louisiana Purchase and dispatched the Lewis and Clark Expedition was also a multifarious taster of art, a dilettante. Lacking a theory, Thomas Jefferson was blessed with an eclectic curiosity about aesthetic experience. As architect, he drew up some of the most refined structures in all Georgian building--Monticello, the Richmond Capitol and an "Academical village," the university of his native Virginia. He also had a devouring and insistent eye for detail; designs for stair rails, coffee urns, goblets and garden gates flowed from his hand. He systematically assembled a library, "not merely amassing a number of books, but distinguishing them in subordination to early art and science."

Instructive Figure. He studied landscape design and was a botanist. He was also one of the first foreigners to discern, as minister to France in the 1780s, the challenging merits of new artists like Jacques Louis David and Antonio Canova. "I do not feel an interest in any pencil but that of David," he wrote in a flush of enthusiasm. Jefferson became the first American to transcend the cultural provinciality of his own land, moving with some ease between the New World and the Old. Even if he had had no political life, he would on that ground alone have been one of the most instructive figures of the 18th century.

Jefferson's achievements and tastes are celebrated in a vast show (609 items), that runs through the summer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The aim of "The Eye of Thomas Jefferson" is to sketch the cultural environments through which Jefferson moved. This is a pharaonic enterprise: pushed to its limit, the subject of such an exhibit might be nothing less than the whole of aristocratic and high bourgeois culture in Georgian England, America and France. Of course, no show could encompass (or even adequately sample) ah" that; so what there is, in essence, is a glamorous but uneven struggle to display cultural history as saga.

Still, the exhibition is rich with detail. One realizes, with fresh interest, how cramped the visual resources of Jefferson's Virginian education must have been; his own remark on local architecture in 1781, that "the first principles of the art are unknown," is borne out in other fields by the stiff, crude society portraits of the young colony. The show traces the neoclassical ideal forming in Jefferson's ideals and tastes--the growing certainty that republicanism was a function of natural law, that a new age of civic virtue was dawning and that an art of reasoned severity and correct classical proportion was needed to embody it. As William Howard Adams writes in the show's excellent catalogue: "Jefferson envisioned a style and form based on antiquity but with a purity that left behind history's corrupting influences of rotten governments, benighted rulers and unenlightened institutions."

Benevolent Squires. Here he is in Paris, "violently smitten" with the geometrical volumes of the Hotel de Salm, so denuded of fripperies of rococo as to promise him a new mode of architectural thought. There he is in Nimes, entranced by the proportions of the Roman Maison Carree, ordering a model of it, which, shipped back to Virginia, became the basis of the Capitol at Richmond.

Of course, there are things one does not learn from the show. The part titled "The British Connection" is merely a rehash, laid forth in paintings, of the now outmoded picture of 18th century England as an Age of Elegance, populated by enlightened lords, benevolent squires and happy forelock-tugging peasants. The whole matter of slavery is discreetly omitted from Jefferson's American experience, although neither his wealth nor the leisure he needed for self-cultivation would have been possible without his slaves. (If the National Gallery wanted to be consistent in its policy of using great borrowed paintings to allude to the social and intellectual norms of Jefferson's day, it might as well have borrowed Turner's Slave Ship.)

Moreover, there is the problem that Jefferson had actually seen few of the major works in the show. There on view is the Uffizi's Medici Venus, because Jefferson longed to install a copy of her at Monticello. Not having been to Florence, he had never seen the original, which he knew through engravings and plasters. It is pleasant to see the Towneley Vase, that once renowned Attic mar ble of the 1st century A.D. on which Keats based several lines of Ode to a Grecian Urn. But Jefferson never saw it, and (as the catalogue admits) would probably have disliked the "licentious mysticism" of its Bacchic figures.

These distortions matter because they imply that Jefferson's experience of the visual arts was much wider than it really was. He did not have the automatic overview of a modern museumgoer; nor was he a kind of Yankee Kenneth Clark, mellifluously discoursing among the servants and mockingbirds of Monticello. He believed, correctly, that he was an instrument of history; but he did not imagine himself as a character in a cultural saga. Jef ferson's tough, ambitious self-teaching, in all its patchiness, cannot have been the smooth inheritance of masterpieces that his show suggests. It was won, not inherited, and in that sense was profoundly American.

Robert Hughes

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