Word: jefferson
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...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...
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...
...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...
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...
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...