Jefferson and Palladio in Virginia
April 9 – 13, 2008
Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America
Arranged by Classical Excursions
“With Mr. Jefferson I conversed at length on the subject of architecture. Palladio, he said ‘was the bible.’ You should get it and stick close to it…”
Colonel Isaac Coles in a letter to John Hartwell Cocke, 1816
There is no state in the union other than Virginia where the influence of the great Italian Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio, is as pronounced, that is, influential by way of English Palladianism that reached its maturity in the early eighteenth century. The architect’s drawings were carefully studied by Inigo Jones in the seventeenth century. Palladio’s great book, Il Quattro Libri, which was reproduced and interpreted frequently, became an extraordinary promotional piece for classical architecture worldwide. Even before Jefferson’s time, Palladio’s works reached America through translations of his book, as well as through the writings of such eighteenth-century English architects as Colin Campbell, James Gibbs, and Robert Morris.
But it was Virginia’s own Thomas Jefferson, the architect, who greatly expanded the Palladian influence on American classical architecture. Like Palladio, Jefferson cherished the lessons to be learned from ancient Roman architecture, especially the columned temple. Thanks to him, classical architecture has been the set style for the American government from his Virginia State Capitol and his ideas for the White House and the United States Capitol to hundreds of civic and public buildings built over two centuries. Jefferson, though a man for a democratic society, could never have imagined the sheer numbers of “colonial” houses that dot the American landscape.
As part of its 2008 celebratory program for the 500th anniversary of the birth of Palladio, the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America is inviting you to join its four-day tour of some of the finest examples of three centuries of Palladian architecture in Virginia. The earliest buildings to be privately visited are such Tidewater plantation houses as Shirley, Brandon, and that icon of American Georgian architecture, Westover.
Central to the scheme of the excursion is time spent in the Charlottesville area with private viewings of Palladian Monticello, the University of Virginia, Edgemont, Mirador, Shack Mountain, and Farmington, as well as other sites.
In Richmond, you will see on a private basis Jefferson’s magnificent State Capitol, the elegant Federal-style Wickham House, Wilton (1753), a Georgian gem where we will have lunch, and Tuckahoe Plantation, Jefferson’s boyhood home, as well as twentieth- century American Palladian houses such as Milburne by architect William Lawrence Bottomley.
Overnight accommodations will be offered at the Beaux Arts classical-style Jefferson Hotel, designed in 1895 by none other than Carrère & Hastings, architects for the New York Public Library, and the Omni Charlottesville Hotel.
Expert lecturers and tour leaders include Calder Loth, senior architectural historian of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources; and K. Edward Lay, Cary D. Langhorne Professor Emeritus of Architecture, University of Virginia, and William Beiswanger, architectural historian for Monticello.
Tour Highlights
Mirador, built near Charlottesville in 1825, was the family home of the famous Langhornes and their five beautiful daughters. Nancy, who married Lord Waldorf Astor and became the first woman to enter Parliament; Irene, who became the wife of illustrator Charles Dana Gibson and was the model for the Gibson Girl; Phyllis; Nora and Lizzie, whose daughter was Nancy Lancaster. Born with an innate sense for beautiful surroundings, Nancy was fortunate to enter a world of great houses, exquisite gardens, glittering international society. She became owner of the London decorating firm of Colfax and Fowler. Her passion for Mirador (“I was born at Mirador. It’s what I love most in the world.”), affected her ideas of home, comfort and style, culminating in the decorating of her English country houses and developing the English Country look.
She later bought Mirador, and with the leading architect William Adams Delano (Delano and Aldrich) redesigned and redecorated the house and laid out a new garden that related to the residence. In his biography Nancy Lancaster: Her Life, Her World, Her Art, author Robert Becker records a conversation he had with her: “The one problem we did have with our plans at Mirador, as I saw it, was with the hall. It would have been too long and too narrow now that he had extended the back of the house. I said to Billy Delano…‘Couldn’t you hollow out the middle of the hall, make it round and two stories tall and put a skylight at the top?’ Which is exactly what he did. It turned out to be perfectly beautiful.” Today the property is gloriously maintained by owners Hope and Paul Burghardt, who, knowing Nancy in her last years, were able to restore Mirador with her vision in mind.
Shack Mountain, in Charlottesville, was designed by Fiske Kimball and completed as “a house of Jeffersonian character” in 1938. Kimball was an architect, architectural historian, professor and prominent director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1919
he was asked to establish a program in architecture at the University of Virginia. Four years later he became chairman of the restoration committee at Monticello. His greatest discovery as a historian was important drawings and other documents that revealed that not only was Jefferson a great statesman, but also a talented architect who had designed his own home, Monticello. His designs for the Virginia State Capitol and the University of Virginia had gone unrecognized prior to Kimball’s discovery.
Shack Mountain, a small one-story interpretation of Jefferson-designed Farmington, is entered from a four-columned portico into an elongated octagon that contains the drawing room and dining room, with service rooms and bedrooms to the rear of the T-shaped plan. Its size is about 2400 square feet. It is a magnificent example of a grand house on a small scale. Owner Mrs. Jane Moore will be our host.
Farmington has been since the 1920s the clubhouse for a Charlottesville country club. Designed by Jefferson in 1802 for his friend George Divers, the architect added a tall Doric portico and an elongated octagon to a previously built Georgian-style house. Eight tall triple-sash windows and centered French doors are topped by nine oculus windows, flooding the elegant, single two-story room with light. The whole concept is truly Palladian. Several smaller rooms and a hall designed by Jefferson ties the addition to earlier structures on the property. We will stop at Farmington to view the building and to have lunch.
Milburne was designed by William Lawrence Bottomley in 1934 and was the last of his Virginia houses. It is considered his best. Overlooking the James River in the Windsor Farms section of Richmond, the stately Georgian mansion was an admirable collaboration of a highly talented classical architect and the sophisticated taste of the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Walter S. Robertson.
One senses privacy upon entering the elegant wrought iron gates. There is a central axis that starts at the gates, continues through the front door, passes through the entrance hall and drawing room and out onto the upper terrace and beyond to the river terrace. The rose-colored brick house is made up of a five-part Palladian composition – center block, stone-faced hyphens and pavilion wings. The oval entry hall contains a beautiful cantilevered staircase. Four main rooms―sycamore-paneled library, drawing room, dining room and breakfast room―overlook the gardens and river. There are perfect proportions throughout with a unified sense of appropriateness and balance.
Upon his death in 1951, a writer gave this tribute to Bottomley: “Marvelously gifted with that rare special sense of scale relationship, like Alberti and Palladio….the brothers Adam and Wren….he [Bottomley] could phase and proportion an architrave like a sonnet and compose all the elements of a building in a rhythmically harmonious entity.” Mrs. Robertson was to remain at Milburne until she died in 2001. The present owners, who have restored the house with great sensitivity, are Janie and William Armfield. Mrs. Armfield is a granddaughter of Herbert Claiborne, the master builder of Milburne and Bottomley’s frequent collaborator. She will be on hand to greet us.
Tuckahoe Plantation, located outside Richmond on the James River, was Jefferson’s boyhood home. Built in two phases, 1723 and 1734, the house is in the form of an “H” with the crossbar as the salon for entertaining. Quite possibly one wing was used for guests while the other became private family quarters. Scholars see a similarity in this arrangement with the room plan at Monticello. Of particular note at Tuckahoe are the magnificently carved staircases. The first-floor rooms have fine wall paneling of an unusual form. The dado is paneled below the chair rail, and above is a tall matching panel with a narrow horizontal panel between it and the cornice. The remarkable survival of the house and its outbuildings, almost unchanged, makes Tuckahoe important among Virginia houses. The present owners, Sue and Addison Thompson, will be on hand for a tour and will host a dinner.
Westover dates from about 1730 and was built by the cultured, English-educated William Byrd II. It is said that he owned a 4000-volume library that was housed in one of the dependencies or adjoining buildings. The beautifully proportioned brick mansion reflects the style of Sir Christopher Wren and is considered the finest large American house of its period. Built at great expense, Westover remains little changed, facing the James River with sweeping lawns. The house itself has a commanding presence due to Flemish-bond brickwork, strong focal points of two superb stone doorways, seven-bay facades and a towering hipped roof and range of dormer windows. Supposedly the work for both doorways was done on site with imported skilled craftsmen from England. The windows of Westover are unique for Virginia buildings of the period for their segmental or curved brick heads. The top lights of the sashes are also arched.
Inside, the off-center hall allows for greater width for the two rooms on the right and lesser width on the left. Although the hall has a beautiful mahogany staircase with spiral balusters and wall paneling, the great feature is the elaborate French Rococo plaster ceiling, a popular style in England at the time, full of reverse curve scrolls, masks, vases, fruits and flowers. The most imposing room in the house is the drawing room, paneled to the ceiling, possessing a great black marble mantelpiece, tall elegant windows and, again,
a French Rococo ceiling. The two smaller rooms on the left were transformed into one large dining room around 1900, beautifully paneled from floor to ceiling. The owners, Frederick and Muschi Fisher, will be our hosts for a private tour and dinner.
Shirley, though the present mansion has existed only since 1769, has been a working Tidewater plantation on the James River for nearly 400 years and since 1653 has been owned by 10 generations of the Hill-Carter family. This remarkable house is unique in many ways. It is the earliest to have two double-tiered and pedimented porticos (a Palladian architectural element), one on the riverside and the other on the land approach. Nearly square in outline, Shirley has a rare early mansard roof and a series of prominent dormers on all four sides. Internally, the sweeping walnut staircase in the large entrance – 5 –
hall is detached from the walls for the most part and continues for all three floors, giving a spectacular flying impression. There is an unusually expansive use of paneling throughout the house. According to the architectural historian Thomas Tileston Waterman, “Shirley is an example of extraordinary individuality.”
Brandon, also located on the James River, is inspired by an English Palladian design found in Robert Morris’ Select Architecture (1757). Built around 1765, the mansion is divided into a scheme of five parts, forming a pavilion-type house. The central unit or block is one room and two stories high covered by a hipped roof topped by a pineapple, the symbol of hospitality. One-story wings, one room deep, extend to either side, also with hipped roofs. Beyond are hyphens connecting two-story terminal buildings, which had been built at an earlier time. The central block contains a wide entrance hall with a staircase that replaces the original one. The hall is divided in half by an elegant triple arcade of Corinthian columns and elliptical arches. The two one-story wings contain the paneled drawing room and dining room, both filled with beautiful 18th century antiques. Brandon is one of America’s oldest working plantations dating from the 1620s. The present owners are Congressman Robert V. Daniel and his family.
Wickham House in Richmond is named after its first owner, John Wickham, who hired Robert Mills as the architect, a student of Jefferson. Wickham was the lead defense attorney for the famous 1807 trial of Aaron Burr, accused of treason and acquitted. Completed in 1812, the house was innovative and costly and today is considered one of the finest examples of the Federal style in America. A small double-columned front porch leads to the paneled entrance door surrounded by a fanlight and sidelights. Repeating this composition are triple windows, one on either side, made up of a large center one flanked by a pair of sidelights. The triple windows are recessed in shallow arches, repeating the shape of the fanlight. Three triple windows are repeated on the second floor. On entering the house, one is struck by the beauty of the cantilevered elliptical staircase. The use of curves for rooms, walls and niches are seen throughout the house. An enfilade of three reception rooms, the center one having a bowed window, look out on a columned porch and a lovely preserved old garden in the back. The house has been restored to its original glory with magnificent period furnishings and finishes. Specialists in architecture and period interior design will guide.
Monticello has been described as a Palladian pavilion or villa and is certainly the most personalized of Virginia’s mansions. Its highly talented architect-owner, Thomas
Jefferson, began grading on a mountaintop, his highly original site outside Charlottesville, in 1768. About this same time he was drawing several studies using James Gibbs’ Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture, Robert Morris’ Select Architecture and Giacomo Leoni’s edition of Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture. Within ten years Jefferson’s first house was relatively completed. It consisted of an entrance portico and hall on the east side that lead directly to the present-day salon with its great polygonal bay and portico to the west. To either side were single-room wings and beyond small single polygonal rooms.
This early scheme was maintained when Jefferson proceeded to enlarge Monticello after his stay in France (1784-1789) as the American Minister. He was taken by the French Roman classicism of the Louis XVI era and upon his return redecorated Monticello’s salon in this noble style. He also moved the east façade forward, thereby adding bedrooms, staircases, larger entrance hall, library and piazzas among other spaces. His architectural travels in France also influenced him to add an octagonal dome on the second floor, his “sky room” as he called it. Jefferson was planning embellishments for Monticello almost to the end of his life in 1826. Our private tour and lecture will be lead by William Beiswanger, resident architectural historian at Monticello.
The University of Virginia remains Jefferson’s legacy to his life-long passion for learning. The school and its architecture were to be his final great accomplishment before his death in 1826. Jefferson called his university an Academical Village, which he assumed would be the core for a growing campus. Believing that an educated public was the basis for a successful democracy, Jefferson’s state university would be the highest goal for the best students to reach.
Borrowing from Palladio’s second book of The Four Books of Architecture, Jefferson drew up a site plan in 1814 that was in the form of a village square. The plan had two-story pavilions for professors connected by rows of one-story student dormitories. The professors lived on the upper floors and taught their classes on the lower floors. These dwellings faced the central terraced Lawn measuring 740 feet long by 192 feet wide creating a U-shaped complex. Colonnades stretched the full length on each side of the ground floor while walkways ran above them, connecting the second floors of the pavilions. The walkways repeat those at Monticello. Each pavilion was designed by Jefferson, some of which incorporated ideas drawn from architects William Thornton, the great Benjamin Latrobe, Palladio and others. Each pavilion was different in style, thereby offering a separate lesson in classical orders and architecture. Jefferson envisioned such variety in his Academical Village as “models in architecture of the purest forms on antiquity, furnishing to the student examples of the precepts he will be taught in that art.”
At the head of the village was the Rotunda, “a temple of learning,” according to Jefferson, which housed classrooms and the library. The building was about half the size of the Pantheon in Rome and also had a dome with an oculus at its top, repeating the dome at Monticello. Paralleling the two ranges of buildings were two rows of outer ranges of dormitory rooms, each with hotels, which were built as eating facilities. The grounds between the inner and outer ranges were to be utilized as gardens bordered by the famous serpentine walls. Today Jefferson’s Academical Village has indeed grown with an enrollment of 2000 students, but, other than later buildings filling in the fourth side of the Lawn and designed by Stanford White, Jefferson’s core plan remains essentially the same.
Tour Price
$2,050.00 per person, $375.00 Single supplement. Please contact Classical Excursions for reservations. Limited availability. 800-390-5536 or contact@classicalexcursions.com