Thomas Jefferson's Monticello
by William L. Beiswanger
from The University of North Carolina Press
Thomas Jefferson's Monticello is a superb collection of essays and color photographs showcasing this American treasure. With essays by William L. Beiswanger, Peter J. Hatch, Lucia Stanton, and Susan R. Stein, this stunning book explores all aspects of Jefferson's home. A section on the plantation and the enslaved community at Monticello provides a larger context in which to place and understand the house, its activities, and its owner.
The Library of Congress: The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building
from W. W. Norton & Company
A handsomely illustrated tribute to the Library of Congress building, published to coincide with its one hundredth anniversary. Arguably the most beautifully decorated building in the United States, the Library of Congress building (recently renamed the Jefferson Building) is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary this year after an eighty million dollar restoration that returned it to its original state. Designed by John L. Smithmeyer and completed in 1897 at a cost of under seven million dollars, the building is enhanced by the art of over forty sculptors and painters whose ranks include such notables as Herbert Adams, Kenyon Cox, Edward Clark Potter, Louis Saint-Gaudens, and John Quincy Adams Ward. The planning and construction are detailed in John Y. Cole's essay, followed by discussions by Henry Hope Reed, Richard Murray, and Thomas P. Somma of the decorations, paintings, and sculptures. The volume concludes with a study of the restoration by Barbara Wolanin, a chronology, a glossary of architectural and decorative terms, and a biographical dictionary of all the artists, architects, and designers who worked on the building. Throughout, noted photographer Anne Day's color images enhance this splendid book.
Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder
by Jack Mclaughlin
from Holt Paperbacks
Thomas Jefferson's Monticello: An Intimate Portrait
from Monacelli
Specially created in collaboration with Ken Burns for his documentary film series on Thomas Jefferson, these rich photographs portray Jefferson's Palladian masterpiece, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia, as Jefferson might have photographed it himself -- with his own refined intellectual and aesthetic vision. Jefferson died in 1826, the year photography was invented. In the spirit of this early era, award-winning photographer Robert Lautman has captured the house artistically using a unique mid-nineteenth-century method of creating photographs. After shooting the spaces with a large-format camera, and using only natural light -- photographing the east side in the morning and the west side in the afternoon, utilizing shutters and doors for lighting control -- he printed the images with a platinum-palladium process on hand-coated paper. The resulting photographs display a never-before-seen radiant atmosphere of this enchanting place, masterfully reproduced in this charming gift volume.
Begun in 1768 when Jefferson was only twenty-five years old, Monticello continued to be altered with changes and additions until his death. It remains the single home in America on the World Heritage List of international treasures. Jefferson, the only architect ever to serve as president, believed this house was his individual exploration and expression of classical architecture. Seen here are the harmonious proportions of the building, warm interiors, extensive grounds, romantic gardens, and elegant furnishings, along with some of Jefferson's prized personal belongings.
Thomas Jefferson's Architectural Drawings
by Frederick Doveton Nichols
from The University of North Carolina Press
From the graceful floor plans of Monticello to the public buildings of Williamsburg and the pavilions of the University of Virginia, the imaginative and mathematical mind of Thomas Jefferson takes shape in the architectural sketches for these landmark structures. A detailed checklist is appended to the text and provides a thorough overview of Jefferson's drawings.
Thomas Jefferson: The Built Legacy of Our Third President
by Hugh Howard
from Rizzoli International Publications
Thomas Jefferson, Architect: The Built Legacy of Our Third President, with text by Hugh Howard and photos by Roger Straus III, shows that the third U.S. President not only shaped democracy but also made the classical style of architecture an American architecture. Today, more than any other style, the columns and rotundas of classical Greece and Rome suggest "U.S. government building." Jefferson was a Renaissance man--inventor, politician, philosopher, scientist, doctor--but the dwellings and civic temples he designed are the only tangible legacy of his most Americans actually see every day. Arguably the crown jewel of Jefferson's architectural oeuvre, his Monticello mansion in Virginia receives a worthy 33 pages, with plenty of interior and exterior photographs. The Virginia Capitol also gets a chapter, as does his other home, Poplar Forest, along with other private dwellings Jefferson designed. Also in focus are public buildings such as the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, with its Rotunda at the head of a great lawn flanked by the copious colonnades-a design familiar now in campuses nationwide. Throughout the book, Howard guides us through the halls, sitting rooms, and grounds with writing that is knowledgeable but not overly technical. Straus' photos show off the estates and edifices in peaceable, natural light, illustrating some interiors as they would have been lit in Jefferson's day (i.e., by the sun). If not for Jefferson's vision, the book implies, our nation would look quite different today. -Eric Reyes
Monticello, his own home, was constantly redesigned by Jefferson during his life time, and he referred to it as his essay in architecture. The University of Virginia, which he founded and conceived the architecture for, is perhaps the greatest campus of any American university and certainly one of this country's greatest public spaces anywhere. Both of these are well served by the beautiful panoramic photographs in this volume, which show them in the landscape they are situated in, an integral part of Jefferson's design. Less well known, but included here, is the balance of Jefferson's work as an architect: the Virginia State Capitol and over a dozen private homes which still stand today. Illustrated with splendid color photography by the same author-photographer team that created Rizzoli's Wright for Wright, this is the first volume to combine all the extant work of Jefferson.
Saving Monticello: The Levy Family's Epic Quest to Rescue the House that Jefferson Built
by Marc Leepson
from Free Press
When Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July 1826 -- the nation's fiftieth birthday -- he was more than $100,000 in debt. Forced to sell thousands of acres of his lands and nearly all of his furniture and artwork, in 1831 his heirs bid a final goodbye to Monticello itself. The house their illustrious patriarch had lovingly designed in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his beloved "essay in architecture," was sold to the highest bidder.
Saving Monticello offers the first complete post-Jefferson history of this American icon and reveals the amazing story of how one Jewish family saved the house that became a family home to them for 89 years -- longer than it ever was to the Jeffersons. With a dramatic narrative sweep across generations, Marc Leepson vividly recounts the turbulent saga of this fabled estate. Twice the house came to the brink of ruin, and twice it was saved, by two different generations of the Levy family. United by a fierce love of country, they venerated the Founding Fathers for establishing a religiously tolerant and democratic nation where their family had thrived since the founding of the Georgia colony in 1733, largely free of the persecutions and prejudices of the Old World.
Monticello's first savior was the mercurial U.S. Navy Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, a colorful and controversial sailor, celebrated for his successful campaign to ban flogging in the Navy and excoriated for his stubborn willfulness. Prompted in 1833 by the Marquis de Lafayette's inquiry about "the most beautiful house in America," Levy discovered that Jefferson's mansion had fallen into a miserable state of decay. Acquiring the ruined estate and committing his considerable resources to its renewal, he began what became a tumultuous nine-decade relationship between his family and Jefferson's home.
After passing from Levy control at the time of the commodore's death, Monticello fell once more into hard times, cattle being housed on its first floor and grain in its once elegant upper rooms. Again, remarkably, a member of the Levy family came to the rescue. Uriah's nephew, the aptly named Jefferson Monroe Levy, a three-term New York congressman and wealthy real estate and stock speculator, gained possession in 1879. After Jefferson Levy poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into its repair and upkeep, his chief reward was to face a vicious national campaign, with anti-Semitic overtones, to expropriate the house and turn it over to the government. Only after the campaign had failed, with Levy declaring that he would sell Monticello only when the White House itself was offered for sale, did Levy relinquish it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1923.
Rich with memorable, larger-than-life characters, beginning with Thomas Jefferson himself, the story is cast with such figures as James Turner Barclay, a messianic visionary who owned the house from 1831 to 1834; the fiery Uriah Levy, he of the six courts-martial and teenage wife; the colorful Confederate Colonel Benjamin Franklin Ficklin, who controlled Monticello during the Civil War; and the eccentric, high-living, deal-making egoist Jefferson Monroe Levy. Pulling back the veil of history to reveal a story we thought we knew, Saving Monticello establishes this most American of houses as more truly reflective of the American experience than has ever been fully appreciated.
When Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July 1826 -- the nation's fiftieth birthday -- he was more than $100,000 in debt. Forced to sell thousands of acres of his lands and nearly all of his furniture and artwork, in 1831 his heirs bid a final goodbye to Monticello itself. The house their illustrious patriarch had lovingly designed in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his beloved "essay in architecture," was sold to the highest bidder. Saving Monticello offers the first complete post-Jefferson history of this American icon and reveals the amazing story of how one Jewish family saved the house that became a family home to them for 89 years -- longer than it ever was to the Jeffersons. With a dramatic narrative sweep across generations, Marc Leepson vividly recounts the turbulent saga of this fabled estate. Twice the house came to the brink of ruin, and twice it was saved, by two different generations of the Levy family. United by a fierce love of country, they venerated the Founding Fathers for establishing a religiously tolerant and democratic nation where their family had thrived since the founding of the Georgia colony in 1733, largely free of the persecutions and prejudices of the Old World. Monticello's first savior was the mercurial U.S. Navy Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, a colorful and controversial sailor, celebrated for his successful campaign to ban flogging in the Navy and excoriated for his stubborn willfulness. Prompted in 1833 by the Marquis de Lafayette's inquiry about "the most beautiful house in America," Levy discovered that Jefferson's mansion had fallen into a miserable state of decay. Acquiring the ruined estate and committing his considerable resources to its renewal, he began what became a tumultuous nine-decade relationship between his family and Jefferson's home.
Jefferson's Monticello
by William Howard Adams
from Abbeville Press
Mr. Jefferson's University (National Geographic Directions)
by Garry Wills
from National Geographic
In Charlottesville, Virginia, at the University of Virginia, there is today—beneath the irregular rhythms of modern student comings and goings—a severely rhythmic expression of the Enlightenment, a philosophy concretized in brick and timber. The play of one architectural element into another is meant to express the interconnectedness of all knowledge. It is Jefferson's last but not his least achievement, and one of the three things that he put on his own tombstone to be remembered by.
In important ways, this architectural complex is a better expression of Jefferson's mind than is his home on the hill overlooking the campus. Chance had a great deal to do with the way Monticello grew up over the years. But everything in the university's structure was planned, to the last detail—a meticulous ordering that is both romantic and quixotic. It is a place of study that itself repays study, and makes on lost world of the 18th century only half lost after all.
The Levy Family and Monticello, 1834-1923: Saving Thomas Jefferson's House
Although the Levys literally saved Monticello from ruin--not once, but twice--in the nineteenth century, and actually owned the property longer than Jefferson, the family's vital contributions to preserving Thomas Jefferson's home have been largely ignored or minimized. In a story filled with drama, irony, political wrangling, and legal battles, Professor Melvin I. Urofsky corrects the misconception that a "century of ruin and neglect" marked Monticello between Jefferson's death and the creation of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
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