Review: From the Grounds Up: Thomas Jefferson's Architecture and Design

Abstract

From the Grounds Up: Thomas Jefferson's Architecture and Design Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville 26 January–29 April 2018 Recalling the many accomplishments of his long public life, the polymath Thomas Jefferson instructed that his gravestone be inscribed with what he considered the three most important: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence of the Statute of Virginia Religious Freedom and Father of the University of Virginia.” To mark the bicentennial of the last of those achievements—the founding of the university on the edge of the courthouse town that stood in the shadow of Monticello—Jefferson scholar Richard Guy Wilson organized From the Grounds Up , an exhibition of drawings, books, letters, paintings, prints, models, tools, and architectural fragments that exemplified Jefferson's passion for architectural design and building. Just how absorbing those passions could be was revealed to a visitor to Monticello who stumbled around scaffolding in unplastered rooms. Rather than apologizing for the unfinished appearance of the house so many years after it was built, Jefferson stated that he fervently hoped that it would “remain so during my life, as architecture is my delight, and putting up, and pulling down, one of my favorite amusements.”1 Although staged to commemorate the laying of the foundations for the first pavilion on the grounds of Jefferson's “academical village,” the exhibition did not focus solely on the design and construction of the university; rather, it served as an informed introduction to those sources that inspired his abiding interest in architecture (Figure 1). Jefferson was just as fascinated with the practical aspects of building as he was with the theoretical nature of design. Wilson emphasized this point by displaying utilitarian objects such as nails made by slaves in the nailery on Monticello's Mulberry Row, period tools, a brick fragment from Poplar Forest, and a door from the same place fabricated by the enslaved carpenter John Hemings. Like many of his contemporaries in the …