Word: monticello
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
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...
...acquired his own practice, between Williamsburg and his family's estate at Shadwell, 90 miles to the northwest. At 21 he came into his inheritance, and in 1769 he began work on his own estate, four miles from Shadwell, which is still uncompleted and which he calls Monticello, the Italian for "little mountain." (Its elevation is only 500 feet, but it provides a view of 20 miles to the Blue Ridge Mountains...
...methodical, almost obsessively orderly man, Jefferson has long kept a garden book in which he jots down when the flowers bloom at Monticello and when they die, as well as various account books in which even the smallest expenditure and receipt are entered. More recently, he has begun a farm book to record his plantings and crops, and in another ledger he has started recording each day's temperature. Last week, on the day his Declaration was accepted, he observed not only that the temperature was 68° at 6 o'clock in the morning but that it was 72?...
...Jefferson married relatively late, at 28. his wife, lovely, musical Martha Wayles Skelton, was the widow of his college friend Bathurst Skelton. According to the family story ?he himself is reticent about his private life?Jefferson apparently misjudged the traveling time and arrived with his new bride at Monticello in the snow late one night. Only a one-room building for his use was completed at the tune, and the servants had all gone to bed, leaving no fires burning. Despite that inauspicious beginning, the Jeffersons appear unusually contented. They have one daughter, Martha, 4 (a second daughter died...