Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor 9781644531617

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Epic Landscapes

Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture Series Editor: Sarah R. Cohen, University at Albany, State University of New York Series Advisory Board: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware; Martha Hollander, Hofstra University; Christopher M. S. Johns, Vanderbilt University; William Pressly, University of Maryland; Amelia Rauser, Franklin and Marshall College; Michael Yonan, University of Missouri Tilden Russell Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection Paula Radisich Pastiche, Fashion, and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects: Looking Smart Christine A. Jones Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France Jean-François Bédard Decorative Games: Ornament, Rhetoric, and Noble Culture in the Work of Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672–1742) Amelia Rauser Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints Alden Cavanaugh, ed. Performing the “Everyday”: The Culture of Genre in the Eighteenth Century William L. Pressly The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s “Fine Frenzy” in Late Eighteenth-Century British Art Charles A. Cramer Abstraction and the Classical Ideal, 1760–1920 Susan M. Dixon Between the Real and the Ideal: The Accademia degli Arcadi and Its Garden in Eighteenth-Century Rome Dorothy Johnson, ed. Jacques-Louis David: New Perspectives Amy S. Wyngaard From Savage to Citizen: The Invention of the Peasant in the French Enlightenment Mark Reinberger Utility and Beauty: Robert Wellford and Composition Ornament in America Martha Mel Stumberg Edmunds Piety and Politics: Imaging Divine Kingship in Louis XIV ’s Chapel at Versailles Elise Goodman, ed. Art and Culture in the Eighteenth Century: New Dimensions and Multiple Perspectives

Epic Landscapes Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor Julia A.Sienkewicz University of Delaware Press · Newark, Delaware Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

Parentibus meis, sine quibus hoc volumen castellum remansisset in caelo

University of Delaware Press Copyright © 2019 by Julia A. Sienkewicz All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2019 isbn 978-1-64453-159-4 (casebound) isbn 978-1-64453-161-7 (e-book) 1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Fund of CAA and a publications grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Book design by Robert L. Wiser, Silver Spring, Maryland Pages 2–3 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View to the North from the lawn of Mount Vernon, 1796. (See Fig. 3.9, page 107.)

Contents 006

List of llustrations

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Notes on the Text

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Introduction

019 Chapter 1: Atlantic Purgatory 045 Chapter 2: Latrobe in a European Context 085 Chapter 3: A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods 117 Chapter 4: Learning to Read the Stones 139 Chapter 5: Stage Tricks for Landscape 161 Chapter 6: Performing Spaces 197 Chapter 7: Castles in the Air 225 Chapter 8: Illusions of Selfhood 253

Conclusion

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Acknowledgments

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Endnotes

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Selected Bibliography

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Index

List of Illustrations Fig. 1.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, First View of the Coast of Virginia, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.23. Fig. 1.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Breakfast Equipage set out for the Passengers of the Eliza, the Captain and Mate in all 9 Persons, March 4th, 1796 being the compleat set, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID Number: 1960.108.1.1.23b. Fig. 1.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Dover, as seen from the Eliza, 1795. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID Number: 1960.108.1.1.3. Fig. 1.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Bathing Machine from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 1.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the Coast of England at Hastings from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 1.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Moonlight scene at Hastings, England from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 1.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sea Anemone from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 1.8: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, A View of Dover, taken at Sea, 3 miles o∑ Land from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 1.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the undercli∑ on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, England, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 1.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Situation of the Eliza, December 21, 1795, 1795. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No.: 1960.108.1.1.4. Fig. 1.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Situation of the Eliza, December 21st 1795, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No.: 1960.108.1.1.16. Fig. 1.12: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, January 6th, Δ past 7 o’clock a.m., View of the Azores nearest Island supposed to be St. Michael (afterwards known to be Pico), 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.6. Fig. 1.13: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the Summit of Pico di Azores, as it appeared at 12 o’clock, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.6. Fig. 1.14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Pico, one of the Azores at 8 o’clock a.m., January 6th, bearing NNW about 10 or 11 Leagues Distant, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.7. Fig. 1.15: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Pico di Azores with one of the boats used among the Western Isles, 13 February 1796, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.17. Fig. 2.1: Johann Gottfried Schulz, Plan und Profil title cartouche from Plan von der Leitung des Roehrwassers vom Berthelsdorfer Territorio nach Herrnhuth. 1778[?]. Courtesy of the Heimatmuseum der Stadt Herrnhut, Inv. HM 2099.

Fig. 2.2: Johann Gottfried Schulz, landscape vignette title cartouche from Plan von der Leitung des Roehrwassers vom Berthelsdorfer Territorio nach Herrnhuth. 1788. Courtesy of the Heimatmuseum der Stadt Herrnhut. Inv. HM 2099. Fig. 2.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe. The Tollenstein, in the Mountains of Bohemia from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 2.4: Unknown, Der Todtenstein [ca. 1780]. Title page image in Karl von Schachmann, Beobachtungen Überdas Gebirge bey Königshain (Dresden 1780). Photo by the author. Fig. 2.5: Unknown [Quandt?], Amicis from the Stammbuch of Johann David Cranz, ca. 1784–1797. Courtesy of the Unity Archives. Fig. 2.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Plan of the new Cong. Place at Droilsden, 1784. Courtesy of the Unity Archives. Fig 2.7–8: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den], 1784. Courtesy of the Unity Archives. Fig. 2.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, elevations detail, Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den], 1784. Courtesy of the Unity Archives. Fig. 2.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, trompe l’oeil detail, Plan of the new Cong. Place at Droilsden, 1784. Courtesy of the Unity Archives. Fig. 2.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, title cartouche detail, Plan of the new Cong. Place at Droilsden, 1784. Courtesy of the Unity Archives. Fig. 2.12: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire, 1784. Courtesy of the Moravian House Archives, London. Fig. 2.13: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, title cartouche detail No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire, 1784. Courtesy of the Moravian House Archives, London. Fig 2.14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, vignette detail, No. 11: The C.[ongregation] Shop, 1784. Courtesy of the Moravian House Archives, London. Fig. 2.15: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, vignette detail, No. 12: C[ongregation] Inn, 1784. Courtesy of the Moravian House Archives, London. Fig. 2.16: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 1784. Courtesy of the Unity Archives. Fig. 2.17: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, title vignette detail, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 1784. Courtesy of the Unity Archives. Fig. 2.18: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 1784. Fig. 2.19: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, title vignette detail, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 1784. Fig. 2.20: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Hammerwood Park from the Southeast, 1791 or 1792. Courtesy of RIBA, Image Reference RIBA13248. Fig. 2.21: East Temple Façade (with Coade Stone panel visible above the door), Hammerwood Park. Photograph courtesy of David and Anne-Noelle Pinnegar. Fig. 2.22: East Coade Stone Panel, Hammerwood Park. Photograph courtesy of David and Anne-Noelle Pinnegar.

List of Illustrations ·

Fig. 2.23: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Borghese Vase. Vasi, Candelabri. . . . ed Antichi (Rome, 1778). Figs. 2.24–25: John Bacon and Eleanor Coade [att.], Bacchanalian Figures from the borghesean Vase from Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory, Coade’s Lithodipyra, or, Artificial Stone Manufactory: for all kind of statues, capitals, vases, tombs, coats of arms, & architectural ornaments, &c, &c (Lambeth and London: 1784). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Fig. 2.26: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of East Grinstead, September 1795. Courtesy of David and Anne-Noelle Pinnegar. Fig. 2.27: Paul Sandby, A View of Vinters at Boxley, Kent, with Mr. Whatman’s Turkey Paper Mills (Vinters and Turkey Mill), 1794. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. Fig. 2.28: Thomas Sandby, View of Boxhill from Norbury Park, Surrey, 1775. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund. Fig. 2.29: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Saxon stile of the West entrance, Kirkstall Abbey, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 2.30: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, An exact view of the great East Window of the Abbey, which now leads into the Church, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 2.31: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Kirkstall Abbey, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 2.32: Samuel Buck, The East Prospect of Kirksted Abbey near Horncastle, in the County of Lincoln from Buck’s Antiquities (London: Printed by D. Bond, 1774). Engraving. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. File Number: 184932. Fig. 2.33: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Transept of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, ca. 1795. Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Fig. 2.34: William Blake, Plate I Frontispiece, America. A Prophecy, 1793. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Fig. 2.35: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Oft by the Setting Moon, 1797. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item Id. No: 1960.108.1.3.9. Fig. 2.36: John Flaxman, Iliad Plate 38: Iris Advises Priam to Obtain the Body of Hector, 1793. Courtesy of the Beineke Library, Yale University. Fig. 3.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Richmond from Bushrod Washington’s Island, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.36. Fig. 3.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of Washington’s Island, James River, Virginia, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.33. Fig. 3.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the North front of Belvidere, Richmond, undated [1796 or 1797]. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.43. Fig. 3.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Estate of Henry Banks Esqr. On the York River, 1797. Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Fig. 3.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, York River, looking N.W. up to West Point, 1797. Digitally-completed full image of the panorama, consisting

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of three original sketchbook sheets. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID Nos. 1960.108.1.2.42a, 1960.108.1.2.42b, and 1960.108.1.2.42c. Fig. 3.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the fishing Shore on the York river at Airy Plains, 1797. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.38. Fig. 3.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.11. Fig. 3.8: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Mount Vernon looking to the North, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.13. Fig. 3.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View to the North from the lawn of Mount Vernon, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.10. Fig. 3.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West (Version 2), 1796. Courtesy of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. Item ID No. W-5307. Fig. 3.11: John Flaxman Iliad Plate 7: Venus Disguised Inviting Helen to the Chamber of Paris, 1793. Courtesy of the Beineke Library, Yale University. Fig. 3.12: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Outlines of a group for another drawing of Mount Vernon, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.22. Fig. 3.13: John Flaxman, Iliad Plate 8: Venus Presenting Helen to Paris, 1793. Courtesy of the Beineke Library, Yale University. Fig. 3.14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of a group for a drawing of Mount Vernon, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.21. Fig. 4.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.27. Fig. 4.2: C.S., Nullum est Sine Nomine Saxum, [1780]. From: Karl von Schachmann, Beobachtungen Überdas Gebirge bey Königshain (Dresden: 1780). Photo by the author. Fig. 4.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View on the Elizabeth River, Norfolk Virginia, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.26. Fig. 4.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Norfolk from [Smith’s] Point, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.1.28. Fig. 4.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of York town, from the beach, looking to the West, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.4.9. Fig. 4.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View at Little York in Virginia, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 4.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, “Cornwallis’ Cave,” from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 4.8: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, untitled vignette at Yorktown, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia.

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Fig. 4.9: John Flaxman, Aeschylus 26: Orestes over the Dead Bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, 1793. From Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus Reprint Edition (London: George Bell and Sons, 1882). Courtesy of Googlebooks. Fig. 4.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Lord Botetourt’s mutilated Statue Wmsburg, undated [probably 1796]. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.32. Fig. 4.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Greenspring, home of William Ludwell Lee, James City County, Virginia, 1796. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.33. Fig. 5.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Rocks on the James River from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Figs. 5.2–4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Bay of Naples, 1–3 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Figs. 5.5–6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Landscapes 1–4 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 5.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Taste Anno 1620 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Figs. 5.10–11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Studies of Trees 1–2 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 5.12: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Frontispiece from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 5.13: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Ravenstones at Saddleworth vignette from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 5. 14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Niemsch Peasants at Rest vignette from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 5.15: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Mason vignette from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 5.16: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Venus Flycatcher vignette from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 6.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Front of the Stage from Designs of a Theatre, 1797–98. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2885 no. 4. Photo by the author. Fig. 6.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sheet IV, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 1797. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 6.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View in Perspective of the Gate of the Penitentiary House, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 1797. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 6.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, First Phase, Plan I, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 1797. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 6.5.: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Second Phase, Plan II, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 1797. Courtesy of the Library of Virginia. Fig. 6.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus from Designs of a Theatre, 1797–98. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2885 no. 4. Photo by the author.

Fig. 6.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Head Piece, Study, Tragedy Begging, and Farce Snatching the Mask from Comedy from Designs of a Theatre, 1797–98. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2885 no. 4. Photo by the author. Fig. 6.8: John Flaxman, Aeschylus Plate 16, The Appeal of the Theban Ladies, 1793. From Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus Reprint Edition (London: George Bell and Sons, 1882). Courtesy of Googlebooks. Fig. 6.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the House from the Stage from Designs of a Theatre, 1797–98. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2885 no. 4. Photo by the author. Fig. 6.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Ballroom from Designs of a Theatre, 1797–98. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2885 no. 4. Photo by the author. Fig. 6.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Section or Internal View of the Theatre & Stage from Designs of a Theatre, 1797–98. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2885 no. 4. Photo by the author. Fig. 7.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Frontispiece, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.2: John Flaxman, Aeschylus, Plate 5, Io’s Dreams, 1793. From Compositions from the Tragedies of Aeschylus Reprint Edition (London: George Bell and Sons, 1882). Courtesy of Googlebooks. Fig. 7.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch at Norfolk, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Map of the Pennock property, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Pennock House ground and chamber stories, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Pennock House second floor plan and elevation, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View in Pennock’s Hall & Staircase, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Figs. 7.8–10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Garden Temple/Retreat, Sheet 1–3, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photos by the Author. Fig. 7.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Detail, Bedroom Alcove, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author.

List of Illustrations ·

Figs. 7.12–14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Detail, showing Section 1–3, Garden Temple/Retreat, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photos by the Author. Fig. 7.15: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Ground Plan of Mr. Tayloe’s House in the Foedera[l] City, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.16: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, South Front, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.17: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, East Flank, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.18: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Section Looking North, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.19: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Section Looking West, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.20: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Plan and sections of the Dining Room, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Figs. 7.21–7.24: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Detail: Plan and sections of the Dining Room, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photos by the Author. Fig. 8.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Watercolor: Two views of the Potomac and a Portrait, 1798. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society. Item ID No. 1960.108.1.3.20. Fig. 8.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Three Small Landscapes. Rainy Weather. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, 1797. Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.20. Fig. 8.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Collection of Small Moonlights Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, 1797. Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.16. Fig. 8.4: George Bickham, Study, from Museum of the Arts, or, The Curious Repository (London, 1745?). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. File Number: 187174. Fig. 8.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the Potowmac about a mile above George town, taken from the road, to the Westward, March 16, 1798. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item No.: 1960.108.1.3.21a. Fig. 8.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Bridge at the little Falls of the Potowmac, March 16, 1798. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item no.: 1960.108.1.3.23. Fig. 8.7: Thomas Gaugain after Sir Joshua Reynolds, James Beattie, 1805. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Fig. 9.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Washington Monument Proposal: Decorative Ceiling Motif, 1799– 1800. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2545. Fig. 9.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Washington Monument Proposal: Rendered Perspective, 1799–1800. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2545.

Notes on the Text A Note on Translations Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Italian are my own and all translations from Latin or Greek are courtesy of Thomas J. Sienkewicz.

For readers’ ease, whenever possible I cite the relevant page numbers from the Benjamin Henry Latrobe Papers, even for primary sources held by collections other than the Maryland Historical Society.

A Note on Transcriptions All quotations from Latrobe and other period sources appear exactly as written, including any italicization or underlining. In instances where edits have been made to italics or underlining, these are indicated in endnotes. I routinely insert brackets in order to clarify editorial additions I have made to the texts.

A Note on Naming Conventions Using the system established by the Charles Willson Peale Papers, I use “Latrobe” throughout to refer to Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Other members of his family, including his father Benjamin Latrobe, and his brother Christian Ignatius Latrobe, are referred to either by their first and last names together or their first name only.

List of Illustrations ·

Figs. 7.12–14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Detail, showing Section 1–3, Garden Temple/Retreat, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photos by the Author. Fig. 7.15: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Ground Plan of Mr. Tayloe’s House in the Foedera[l] City, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.16: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, South Front, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.17: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, East Flank, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.18: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Section Looking North, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.19: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Section Looking West, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Fig. 7.20: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Plan and sections of the Dining Room, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photo by the Author. Figs. 7.21–7.24: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Detail: Plan and sections of the Dining Room, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2886. Photos by the Author. Fig. 8.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Watercolor: Two views of the Potomac and a Portrait, 1798. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society. Item ID No. 1960.108.1.3.20. Fig. 8.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Three Small Landscapes. Rainy Weather. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, 1797. Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.20. Fig. 8.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Collection of Small Moonlights Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, 1797. Item ID No. 1960.108.1.2.16. Fig. 8.4: George Bickham, Study, from Museum of the Arts, or, The Curious Repository (London, 1745?). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. File Number: 187174. Fig. 8.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the Potowmac about a mile above George town, taken from the road, to the Westward, March 16, 1798. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item No.: 1960.108.1.3.21a. Fig. 8.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Bridge at the little Falls of the Potowmac, March 16, 1798. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, Item no.: 1960.108.1.3.23. Fig. 8.7: Thomas Gaugain after Sir Joshua Reynolds, James Beattie, 1805. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Fig. 9.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Washington Monument Proposal: Decorative Ceiling Motif, 1799– 1800. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2545. Fig. 9.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Washington Monument Proposal: Rendered Perspective, 1799–1800. Collection of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, ADE Unit 2545.

Notes on the Text A Note on Translations Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Italian are my own and all translations from Latin or Greek are courtesy of Thomas J. Sienkewicz.

For readers’ ease, whenever possible I cite the relevant page numbers from the Benjamin Henry Latrobe Papers, even for primary sources held by collections other than the Maryland Historical Society.

A Note on Transcriptions All quotations from Latrobe and other period sources appear exactly as written, including any italicization or underlining. In instances where edits have been made to italics or underlining, these are indicated in endnotes. I routinely insert brackets in order to clarify editorial additions I have made to the texts.

A Note on Naming Conventions Using the system established by the Charles Willson Peale Papers, I use “Latrobe” throughout to refer to Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Other members of his family, including his father Benjamin Latrobe, and his brother Christian Ignatius Latrobe, are referred to either by their first and last names together or their first name only.

But indeed, at the present moment the great convulsions of empires and nations are so violent, that they lay hold of, and move individuals with an e∑ect unknown in the former wars of kings. The surface—the great men of every nation—were once the only part of the mass really interested. The present storm is so violent, that the ocean is moved to the very depth, and you and I who inhabit it, feel the commotion. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, April 17, 1798⁄

Introduction

With these words in a letter to his Venetian friend Giambattista Scandella (1770–1799), Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820) describes the disorienting nature of life on both sides of the Atlantic during the Age of Revolutions.¤ Latrobe, a recent immigrant from Britain to the United States, had come of age in the wake of the American Revolution, supported the rise of Republican France, but then witnessed the horror of the Terror and its aftermath. He describes here the sensation of trying to find his way in a world that has been turned upside down, and the growing realization that even he, a mere common citizen, might have a role to play. Having traveled from storm-tossed Europe to the wooded shores of Virginia, Latrobe still feels the force of this great commotion. In the young United States, he dreams of future potential, but also struggles in an unfamiliar cultural and physical landscape. If, in Europe, the “great men” did not traditionally expect “the mass” of society to make significant contributions, in the United States the idealistic social model was di∑erent. All (white, male) citizens were expected to have some voice, but the radical nature of the social experiment was very raw and discord was often more apparent than cohesion.‹ As an immigrant, Latrobe frequently felt ostracized and alone, while vacillating between enthusiasm and ambivalence about donning a new, American identity. Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor analyzes the watercolor images that Latrobe produced between 1795 and 1799, what I interpret as his “immigrant years,” as contributions to the study of art in the transatlantic world of the Age of Revolutions. Latrobe is best known as an architect and is generally heralded as the founder of the profession in the United States. His many high-profile years of service to the federal government have justifiably drawn significant attention to his prolific architectural work in the American context. By contrast, his skills as a watercolorist are virtually unknown.› Labeled as the amateur products of a professional’s leisure hours, his watercolors have failed to garner art historical attention. Epic Landscapes proves that these images leave a great legacy of interest to the discipline of art history, and also demonstrates their significance to many facets of our understanding of the social and cultural developments of the 1790s on both sides of the Atlantic. Latrobe’s watercolor oeuvre fails to conform to rigid expectations of modern scholarship—it crosses national and regional boundaries, it rejects modern professional categories (architect vs. artist vs. amateur, for example), it transcends genres, it copies (but in the service of ambitious content), and it explores new pictorial methods. Making use of

Fig. 7.1 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Frontispiece, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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12 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

close visual and textual analysis, this book presents for the first time an analysis of the ambitious and experimental content that Latrobe developed across his watercolor oeuvre. This analysis reintroduces Latrobe as both a creative figure and an intellectual. Through Latrobe, this book also pursues larger interpretive questions about art and society in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century. Although in many ways separate from his architectural practice, Latrobe’s watercolors are integrally related to his professional training. His sketches often present detailed studies drawn from journeys through real landscapes, though many also render the experience of spaces that he imagined. In crafting his watercolors, Latrobe drew on an extensive education, innovatively fusing picturesque, topographical, and antiquarian techniques with the art of architectural rendering, all in the pursuit of his ambitious visions. Below the surface of their often-mundane subject matter, many of these images are deeply introspective reflections on the physical, mental, and sensory experiences of an immigrant examining new places while remembering the old. The journeys that this book considers were both real movements in the physical world and explorations of interiority. In journal, manuscript, and epistolary accounts that connect to his sketches, Latrobe gestured toward the complex content associated with these views. Whether experimenting with visual form or reading the landscape through Classical and other literary frames, Latrobe pushed the boundaries of watercolor practice, triggering deep reflection. His subject matter was frequently the Virginian landscape, but he used various techniques to probe larger social and moral content. Introducing Classical heroes to the shores of Virginia, or exploring personal tragedy within Revolutionary ruins, Latrobe worked through his individual challenges, while also asking big questions about the place of art and heroism in human civilization. Latrobe’s watercolors do not readily reveal their embedded intellectual content, a fact that partially explains the dearth of prior art historical exploration of them. Indeed, at first glance most seem to o∑er straightforward landscape or genre scenes. Their more ambitious elements have either gone unrecognized or been only partially understood and, consequently, deemed minimally interesting or derivative. Though some of Latrobe’s watercolors are well known, this reception

has resulted from their role as architectural renderings, containing vital information about his buildings. As is explored in depth in Chapters 6 and 7, such a myopic approach to Latrobe’s architectural watercolors has left us with not only an incomplete understanding of the architectural details they contain, but also no awareness of the deep, philosophical content that the images are meant to convey. The in-depth understanding of Latrobe’s watercolor theory and method that is drawn out across the chapters of Epic Landscapes is the reward of a decade’s attempt both to understand these images and to reconcile them with Latrobe’s well-known later architectural career. It is an intellectual journey on which I was sent by encountering his Watercolor: Two Views and a Portrait in person in April 2008 [Fig. 8.1]. Though I was at work on a dissertation that featured Latrobe alongside three other artists, I could not begin to understand the image, and its mysteries continued to nag at me long after the dissertation was complete.fi The reason for the watercolor’s visual force is now readily apparent—while it launched my own intellectual journey, it also helped Latrobe to coalesce his ideas both about the cultural significance of art and about his own identity. Curious readers should continue through the final chapter of this book to gain a more complete understanding of Watercolor: Two Views and a Portrait. Here, the narrative of my visual encounter with this image serves to underline the next motivating point of this introduction: Latrobe’s watercolors are both public-facing, underlying what he saw as the social purpose of art that could be activated in large part through viewers’ interactions with it, and private, with evident mental, psychological, and practical importance to his own life. Since Latrobe’s concerns about the nature of life in the Age of Revolutions relate directly to his social concerns, I will turn first to the public-facing aspects of his watercolors. There is ample evidence that Latrobe was socially engaged from his youth, but once he arrived in Virginia, he joined a community infected with “politicomania” and found himself caught up in its excitement.fl In such a context, Latrobe felt the acute pressure of engaging in creative practice with a public mission. No longer could artists in all media be concerned solely with aesthetic pleasures or elite ideals removed from a wider social burden. Whether practicing his profession of

Introduction ·

architecture, or sketching in watercolor, Latrobe approached art within a social and moral context. Ultimately, he found inspiration in the idea of the artist’s “comprehensive mind” as a stabilizing and inspirational force for human civilization, a concept considered in detail in the final chapter of this book. Although the United States could appear to have been a world apart from the uproar in Europe, Latrobe worried about the contagious flames of revolution that burned in Europe and about a repeating cycle of imperial decline. Indeed, Latrobe’s letter to Scandella continues on to discuss a dramatic incident of cross-Atlantic politics in which the young United States teetered on the brink of war with France. Recounting the passionate fury of all parties surrounding the XYZ A∑air, Latrobe observes that his acquaintances cannot agree on how to react to the scandal. Some comment, “Shocking indeed! Who should have thought it of the virtuous French!,” while others remark, “Nothing else could be expected from the bloodsucking rascals.”‡ With no common ground, the two sides clamor for divergent outcomes: “War, war, war—or national disgrace, and slavery, on one side, Peace, peace, at all events and all hazards on the other.”° Latrobe responds to such hyped binaries with skepticism, writing: “Pray, my very good friends, how will you make war? And you others, how can you preserve peace? Let alone your discussions, and read Gulliver. The book is both entertaining and instructive, and has a very pretty story in it about the Land of Brobdingnag.”· Directing his contemporaries to read the satire of Jonathan Swift, Latrobe o∑ers them a fantastical model of civilization. The unreal scale of the Land of Brobdingnag and its absurdly unattainable social balance o∑er no real solution to the issues of the day, but rather postulate that a sustainable model of civilization is impossible. In the 1790s, Latrobe and his contemporaries urgently faced the question of what, if any, form of government could be reasonable, enduring, and peaceful. Latrobe’s watercolors explore his skepticism that sustainable social models could exist, but they also present dream visions of social and moral balance. Like Swift’s fictional social landscapes, Latrobe’s transparent watercolors create spaces that are at once real sites and fantasies of society. They reflect on, respond to, and craft anew a vision of self and landscape capable of surviving the commotion of his moment.

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If Latrobe sought to craft a vision of sustainable society, then he also used his watercolors to dream of himself as healed and successful. As is explored more fully in the first two chapters of this book, Latrobe set sail for Virginia under acute personal conditions: he was a recent widower, bankrupt, su∑ering from depression, and likely running aground professionally. His transatlantic journey and arrival in Virginia changed his environment, but could not quickly heal this accumulation of tragedies, which weighed heavily on his mind and psyche. Further, as has been well documented, Latrobe’s initial forays into professional practice in Virginia were not successful. Although he was unable to realize his visions in brick and mortar in these years, sketching allowed Latrobe to animate his dreams. His correspondence and journals reflect the psychological and physical toll that he experienced at this time, and they also document the relief he gained from the therapeutic process of painting in watercolor. In watercolor, Latrobe thought through issues that concerned him, created visual escapes from an uncomfortable environment, and simply meditated while applying pigment to paper. Through a process that I elsewhere analyze as heartrend[er]ing, Latrobe negotiated his feelings of failure, heartbreak, mourning, and anxiety using his own form of art therapy.⁄‚ The intimacy of the medium allowed Latrobe to open up his heart and mind, finding closure, healing, and a vision of a possible, more successful, future. In seeking both personal solutions and public purpose, Latrobe found inspiration in the epic tradition; indeed, he built his fascination with personages, literary forms, and lessons drawn from epic poetry into the form of his watercolor images. In watercolors and journals, Latrobe traced the course of his troubled journey, sometimes assuming the guise of narrating poet-artist, at other moments the role of ill-starred hero. As a collection, these watercolors open a window into Latrobe’s mind and imagination, just as an epic explores the deepest concerns of its central protagonists. Latrobe’s watercolors also evoke the epic through the ideas with which they are concerned. Latrobe was an expert scholar of Classical languages and literatures, as well as an active intellectual on a range of topics and an avid reader of current sources in an array of disciplines. He approached the world in a reflective manner, integrating literary references, historical

14 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

knowledge, and his own observations. Thus, Latrobe’s watercolors convey the physical realities of places, but they also explore these sites in larger intellectual terms. By rendering the Virginian landscape as refracted through the lens of ancient Rome or modern Britain, Latrobe posed intellectual, social, and moral quandaries for his viewers. Further, many of Latrobe’s watercolors engage directly or indirectly either with the content of epic poetry, or with the words of ancient literature or history. Through these embedded references, Latrobe created complex intellectual frames for interpretation and selfconsciously placed modern scenes in direct dialogue with their ancient counterparts. These epic landscapes speak with a visual voice intended to resonate socially, politically, and morally. They navigate across history, placing key figures, sites, and texts next to one another in order to create greater meaning. As a self-referential body of work, these watercolors tell of an intellectual and artistic journey across an ocean and spanning several years of Latrobe’s life, and they reflect on the significance of these years through references and comparisons that open them up for larger resonance. While much of the interpretation of these watercolors is my own, there is strong evidence that Latrobe invested deeply in the significance of their form and content. My most complex analyses of these works are only possible because of a trail of textual breadcrumbs that Latrobe left as guides to decoding his works. Though he discussed his watercolors as amateur, even exclaiming, “It is to me, I think, a considerable advantage to be a very indi∑erent painter,” his ambition in the medium is evident, reflected both in form and content, while the large investment of his time is also readily apparent.⁄⁄ There is certainly room for di∑erences of opinion concerning what Latrobe sought to achieve with these images and what the individual meanings of any specific work might be, but there can no longer be doubt that Latrobe was a trained watercolorist who employed innovative forms in pursuit of deep, intellectual content. As we will see, in even a simple sketch showing nothing more than water and rocks, Latrobe could seek to trigger melancholy ruminations on nature’s sad cycles of life and death across the history of creation. He devised formal tricks to push beyond the standard representational repertoire of watercolor for his most complex studies. This book identifies four such experimental forms of images. First, and best

known, are Latrobe’s watercolors into which he inserted figures copied from John Flaxman’s line-drawn illustrations of epic literature. These visual recastings of figures are frequent insertions into Latrobe images and introduce intellectual, as well as visual, references into his watercolor scenes.⁄¤ Though they have been identified elsewhere, little has been understood about these homages to Flaxman prior to my research. Second are Latrobe’s innovative serial landscape views, an image type that has never been discussed relative to his watercolors and to which, furthermore, I have been unable to identify parallel examples.⁄‹ In his studies of sites along the southern coast of Britain and in Virginia, Latrobe produced multiple views of the same site from di∑erent perspectives. Experimenting with this form allowed him to move the viewer across time and/or space to strategically build his intellectual content, while actually only moving a few paces from one view to the next. Third, during these years, Latrobe created a series of trompe l’oeil watercolors. Although these works build on visually similar pieces produced in France and Britain in the 1780s and 1790s, they are unparalleled in the ambitious intellectual content that they include in both their form and subject matter. Here, Latrobe toyed with a relatively common amateur image type, but reframed it into a content-driven form with deep intellectual resonance. Finally, this book also identifies Latrobe’s fusion of architectural design and ambitious watercolor. In three illustrated manuscripts, he presents interpretive visions of the buildings he designed during his Virginian residence. He creates visual journeys depicting what it might be like to move through and around these imagined structures and he integrates these jewel-toned and absorptive watercolors within more standard architectural renderings. These images build directly on contemporary architectural rendering practices, but they also shape a viewing mindset and larger intellectual narrative not present in other architectural drawing. The identification of these four image types and their integration into a larger analysis of the scope and meaning of Latrobe’s watercolor practices is one of the greatest contributions of this book, particularly with respect to the larger historiographies of British and American art at the end of the eighteenth century. Because we do not have many surviving watercolors from before Latrobe’s emigration, it is impossible to say if he created

Introduction ·

similar ambitious works before his departure from London in December 1795. Although there is much evidence in this book that Latrobe’s watercolor practice matured and shifted focus over his years in Virginia, it is perfectly likely that he created intellectually and formally innovative watercolors in Britain. Focused on his immigrant years, this book begins its primary period of analysis in 1795, with the contents of Latrobe’s surviving sketchbook from his Atlantic crossing. The conclusion of this study in 1799, however, requires some additional explanation. After Latrobe relocated from Virginia to Pennsylvania, his life changed dramatically. He married his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Hazelhurst Latrobe (1771–1841), and soon began a second family. More importantly in terms of his professional trajectory, his receipt of the high-profile commission for the First Bank of Pennsylvania catapulted him to prominence. His greater level of personal and professional occupation, combined with greatly increased personal satisfaction, meant that he no longer dedicated long evenings to watercolor. While his sketchbooks continued to accompany him on travels, his watercolors become relatively few and far between. After 1799, Latrobe did produce numerous masterful landscape studies, as well as many architectural drawings, but watercolor was no longer of the same artistic or intellectual significance that it had been for him. He set aside the type of complex and ambitious watercolors on which this book focuses. As I consider further in the Conclusion, Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors served psychological and creative needs that ceased to exist as he gained greater professional success and personal satisfaction. The five-year span considered in this book represents an intense interval in Latrobe’s life, in which watercolor marked his travels, expressed his innermost thoughts, and helped to formulate a new direction for his future. Reconsidering Latrobe As the subject of thousands of pages of published primary and second literature, Latrobe is a well-known historical figure, particularly in architectural history circles.⁄› Nevertheless, the work of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the watercolorist, introduces us to unknown, or little-considered, moments of his life and facets of his intellect. The historical figure explored

15

across these pages is not the prominent, reasonably successful Federal architect, with a wide network of powerful American correspondents. He is not the proud American architect so long upheld in the historiography. Instead, he is an unknown, bankrupt, émigré. As explored in Chapter 2, even his British expatriate status is troubled by his biography, with his strong family ties to the Moravian faith, and his international education and ancestral pedigree. In short, Epic Landscapes seeks to introduce Latrobe from an alternative perspective, one that recognizes his multinational and faith-based education and family roots, that accounts for his deep engagement in the intellectual currents of the Atlantic world, that takes into consideration the relationship between watercolor and architectural practice in his period, and finally, that takes seriously his investment in watercolor as a generative medium contributing to his creative maturation. This updated understanding of Latrobe could not be realized without the existing extensive body of scholarship, but it pursues alternative lines of inquiry.⁄fi Indeed, though Latrobe is remembered almost exclusively in association with architecture, this book is not primarily concerned with his buildings. Nevertheless, it is my hope that other architectural historians may find much here to inspire new interpretations of Latrobe’s known work and, possibly, to guide new archival quests for forgotten examples of his early career. This book also o∑ers avenues for scholars across the humanities to reconsider Latrobe’s intellectual and artistic contributions. Approaching him through a broader, interdisciplinary lens allows us to remember his diverse intellectual and creative pursuits and to explore a richer transatlantic historical context for his life and work. Reclaimed in Epic Landscapes as an ambitious artist, a scholar of Classical languages and literature, and a thoughtful cultural critic, Latrobe becomes a figure of increased significance in the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I do not seek here to review the details of Latrobe’s full biography. Salient points are discussed as they arrive within the text, and a more complete understanding can be gained from other readily available published sources.⁄fl Likewise, a reader of this book does not need mastery of Latrobe’s architectural oeuvre to understand the analysis of the works considered,

16 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

though many sources exist for further reading.⁄‡ However, some discussion is necessary to introduce the available collections of textual and visual primary sources and their central role in the methodology of this book. Throughout his life, Latrobe kept both sketchbooks and journals. Through them, he not only documented the experiences of his Virginian years, but also explored his emotions and intimate reflections, while experimenting with crafting a more public voice in text and image. However, little survives of these materials prior to his departure from London, and there are many subsequent intervals in which he failed to maintain either his visual or textual diary. Still, a large collection exists, the core of which has been archived at the Maryland Historical Society and published in the multiple volumes of The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe.⁄° Concerning his journals, Latrobe attributed his lifelong commitment as a diarist to his father’s influence: The practice of keeping a regular journal was recommended to me very early in life by my father, merely for the sake of acquiring a habit of writing down my ideas with ease and correctness; for he recommended at the same time, that I should, at the close of every Year, extract all the generally useful facts, and burn the remainder. I have followed his advice at intervals ever since I was a boy, both in writing and in burning my journals.⁄·

Latrobe describes an annual ritual, a reflective and destructive process to preserve the most valuable accounts from any given year’s journal, while also destroying the remaining historical document.¤‚ Notably, this discussion only concerns his written journaling practices and does not mention whether his prolific sketching developed as a separate habit or went handin-hand with journal-writing. Luckily, Latrobe self-consciously adopted a di∑erent approach when he set sail for the United States. He noted his decision to change the types of materials he included in his journals and the authorial voice of his writing, and to cease the annual burning ritual: “Since my arrival in America, I have in a great measure altered my plan of a diary into a collection of observations and a record of facts in which my personal interests and actions were not immediately concerned. The great chasms which appear in the collection, are chiefly owing to the personal activity which so filled up my time as to render it out of my plan, to record what was going forward.”¤⁄

Although Latrobe intended to adopt a new, more dispassionate approach to journaling, his diaries continued to contain many personal exclamations and to lay bare his emotions— though, perhaps, he may have permitted such intrusions due to his Romantic sympathies. It is likely, however, that some ripped or missing pages may have been the result of his later censorship of his journals. Most important for this book is the fact that Latrobe’s writings often closely correspond to the content of his images, allowing for close visual reading alongside textual analysis. Furthermore, the images and texts relate beyond subject matter. Together they allow for the potential of an intimate understanding of the mind, beliefs, and emotions of their author. Indeed, they are such an interwoven project he experienced in that neither text nor image is fully intelligible without a deep understanding of the other. Likewise, both Latrobe’s writings and his images relied on a larger body of knowledge he possessed and interacted with—especially the corpus of Classical texts, personages, and art objects by which he was inspired.¤¤ In addition to his sketchbooks and diaries, this book dedicates three chapters to Latrobe’s illustrated manuscripts, which are a di∑erent type of record and unique to Latrobe’s Virginian residency. Each of these handwritten manuscripts is illustrated in ink and watercolor. None were published in Latrobe’s lifetime, though each was completed with a semipublic or professional purpose. Surprisingly, scholarly engagement with these texts has been very limited, rising primarily from interest in the history of landscape and/or drawing treatises and from the pursuit of information about Latrobe’s architecture. These manuscripts maintain aspects of the introspective tone that Latrobe developed in his diaries and engage directly with the Virginian iconography that he developed in his sketchbooks. As such, they craft a somewhat polished and professional version of his more private journals and sketchbooks. Epic Landscapes is the first monograph to analyze these manuscripts together and in toto, considering their material, visual, and textual arguments and placing them within the larger intellectual and creative work of Latrobe’s Virginian residence. Latrobe’s journals, sketchbooks, and illustrated manuscripts dating to his immigrant years provide the foundation

Introduction ·

for a new understanding of this significant historical figure. These sources capture the ideas, visual forms, and grand reveries that preoccupied Latrobe in these years. Epic Landscapes reintroduces Latrobe primarily through the context of this body of work. The focus on his period of residence in Virginia concentrates on a time in his life that has previously been understudied but for which there are rich archival resources available. It also allows an understanding of Latrobe in an early, transitional moment of his life, before he was subject to the public limelight his Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., years. While many aspects of his persona and preoccupations will be familiar, others are cast in a di∑erent light or appear at variance with the concerns of his later life—perhaps opening the way for revisions of our understanding of aspects of his later life and work. Such is the richness of the journals and sketches from Latrobe’s Virginian residence that Epic Landscapes considers only a selection of these materials, focused around Latrobe’s renderings of Virginia’s landscapes and his designs for this landscape. Though examples of his natural history, literary, and genre scenes are integrated into these chapters, they are not given separate consideration. Latrobe’s Virginian residence has long been interpreted as a fallow and unproductive time. In Epic Landscapes, these transitional years are reinterpreted as a period of germination and introspection, rich in generative watercolor visions that helped Latrobe to interpret his current experiences and to formulate his dreams of the future. Notes for the Reader Epic Landscapes is divided into eight chapters, which are organized thematically, while also largely following a chronological arc. The first chapter, “Atlantic Purgatory,” analyzes Latrobe’s sketchbook and journal from his Atlantic crossing. It establishes Latrobe’s tendency to reflect on his biography in the epic mode, and it introduces key themes of form and content that are salient throughout the book. The second chapter, “Latrobe in a European Context,” takes a chronological step back to explore evidence for Latrobe’s training in watercolor in Europe. Building on the themes introduced in the first chapter, it explains how Latrobe developed his individual approach to watercolor. Importantly, this chapter situates Latrobe’s artistic and architectural training in the

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Moravian, as well as the British, context, again establishing themes of form and mentality that remain salient throughout the manuscript. The third and fourth chapters introduce Latrobe’s life in Virginia via two prevalent themes from his watercolor oeuvre. Chapter 3, “A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods,” analyzes Latrobe’s encounter with Virginia’s “wilderness,” alongside his astute analyses of its domestic and cultural landscape. Chapter 4, “Learning to Read the Stones,” confronts a surprising subset of watercolors that represent the Revolutionary War ruins that Latrobe toured in the state. Both the third and the fourth chapters o∑er detailed consideration of Latrobe’s internalized experience of immigration, particularly with respect to his sense of displacement. Through visual and textual accounts of this displacement, Latrobe captured his transatlantic sensibility, drawing connections between Europe and the United States, but also highlighting the uncomfortable realizations of di∑erence through which he detected his own foreignness. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 interpret the illustrated manuscripts that Latrobe produced during his years in Virginia. These manuscripts are studied in sequence because of the relationships between them, the related interpretive methodologies used to understand their content, and the fact that all were composed between 1798 and 1799 in the second half of Latrobe’s Virginian residence. These manuscripts a∑ord an exceptional opportunity to interpret Latrobe’s watercolors through conjoined textual and visual imagery. Prepared for an audience, these illustrated texts represent Latrobe’s most ambitious artistic projects, developing complex content that builds on the iconography and concepts of his journals and sketchbooks. Significantly, these chapters explore the close integration of watercolor, architecture, and landscape design in Latrobe’s work. The final chapter, “Illusions of Selfhood,” ties together the themes introduced throughout Epic Landscapes via an analysis of Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil watercolors. Due to the close correspondence between these works and biographical developments during Latrobe’s immigrant years, as well as the fact that several of these works help to artistically capture Latrobe’s move from Virginia to Philadelphia, they o∑er a fitting conclusion to this study. 

Chapter One

Atlantic Purgatory

Two watercolors capture Latrobe’s reflections on the eve of his arrival in Norfolk, Virginia, concluding a painful and protracted Atlantic crossing. On March 3, 1796, he completed First View of the Coast of Virginia, henceforth First View of Virginia [Fig. 1.1], and on the following day, Breakfast Equipage set out for the Passengers of the Eliza, the Captain and Mate in all 9 Persons, March 4th, 1796 being the compleat set, henceforth Breakfast Equipage [Fig. 1.2]. Sea and sky dominate First View of Virginia. Small, regular waves rhythmically lick the foreground. Two sailing vessels—a diminutive scouting dingy and a meticulously rendered transoceanic vessel—bookend the view. A thin ribbon of woodlands defines the horizon, but is almost lost between watercolor washes of sea and clouds.⁄ The view anticipates arrival, but conveys an air of stillness, rather than excitement, explained by Latrobe’s recollection that, “the wind died away and it became perfectly calm” as soon as land was spotted.¤ The following day, while still idling, Latrobe completed Breakfast Equipage. In contrast to First View of Virginia, Breakfast Equipage is claustrophobic. A trompe l’oeil, it layers a stack of letters, notes, playing cards, and a freshly finished watercolor sketch. Rather than signaling journey’s end, it traps its viewer, ensnaring the eye within a confusing array that seems to chafe at unending travel. In their contrasting genres and perspectives, First View of Virginia and Breakfast Equipage set the stage for understanding the breadth and significance of Latrobe’s watercolor practice during and after his transatlantic voyage. From departure to landing, Latrobe documented his voyage in a sketchbook and journal. He used images and notations to record events, as well as sites encountered, and flora, fauna, and scientific phenomena observed. From among this array, this chapter focuses on works in which Latrobe gives visual form to the experience of immigration. These images would be significant if analyzed merely as evidence of an immigrant’s journey, but they are even more so due to the metanarratives Latrobe constructed across them, using ancient literature and history as resources to construct a reflective heroic and narrative assessment of his life. Here, Latrobe’s Atlantic sketchbook is considered as the first e∑ort in carefully crafted self-fashioning through art and text, a process that Latrobe continued throughout his immigrant period. Across these images, a distraught man staged himself as epic hero, through a self-fashioned vision that brought perspective to the jarring experiences of immigration. The epic landscapes of Latrobe’s Atlantic crossing o∑er an opportunity to establish the foundations of the artistic, textual, and philosophical practices that recur throughout this book. In this discrete body of images, Latrobe explored self, site, and form in ways that he reemployed e∑ectively when traveling throughout Virginia. As a mature artist and thinker, he drew on the rich resources of his previous education and experiences to construct a perspective toward travel and personal transition. The diverse nature of Latrobe’s education in watercolor is the subject of Chapter 2, and the significant stakes of the analysis in that chapter can

Fig. 1.11 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Situation of the Eliza, December 21st 1795, 1796.

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20 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

be better understood after studying Latrobe’s Atlantic watercolors. Although these watercolors look toward Virginia, they also o∑er us the most complete taste available of Latrobe as a European artist prior to his immersion in the Virginian landscape. In these works, Latrobe is an emigrant artist, looking forward to an uncertain new phase of life in the United States. An Epic Perspective Latrobe built up epic associations to his travels from the first page of his Atlantic sketchbook. He boarded the Eliza, an American ship, on November 25, 1795, landing in Virginia some four months later.‹ Latrobe recorded his departure on the title page and wrote, in Latin: “forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit ” (“perhaps someday it will be pleasing to remember even these things”).› As a personal notation, the phrase defines the sketchbook as a place of memory, commemorating current miseries and anticipating a brighter future. This well-known line from Vergil’s Aeneid also sets an intellectual and philosophical tone.

Latrobe’s citation makes sense. It resonates with the unhappiness of his life. Though only thirty-one years old, he sailed with a heavy heart, in extended mourning over his wife Lydia and his mother, who died in rapid succession.fi Later, Latrobe would assert that his immigration was driven by grief, writing: “The loss of my wife made business irksome to me, and I therefore resolved to leave a country where everything reminded me how happy I had been and how miserable I was.”fl After his departure, Latrobe’s sadness surely deepened as he worried over the two young children he left behind. His emotional distress was compounded by financial disaster, and his hasty departure was timed to escape bankruptcy proceedings.‡ It is uncertain whether Latrobe intended a permanent relocation, but he doubtless anticipated a prolonged absence due to his finances. He set sail amid heartbreak, social ruin, and professional disappointment. Latrobe’s Aeneid reference proved apt for his Atlantic crossing. He endured a miserable voyage—su∑ering seasickness,

Atlantic Purgatory ·

life-threatening storms, and unlikeable companions—all of which he painstakingly documented. In such a context, Vergil’s words could have encouraged Latrobe and put his di≈culties into perspective. Latrobe had a thorough Classical education and his understanding of the Aeneid citation would surely have considered its specific literary context. Book I finds Aeneas, the great Trojan hero, wandering the Mediterranean with his loyal troops, seeking a safe harbor. Their illfated journey, chronicled throughout the Aeneid, had been set into motion by the destruction of Troy and the preceding decade of war. Aeneas su∑ers the loss not just of his city, but also of his dear wife Creusa, who died fleeing Troy. The Aeneid begins in medias res, introducing a hero and his companions worn down by disasters. Devastated by losses and never-ending troubles, they begin to abandon hope. As their leader, Aeneas needs to raise their spirits, a task performed in the speech from which Latrobe drew, here captured in the verse translation of John Dryden’s that was popular in Latrobe’s lifetime: Endure and conquer! Jove will soon dispose To future good our past and present woes. With me, the rocks of Scylla you have tried; Th’ inhuman Cyclops and his den defied. What greater ills hereafter can you bear? Resume your courage and dismiss your care, An hour will come, with pleasure to relate Your sorrows past, as benefits of Fate. Thro’ Various hazards and events, we move To Latium and the realms foredoom’d by Jove. Call’d to the seat (the promise of the skyes) Where Trojan kingdoms once again may rise, Endure the hardships of your present state; Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate°

The full speech promises a better future as a reward for great su∑ering. Aeneas characterizes the harsh turns of fate as driving toward a new life in “Latium,” prefiguring the dawn of a new Trojan civilization on the Italian Peninsula, where he was fated to become the founder of Rome. Elsewhere, Latrobe complains, “My destiny is not blind. She has a keen

Fig. 1.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, First View of the Coast of Virginia, 1796.

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active eye to discover thorny paths for me to walk in.”· Reflecting on Aeneas’s words could allow Latrobe to toy with his own life fantasies. Traveling from Britain to the United States, he looked toward a New World Promised Land, where his troubles could remain in his past and a brighter future could unfold. However, Vergil also shares the secret of Aeneas’s words with the reader: the speech is an elaborate ruse designed to cheer his followers, but one in which Aeneas has no faith. It is a performed deception; the rhetorical cognate of a trompe l’oeil. Aeneas has received omens promising the rosy future he invokes, but he does not believe them. His public face shows hope, but privately his heart and spirit are broken. Anecdotes from Latrobe’s Atlantic voyage testify that he would have understood Aeneas’s conflicted experience, since Latrobe too experienced disjuncture between the public persona he maintained and his inner personal struggles. When interacting with his shipmates, Latrobe behaved like a high-class intellectual (doing such things as awarding his pianoforte his paid berth in the first-class cabin and flaunting his British status vis-a-vis his uncouth American shipmates), but these public performances of status masked inner anxieties.⁄‚ General a≈nities in emotion and ill-starred fate may have drawn Latrobe to Aeneas’s words, but the larger cultural

Fig. 1.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Breakfast Equipage set out for the Passengers of the Eliza, the Captain and Mate in all 9 Persons, March 4th, 1796 being the compleat set, 1796.

22 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

milieu of the Age of Revolutions could also have made their contexts seem similar. Vergil lived at the end of the Roman Republic and witnessed the ascent of Octavian as the first Roman emperor Augustus.⁄⁄ Vergil’s era, with its accompanying political, social, and personal anxieties can be understood as having some similarities to the restive Age of Revolutions. Richard F. Thomas has observed, “Virgil’s poetry is constantly and unrelievedly grappling with the problems of existence in a troubled and violent world.”⁄¤ The currents of Vergil’s tumultuous historical context run palpably throughout the Aeneid, making it exceptionally relevant to an individual caught up in the throes of international political anxiety. Both Vergil and Aeneas lived in worlds wherein “the ocean is moved to the very depth,” circumstances that may have invited Latrobe to closely associate himself with the epic. Latrobe’s citation of Vergil would also have functioned within the broader neoclassical climate of Britain in which he was immersed. He espoused a neoclassical approach that integrated thoughtful use of ancient inspiration combined with sensitive consideration of modern purposes. This approach developed with an awareness that classicism could be employed in society for political purposes. Elite men often honed their public personae by employing civic concepts, such as liberty and republicanism, which were rooted in, and interpreted via, the ancient world. These cultural building blocks transcended individual assessments of ancient personae or historical events and formed the driving cultural force of the sociopolitical sphere. As Philip Ayres asserts: “for purposes of political self-justification the classical political heritage served too conveniently to be ignored . . . very few would have denied the continuing validity of the classical ideal of libertas or the social virtue obligatory in citizenship of civitas.”⁄‹ When a figure of Latrobe’s stature employed Classical references, even within private texts or images, he did so both for the precise ways that they related to the life stories of a particular ancient figure and also for their political resonance. Within this cultural backdrop, Latrobe’s citation from the Aeneid has a more grandiose allusion. In his speech, Aeneas refers to the future founding of Rome, a land of peaceful prosperity. The connection of peace and prosperity with Rome was a well-known aspect of the political platform of Augustus.⁄›

Much debate existed in the late eighteenth century about where Britain stood within the cycle of its own imperial history. The American Revolution damaged British claims to a culture of libertas, as colonists accused their motherland of various oppressions.⁄fi These anxieties were furthered by the French Revolution, jostling the stable imprimatur of Europe’s reigning kings. While aboard the Eliza, Latrobe read Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and likely meditated on the current circumstances of Britain and the United States via this historical account.⁄fl In such a context, the United States could, indeed, be seen to o∑er the prospect of a new Golden Age. If in the Aeneid the hero travels toward his forecast role as founder of a new, prosperous civilization, then Latrobe could extend this frame to think of his own future. Was he, as an artist whose craft could be compared to that of Vergil, headed toward a prosperous New World Latium? If so, what would his role be there? Many of Latrobe’s watercolors and writings of his immigrant years skirt around these issues, pondering possibilities both for his own future and for the young nation. One final point is worth consideration in assessing Latrobe’s meditations on the Aeneid alongside dreams of his own immigrant future. The Aeneid serves as a mythic pre-history of Rome’s founding. Significantly, though, in Book 6, the hero travels to the underworld for a final meeting with the shade of his father Anchises. While there, he is given a view into the future that encapsulates the entire history of Rome. Here, the reader meets Augustus and learns that he is Aeneas’s descendant. Regarding Augustus, Vergil comments: “Now fix your sight, and stand intent, to see / Your Roman race, and Julian progeny”⁄‡ In this passage, the hero and mythic founder of Rome is connected historically to the emperor who would bring peace and prosperity to Rome. As Latrobe daydreamed about his future achievements and impact, his citation permits expansive possibilities. In connecting himself to Aeneas biographically and emotionally, Latrobe metaphorically donned the hero’s mantle. If Aeneas’s unhappy journey could lead to such a grand future, Latrobe hoped his own would likewise achieve happy results. If this single line from the Aeneid were the only moment in which Latrobe connected his experiences to those of a hero, considering such far-ranging interpretations would be

Fig. 1.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Dover, as seen from the Eliza, 1795.

Atlantic Purgatory ·

overreaching. However, during the Atlantic crossing he peppered his journal and sketches with references to heroic historical or literary journeys, positioned alongside introspective watercolor studies. Using allegory, metaphor, and literary allusion, Latrobe pondered his own experiences in relation to epic voyages. He routinely related history to his experience of the present and the stories of renowned heroes to his own modest biography. For example, he likened humble practices of keeping a sketchbook and writing a journal to the achievements of a conquering general, reflecting in his second Atlantic journal entry on his first day’s account: “In looking back I am ashamed of the length of my account of this day, but like the description of the reign of the founder of a new state, it must necessarily occupy more room than that of any of its successors.”⁄° The subject matter considered in the day’s account was modest—commentary on the ship and its contents, reflections on scenery and weather. Nevertheless, since these details described the outset of his own momentous

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journey, Latrobe utilized a heroic metaphor to mark the significance of his documentary project and the larger import of the journey.⁄· Although his voyage to the United States was not for a glorious cause, Latrobe nevertheless saw it as significant, perhaps even akin to those of the epic heroes about whom he had read so much. Like Aeneas, Latrobe may have seen himself as a refugee, traveling toward a future of renewal and, perhaps, of glory. An Emigrant Perspective Latrobe correlated ancient literature with modern (home)lands as he completed the first image of his Atlantic sketchbook Dover, as seen from the Eliza, henceforth Dover, dated November 28, 1795, which o∑ers a view of the famed white cli∑s [Fig. 1.3]. Latrobe enclosed his view within a double-lined black border, a common practice in his sketchbooks. His caption names site, date, and some details about the orientation, namely: “Bearing NNW 2 miles dist.”

24 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

The caption witnesses that the image is both accurate in its geographical perspective and the product of a dispassionate, learned eye. The foreground presents choppy ocean waters, behind which the landmass of Great Britain recedes toward the horizon, beneath an expanse of sky. Latrobe uses the paper’s texture to emphasize whitecaps and the ocean’s spray. Two diminutive figures occupy a small sailboat—one stands erect, probably steering the ship, while the second sits, looking out over the water. The chalky white cli∑s dominate the view with their undulating profile; they both define the coastline and draw the eye toward the horizon. Hidden within this scene of nature, a careful viewer will spot a town nestled on the bay, as well as a massive stone structure atop the cli∑s. In his journals, Latrobe comments on these two human elements. He describes the small town in scathing terms, “Deal has not even the merit of most dirty towns, to a∑ord a good prospect from a distance. It lies upon the edge of the Sea like a black heap of rubbish.”¤‚ By contrast, “Sanddown Castle is a bold object” enhancing the view. Juxtaposing the modern town and ruined castle, Latrobe reflects on the relative merits of contemporary and historic buildings, and the societies to which they give witness. Both Deal and Sanddown embody the British Empire: Deal’s unappealing condition reflects that of the contemporary empire, while the ruined castle recalls former glories. However, this ruin also testifies to the moral and class systems that triggered its eventual downfall. Latrobe’s journal entry digs deeper, showcasing his authoritative knowledge of the landscape and its history, and expressing his a∑ection for the landscape of Britain. The sketch only captures one glimpse of the coast, but Latrobe recorded his feelings while sailing along Britain’s southern coastline. He attributed some of his pleasure to the inherent beauty of the coastline, but more to his familiarity with it, noting, “Every spot on the coast was so well known to me, that I had a superior pleasure in seeing and recognized [sic] the di∑erent towns and eminences.”¤⁄ Latrobe laid claim to the receding coastline by employing his knowledge of its history and associations. Moreover, he interpreted his own reactions to the shore via his understanding of Julius Caesar’s gaze, which he described

as having assumed a similar possessive character—though motivated by military aspirations: The coast of England, which cannot have varied much since the days of Caesar in its appearance, has su≈cient beauty to have tempted a less ambitious conqueror, than he was. It is not probable that the bleak Chalk Downs were ever covered with wood. They are now, I suppose, no more, nor less the smooth undulation of hills variegated only by the mixture of clear turf and purple heath, and the occasional breaks of light and shade, which they presented to his eye. If, as some antiquarians suppose, he landed in Pevensey bay, the beautiful woody country breaking into the cold extent of Chalk Cli∑s between Folkestone and Romney and again between Fairlight and Bexhill to Beacheyhead must have formed a landscape of the most romantic contrast.¤¤

Latrobe imagines Caesar as a tourist, siting his battles on picturesque landscapes. Displaying his own sophisticated understanding of picturesque theory, Latrobe characterizes the tourist’s possessive eye as seeing with the ambition of the conqueror. Surely, this logic posits, the attractive nature of the landscape at Dover motivated Caesar to add it to the growing territory of Rome. Latrobe guesses that the historic landscape view would di∑er little from its current condition. As his text suggests, while gazing at the coast from the Eliza, Latrobe may have tried to see with Caesar’s eyes, and been reassured that Caesar would have seen things just as he did. Though straightforward in its appearance, Latrobe’s Dover can be opened up interpretively through examining his writings. The image permits its viewer to enter a time warp. Past, present, and future are compressed into one scene of cli∑s, sea, and sky. As the opening image in a traveler’s sketchbook, it assumes both Latrobe’s emigrant vision and Caesar’s conquering perspective. It combines local, a∑ectionate knowledge with a conqueror’s ravenous ambitions. One scene shows both the excited vision of the Roman hero first approaching Britain and the artist’s lingering valediction. This sense of an implicitly embodied, yet conflicted, viewer serves Latrobe well in other scenes throughout his Atlantic sketchbook. The initial course of the Eliza skirted England’s southern coast. Due to contrary winds, mistakes in navigation, and special arrangements for passengers and supplies, the ship spent many days in the English Channel. Latrobe passed his time observing the ship, its crew, and, most importantly, the coast. As with Dover, he bulked up his observations through references—

Atlantic Purgatory ·

citing ancient texts, travel diaries, mariner’s accounts, and scientific texts.¤‹ These references lend an air of authority to his observations, and bolster his claims of familiarity. Although his journal is interspersed with much quixotic commentary and is often personally or emotionally charged, Latrobe generally attempted to adopt a distant and detached tone fitting for a formal, public text, rather than an intimate diary. Latrobe populated his Atlantic sketchbooks with images that illustrate his travels, but that also collectively construct a complex and intellectually charged visual narrative of the voyage. His sketchbook is most e∑ective if considered as an assemblage of views, which add to one another and build a growing dialogue. Latrobe described rereading and reflecting on the contents of his journal and he surely would have engaged with the sketchbook in a similar way. Likewise, to the extent that he thought of a future audience beyond himself, he likely considered the sequential and comparative e∑ects of his imagery. If, as has been argued, Latrobe planned to publish his travels, then his sketchbooks would have served as the inspiration for more complex associations and correspondences, just as his textual references to larger concepts would have added significance to the daily tedium on the small American boat. With this more complex content in mind, Latrobe devised an innovative technique to craft multiple and serial images. This approach is evident in images likely drawn from his Atlantic crossing, but remade within a manuscript dating to his Virginian residence. Four scenes representing Hastings now exist only within the first volume of Latrobe’s An Essay on Landscape, a significant manuscript of Latrobe’s immigrant years and the subject of Chapter 5. Though painted in Virginia, these views represent sites seen from the Eliza and give innovative form to Latrobe’s experiences of emigration. Latrobe o∑ers a brief mention of Hastings in his journal: “We sailed along the charming coast with a fair brisk wind till the evening haze hid the yellow cli∑s of Hastings from us. . . . We had the advantage of a delightful moon, by the assistance of which, we could just discover Beacheyhead about 9 o’clock upon our starboard beam.”¤› A similar side reference to Hastings accompanies his retelling of Caesar’s invasion. He notes that “some antiquarians” believe that Caesar’s troops landed somewhere “between Fairlight and Bexhill to Beacheyhead,” a series of points along what

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Latrobe refers to as Pevensey Bay, which wraps away from Hastings toward the southwest. In An Essay on Landscape, he further observes that this same coastline witnessed William the Conqueror’s landing, from whence he waged the Battle of Hastings to win authority over Britain.¤fi As he sailed from Britain, a homeland he unwillingly renounced, Latrobe meditated on the possessive gaze cast on these shores by William the Conqueror. Through the contours and topography of this landscape and these historical allusions, Latrobe’s studies of the coast at Hastings helped him to relate past and present, ancient heroism and current personal anxiety, again mingling the possessive perspective of the conqueror with the longing, lingering gaze of the emigrant. Latrobe’s views of Hastings are not located adjacent to one another within An Essay on Landscape, but rather are interspersed among text and imagery pertaining to other sites in Virginia and Europe.¤fl Reading this section of the manuscript transports the reader repeatedly back and forth across the Atlantic. This e∑ect is combined with Latrobe’s textual focus on conquering military heroes and forcible invasions, which connects the views he depicts to momentous arrivals and departures. The original context of these watercolors was likely within a sketchbook, and even reconfigured within this setting in An Essay on Landscape, the images still evoke sensations Latrobe experienced on his Atlantic voyage. This overall structure serves Latrobe’s larger narrative in An Essay on Landscape, in which he seeks to theorize his approach to watercolor in an American context. However, this purpose subsumes and conceals the logic of Latrobe’s Hastings images, which have a narrative and form in their own right that is closely tied to their origin in Latrobe’s Atlantic crossing and is also significant for understanding the subsequent technique and perspective Latrobe employed in his Virginian watercolors. This chapter will focus on their significance in this context, and a larger consideration of An Essay on Landscape can be found in Chapter 5. The first Hastings image, Bathing Machine, is comical, but nonetheless critiques frivolous aspects of Britain’s tourist society [Fig. 1.4]. It shows a wooden, box-like carriage emerging from rough seas onto a sandy beach. The carriage is pulled by a tall, thin horse, urged forward by a man who grasps the bridle and cracks a long whip. It is sealed on all sides by thin

26 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

boards, except for a rear door. A small, frail, and anxiouslooking woman stands in the threshold, while the cart rocks in the ocean spray. This vignette is not explained in the text until several pages later, when Latrobe pokes fun at the visitors to the sea resort of Hastings because “the number of idle, always exceeds that of the sick.”¤‡ The scene captures a contraption used by female bathers, which he also describes.¤° Both the text and the image mock bathing culture generally, and that of Hastings specifically. Since Latrobe’s description appears several pages after the image, it illustrates a page on which the text expounds on the danger around Hastings, claiming it is “almost inaccessible” and “safe from the invasion of a modern enemy.” While coastal dangers are suggested by the rocking carriage and whitecaps, visitors nevertheless bathe merely for recreation— contradicting Latrobe’s assertion that the topography would prevent invasion. The timid occupant of the bathing machine, and the coarse man who pilots it, are modern successors of Caesar and William the Conqueror. At Hastings, the idle and sickly pass their time with insignificant plunges into the ocean, their actions absurd in juxtaposition with the historic achievements of conquering leaders along the same coast. Latrobe’s vignette guides the viewer to laugh at the activities of modern civilization, relative to the ancient past. View of the Coast of England at Hastings, henceforth View of Hastings, is paired with Bathing Machine in the manuscript, and is accompanied by a lengthy descriptive passage. The text covers the landscape context, the history of the site, and the visual techniques used in the image [Fig. 1.5]. Latrobe admits to using the “Licence of a Painter” in manipulating

light and shadow, so that “brilliant Sunshine” illuminates the middle ground of the cli∑s.¤· Although the view was likely composed aboard the Eliza, the viewpoint looks west from the beach in what may be another painter’s sleight of hand. The landscape is dominated by the face of a high cli∑, which is emphasized by the light that bathes its striated surface. Within the grand scene of nature, the viewer quickly discovers indicators of human activity. Two large wooden boats are pulled onto the shore in the foreground shadow. Beneath the cli∑, a carriage and mounted escort progress along a road. An additional boat and several small buildings are visible in the middleground. In the background, two wooden windmills dominate the sloping hillside and stone walls divide fields into a pinwheel pattern. If the viewer immediately understands this scene as showing the impacts of the human hand and of nature, then Latrobe’s accompanying text o∑ers more pointed commentary. Both nature and humankind have ravaged this landscape. In the years since Caesar’s landing, Latrobe notes, this coastline has “undoubtedly undergone considerable change.” Some has been wrought by nature, “the sea has waged a War of 1,800 Years . . . , has pulled down immense fragments . . . has left the still resisting shore as upright as a Wall, and made an impenetrable barrier of its ruins along its Margin.”‹‚ The violent waters have also damaged human endeavors: “more than half of an ancient Castle of which the ruins overhang the brow of the cli∑.”‹⁄ In this destruction, the sea has methodically razed a fortress, emphasizing how readily nature brings any human construct to ruin. However, human enterprise has also changed the landscape. Latrobe points out the caves puncturing the striated face of the sandstone cli∑ and observes its “romantic appearance” due to the caves’ varied shapes and sizes. But these caves are man-made rather than natural, formed by workers digging for sand. Likewise, the contour lines along the cli∑ face are a byproduct of agriculture, with “sheep following each other in the same track on the steep Slopes.”‹¤ In An Essay on Landscape, Latrobe leaves Hastings to introduce his first views at Little York in Virginia, and then returns

Fig. 1.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Bathing Machine from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

Atlantic Purgatory ·

to Hastings with a 180-degree shift in perspective, exchanging dappled daylight for an impressive moonlit view. Moonlight scene at Hastings, England, henceforward Moonlight at Hastings, presents a sliver of beachfront and a large expanse of water [Fig. 1.6]. As the beach recedes, the viewer perceives the smooth, angled walls of a robust fortress and a bristling array of ship masts beyond. A single house appears at left. Cli∑s tower in the background, nearly blocking the skyline beyond, and dwarfing the tallest masts. The composition counterbalances weighty stone cli∑s and structures against

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the open expanse of gently rippling ocean. The moon hovers just o∑-center, casting a strong, clear beam across the water, directing the eye toward the horizon. The moon also bathes the cli∑ in white light, shimmering against the rock surface in a mist. At right, a large boat bobs on the water, resting at anchor a safe distance from the cli∑s. Latrobe notes further details concerning the site. He explains that, at Hastings, ships are beached on their arrival to protect them from violent surf—a practice that explains the bristle of masts behind the fortress in the view. Further,

Fig. 1.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the Coast of England at Hastings from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

28 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

the large gap between resting ship and shore is explained by the fact that “immediately o∑ the town, the Shore is highly dangerous, being guarded by sunken Masses of Rock, the ruins of the Cli∑.”‹‹ As elsewhere, such textual details serve to emphasize the accuracy of Latrobe’s views as well as the authority of his knowledge. Though separated in the manuscript, View of Hastings and Moonlight at Hastings are pendants, which Latrobe constructed to be viewed together. When considered as a pair, they create a significant, complex experience for the viewer, which is even more interesting if assessed from the perspective of Latrobe’s emigrant voyage. The two views pivot, as Latrobe notes, from a single point along the shore. View of Hastings

faces west, setting a course toward the open ocean along the English Channel. Moonlight at Hastings turns the viewer east, backtracking along the route traveled by the Eliza. In View of Hastings, the viewer’s perspective seems firmly fixed on the foreground beach, but having pivoted toward Moonlight at Hastings, the viewer drops from the thin strip of beach into the water. One scene is rooted on the terra firma of homeland, while the other casts the viewer to sea. The contrast is further accented by dueling e∑ects, most notably between day and night, sunlight and moonlight, and the corresponding opposition of warm and cool hues. Such contrasts in intimately related scenes trigger varying sensations. Melancholy and longing are inherent in the

Fig. 1.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Moonlight scene at Hastings, England from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

Atlantic Purgatory ·

moonlight view, where the eye looks tantalizingly beyond the coast of Hastings toward the shimmering moon. View of Hastings, by contrast, uses sunlight to convey sensations of warmth, peace, and contentment. Since Latrobe specifically notes that he contrived the contrast of light and shadow, we know that he manipulated these responses for e∑ect. Furthermore, the spatial relationship between the two views enables the viewer to experience the sensations of and associations with emigration and immigration. The ship at right in Moonlight at Hastings, which should be interpreted as the Eliza given its resemblance to the ship in Latrobe’s other views, provides the viewer with the only protective shelter. View of Hastings, however, firmly locates the viewer on shore. Pivoting from one scene to the next, the viewer experiences, alternatively, solid ground and the ocean’s waves, warm sunlight and cool moonlight, an environment bustling with human activity and another in perfect stillness. From Latrobe’s perspective as artist-viewer for both works, the spatial relationship between shoreline and ship would have allowed him to recollect his earlier experiences on this protective British coastline, as well as to capture his current condition. Further, the moods of the pieces contrast warm associations of a past personal life, family, and homeland, with the melancholy anxieties of the transatlantic journey. The creation of such dual perspectives allows Latrobe to explore, through formal elements and landscape attributes, his experience of leaving one homeland in search of another. Thematic and historical content increase the contrasts between these scenes. Latrobe’s text emphasizes the danger of approaching the shoreline. Having left Britain, the emigrant will find return di≈cult. The warmth of View of Hastings shields the coast’s dangers within a visual mirage of safety that might only increase the threat. Moonlight at Hastings, by contrast, conveys a sense of danger and distance. Latrobe’s text also uses history to deepen visual experience. Moonlight at Hastings communicates longing, which is easily tied to Latrobe’s references to historic conquerors, through its stillness and anticipation. However, this longing for the shore is

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tempered by the moonlight’s forceful beam across the open water toward an unseen destination beyond the horizon. The eastward orientation of the work would pull the longing eye of the ambivalent emigrant back to port and (in Latrobe’s case) toward an abandoned life in London. An impersonal viewer, though, lacking that geographical context, can imagine following the silver rays into the distance, in the expansive, hungering gaze of a historic explorer or a transatlantic traveler. Latrobe associates these views of his own Atlantic crossing with ideas about the passage of time and the transience of life. In his text, he considers the layered interactions of politics, industry, and natural forces on the landscape. Across the images, he similarly meditates on temporal changes to topography, both through specific anecdotes and through the larger metaphoric structure of the contrast of day and night, which opens up consideration of the interwoven passage of history and changing fortunes of nations, and the passing days of a human life. The shift from day to night signals the end of one era in life and the beginning of a voyage toward the next. Within this temporal metaphor, Latrobe’s Atlantic voyage, as a rite of passage, becomes the liminal state of dusk before Virginia’s rising dawn. The final vignette related to Hastings is a natural history study. Here, a jewel-toned sea anemone, in shape and texture not dissimilar from a wagon wheel with spokes, is exhibited on a rock and above the foaming whitecap of a wave, with no shoreline or broader contextual information visible [Fig. 1.7].

Fig. 1.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sea Anemone from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

30 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

The viewer’s eye focuses on the brilliantly colored concentric circles that constitute the anemone’s body. Repeating stripes of beige and earth tones are set o∑ by a brilliant band of burgundy and, at the center of the anemone, a Caribbean blue bull’s-eye. This vignette allows Latrobe to demonstrate his knowledge of nature along Britain’s southern coast, both at sea and on land, while also presenting his skill in producing natural history studies. Asserting that the “rocks of Hastings abound” with similar sea anemones, Latrobe discusses the multiple occasions on which, “I have often taken them carefully from the rocks, and put them into a plate of sea Water.”‹› His observations of these creatures lasted several days when, “If they were not bruised they soon fixed themselves to [the plate], and opened their Mouths, or Flowers. I fed some of them with flies or Worms.”‹fi The narrative communicates that such investigations were conducted prior to Latrobe’s departure, though during his voyage he continued engaging in scientific experiments.‹fl In an uncertain moment in his life, scientific knowledge and rendering helped Latrobe to highlight his education, status, and observational prowess. Moreover, the sea anemone o∑ers Latrobe an opportunity to further meditate on the categories, connections, and interconnections of the human and natural world through which he is passing. As he describes it, the sea anemone, “is one of those Links, in the endless Chain of Being, called Zoophytes, which unite the Animal to the Vegetable World.”‹‡ Understanding the anemone as having both a root and a mouth (which he alternatively refers to as a flower that it can open and close at will), Latrobe considers a phenomenon that bridges the categories of animate and inanimate life, and of plant and animal, challenging rational understanding. Latrobe’s reference to the “Great Chain of Being,” the divinely created relationship among all the constituent parts of nature, is significant within the Hastings series, since it introduces a direct reference to divine order. Though mysterious and sometimes illogical, divine action influences the complex, and constantly shifting, relationship between humankind and nature. Two views, also located in An Essay on Landscape, o∑er an interesting final pairing of Latrobe’s studies o∑ the coast of Britain. He introduces A View of Dover, taken at Sea, 3 miles o∑ Land, henceforth A View of Dover taken at Sea, as a technical

example of rendering water in motion [Fig. 1.8]. The image immediately follows the series of Hastings images. View of the undercli∑ on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, England, henceforth View of the undercli∑, is the final known image of the British coast connected to Latrobe’s voyage, and is also the last illustration of the first volume of An Essay on Landscape [Fig. 1.9]. Because the manuscript lacks four pages in between A View of Dover taken at Sea and View of the undercli∑, it may once have contained additional views. As the text survives, though, the discussion of these two images follows one after the other, and the intervening textual fragments do not suggest a shift in subject. These two images show, respectively, a scene of the coast at Latrobe’s point of departure and a scene from the final British landscape he viewed from the Eliza. View of Dover taken at Sea is a vignette, the subsidiary status of which is visible in its lack of a rectangular ink border, leaving its edges to fade into the white paper. The scene comprises several principal compositional elements: the raging ocean surf, the solid rock of the shoreline cli∑, and the backdrop of the sky behind. The palette is tinged in grey, hinting at inclement weather, which also explains the turbulent surf. Upon closer perusal, a fourth significant element surprises the viewer: three diminutive dark marks along the cli∑ surface and skyline reveal themselves as human figures. Two stand atop the cli∑, toward its edge. The third is suspended by a rope and hangs, like a spider from its cast thread, just above the waves crashing against the cli∑. Latrobe likely explained these figures’ actions in the missing text. Their mere presence emphasizes the height of the cli∑ and the extreme danger posed by the ocean beating against the rocks. As a life hangs suspended on a thread, the viewer is led to consider human frailty vis-a-vis the overwhelming power of nature. The viewer can easily generate two completely opposing hypotheses about the figures’ actions. Either they are frivolous and foolhardy, as in Bathing Machine, or they are heroic, if the two men atop the cli∑ are rescuing the third. A View of Dover taken at Sea reiterates ideas already introduced in Dover as Seen from the Eliza. The smooth cli∑ resembles the stone wall of a castle. Similarly, the small human figures recall Latrobe’s commentaries on the dangers of the coastline. Here, the large wave approaching from the left is greatly exaggerated in scale, threatening the scene with exceptional power,

Fig. 1.8: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, A View of Dover, taken at Sea, 3 miles o∑ Land from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Fig. 1.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the undercli∑ on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, England, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

32 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

a visual metaphor of nature’s might, which crashes with the force of an invading army. If A View of Dover taken at Sea is sublime, then View of the undercli∑ appears picturesque. This scene renders the farthest western point of coast encountered by the Eliza and constitutes Latrobe’s last salute to his homeland. The image focuses on a safe harbor. There, a rowboat bobs, tied securely to a finger of stones. A thin strip of sandy beach o∑ers another safe landing. The beach is surrounded by piles of smooth stones, suggesting a landscape tamed both by human hands and by persistent tides. Several houses nestle snuggly behind the beach. Their stone walls blend easily into the landscape. They are simple dwellings of no more than one or two rooms, but are comfortably situated. Smoke rises from the chimney of the most prominent house, indicating domestic activity. Rocky cli∑s rise behind the buildings, protecting the cove from winds and defining the borders of a discrete community. Caressed by waves, the rocky coastline curves in staggered loops into the distance. At left, the empty ocean waters recede toward the horizon, getting darker and deeper with distance. In the foreground cove, Latrobe represents the water’s surface meticulously, giving the waves both pattern and texture and emphasizing the e∑ect of wind on water. However, the alluring ocean surface, which lulls the eye, also pulls it toward the horizon. The viewer is torn between the safe harbor’s warmth and the ocean’s tug into the distance. In his accompanying text, Latrobe emphasizes this scene as the final outpost between Britain and the open Atlantic. He notes that the many rounded rocks are the visual clue to this fact, commenting, “A remarkable circumstance occurs here. So powerful is the Surge urged on by the weight of the whole Atlantic as to have rounded immense Rocks by their constant attrition, and the Beach is covered with Pebbles, some of which weigh many tons, and few less than 50 or 60 lb . . .”‹° The powerful ocean swells, the “weight of the whole Atlantic” thrust upon these peaceful shores, belie the calm, dappled surface of the water. Yet, the encroaching clouds and agitated ripples hint with troubled anticipation at the force of the ocean beneath that surface. These final images of Britain are again pendants, though in a very di∑erent fashion from the paired views of Hastings. They represent two opposing ocean states: storm-tossed or

calm, threatening or inviting. They also o∑er two distinct interpretations of the British coast—rugged, forbidding, and impenetrable, or safe, appealing, and homelike. In both scenes, the ocean controls the viewer’s gaze. In A View of Dover Taken at Sea, the viewer finds no comfortable foothold on solid ground and is encouraged to imagine the strength of the surf, pulling cli∑ward with startling, dangerous power. By contrast, View of the undercli∑ o∑ers a safe sojourn on the sandy beach of the cove, but the eye is pulled inexorably toward the tantalizing ocean horizon. Meanwhile, battered stones remind the viewer that even this comfortable cove is a dangerously inhospitable environment. The paired scenes of Hastings guide the viewer to reenact Latrobe’s emigrant experience, and in doing so they teeter between homecoming and departure. In these two cli∑side scenes, the viewer is led to a new distance from and discomfort with the British countryside. A View of Dover Taken at Sea distances the viewer from an inhospitable coast. Even the title emphasizes that the image was made “at sea.” The watercolor’s visual qualities reveal the coast as undesirable, dangerous, and foreign. In View of the undercli∑, the landscape initially appears welcoming but reveals itself as threatening. Warned from the cove by the ocean’s menacing ferocity, the viewer is simultaneously drawn toward the distant horizon. Only along the thin boundary where ocean meets sky do clouds begin to part and blue sky appears. The promising future lies in pursuing the distant, alluring ocean, not in awaiting the violent battery of waves and stones on shore. Through these watercolors studying the southern coast of Britain, Latrobe takes leave of his homeland. Departing from the fond familiarity and deep melancholy of his scenes at Hastings, these ocean views adopt a perspective in which the British coast is no longer the desirable driving force. Now, truly at sea, the emigrant artist and his viewers sail toward the distant horizon. Adrift in the Channel Latrobe completed such a considerable number of studies o∑ the coast of Britain due to the desultory course of the Eliza through the English Channel. Leaving on November 25, 1795, the ship reached the open Atlantic on December 9. During this interval, the shipboard mood was tense, and Latrobe’s

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journals record his frustrations. On November 29, he lamented, “Miserable prospects for a long voyage.” Soon after, he observed that “all the passengers [are] down in the mouth.”‹· After passing the Isle of Wight on November 30 and enduring storms for several days, they were dismayed to learn that cli∑s sighted were just west of Beacheyhead.›‚ The following day, they spotted the coast of France, then a dangerous enemy of the British, and turned immediately, again, toward the northeast. Traveling in spurts of four hours, and mostly during the night, the ship was again in sight of the Isle of Wight on December 5, though at first passengers believed that it is “impossible that this land could be any part of the Isle of Wight from the course we had held for some days passed.”›⁄ In the confusion, Latrobe observed, “a most unpleasant and dismal sensation of uncertainty and apprehension occupied us all.”›¤ He noted that the captain and crew were ignorant of “tides and currents of the Channel,” and the ship was urged forward with “an obstinacy equal to that of the wind.” He took it on himself to complete a “tide-table of the Channel from Dover to the Landsend.”›‹ Although the chart’s completion “revived” his spirits, and heartened several companions, the next day they were waylaid by two British warships, and questioned about their contents, destination, and contact with the French. With the appearance of the warships, Latrobe’s “pleasure” at escaping the su∑ering of the English Channel was “blasted.”›› When it finally resumed sailing after this nervewracking encounter, the ship was free of the Channel, and her passengers were promised a much more pleasurable voyage because of the relative comfort of sailing on open waters. Latrobe found “no very fond expectation in that respect.”›fi Safely emerged from the war-torn Channel, the passengers faced new uncertainties on the Atlantic, compounded by the “ignorance and obstinacy” of the captain and crew.›fl Latrobe’s journaling during this fraught interval emphasizes concerns about survival and the tensions of national identity on the waters during the late eighteenth century. These observations are paired with his general distaste for ship life and for his fellow passengers. By contrast, his pleasure and sustenance were derived from intellectual exercise and enjoying his regional knowledge. His entries complement the themes considered in his images, but they are not redundant.

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His account of navigational travails in the Channel is by no means directly reconstructed in his views. Although his texts often join in controversies among di∑erent passengers, or recount general slights the ship’s captain inflicted, Latrobe’s watercolors focus on the larger psychological and emotional quandaries of his emigrant experience. As is fitting to the intimate nature of journals and sketchbooks, both the texts and images from Latrobe’s Atlantic journey are concerned with constructing a sense of selfhood. He addresses his reader as “you,” thereby tempering the fraught nature of his own reflections.›‡ Similarly, he selfconsciously considers the viewer when shaping sketches, structuring his imagery to manipulate and direct the viewer’s experiences across a visual journey. The combined evidence of text and images indicates that Latrobe viewed his voyage as an epic adventure, even when it has barely begun. First formulating himself through the words of Aeneas, then repossessing the gaze of Julius Caesar, he defines his sketchbook and journals as an exploratory space within which he meets the perils and purpose of his journey. In recalling mythic heroic voyages, he seeks models for the meaning of his own journey. Fate could still turn personal tragedy into a heroic narrative. In quelling his shipboard boredom, he had ample time for imagination and reflection. Furthermore, as he left familiar shores he still had resources in the many memorized texts upon which he drew. While he no longer had familiar scenes before his eyes, he could still interpret new sites via the epic and historical heroes who were his intimate familiars, imaginary companions, and constant role models. As he observed the navigational errors committed by the inexperienced American captain, Latrobe felt caught in a frustrating mythical web. The captain, on his first return trip from Europe, strayed into the Channel partly because he was avoiding French warships. The United States was neutral in the ongoing conflict between Britain and France, and the frustrated captain mused that he might just surrender “the ship and cargo as English property” if they happened upon the port of Le Havre.›° The captain rationalized that the passengers and their belongings would be worth a small fortune in France, and Latrobe reflects in horror, “it is almost impossible to believe that all this and much more to the same e∑ect can have been seriously meant, but I am convinced it

34 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

was.”›· Functioning as an elite European, he fails to accept the monetary and moral code of the American captain. He feels trapped in a situation beyond his control, facing dangers (both real and imagined) he had not anticipated on departure. During the lengthy journey, the ship navigated numerous uncertain waters; sometimes because of the crew’s lack of knowledge and sometimes due to the captain’s ignorance of international politics. Once, a deliberately circuitous course was plotted for fear of “Algerine corsairs.”fi‚ Just as the Homeric hero Odysseus crisscrossed the

Fig. 1.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Situation of the Eliza, December 21st 1795, 1795.

Mediterranean in his ill-fated journey home, so Latrobe’s voyage on the Eliza was marked by the unfortunate whims of politics and personalities. Troubled Waters Now beyond the English Channel, Latrobe continued to produce drawings and watercolors. His sketchbooks record little of the daily monotony on ship, though his journal recounts meals, routines, and small events. His sketchbooks include a few such everyday scenes (such as a sketch of a lamb

Fig. 1.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Situation of the Eliza, December 21st 1795, 1796.

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on the boat), but on the whole were reserved for exceptional subjects. Among these were a threatening storm on December 21, 1795, the sighting of the Azores in January 1796, and sea animals encountered en route. From among these scenes, Latrobe’s studies of the storm and of the Azores are pieces that further developed his assessment of his voyage in epic terms. In text and image, Latrobe recorded the peril faced by the Eliza, surrounded by clouds and lightning strikes and illuminated by moonlight in a “strong and awful” e∑ect.fi⁄ The night of the December storm, Latrobe produced a pencil sketch of the scene from a bird’s-eye view, taking an imagined aerial perspective rather than the shipboard view [Fig. 1.10]. Loose, rapid pencil work captures the motion of wind and surf. The ship is rendered in dark graphite, pulling the

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eye toward its tenuous situation between two large waves, which crest at the height of the masts and could easily destroy the vessel. Latrobe describes the storm’s aesthetic e∑ect in detail, with powerful evocations of color, atmosphere, and motion: “A more sublime scene it is almost impossible to imagine, than the united e∑ect of the dark Ocean agitated into mountainous waves, the broad shadows of which were contrasted by their white foaming summits; the horizon covered with heavy clouds from which perpetually flashes of red lightning issued; and the Moon breaking through the gloom and beaming a silver light upon the whole scene from a sky of the clearest blue.”fi¤ This description echoes the e∑ect that Latrobe often conveys in his moonlight sketches, and it is

36 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

carefully structured by knowledge of conventions in aesthetic literature. Latrobe describes moonlight counterbalancing the sublime e∑ect of clouds and lightning. It is no surprise that he characterizes the scene as “sublime,” as a storm at sea is a perfect definition of this e∑ect. Latrobe describes what must have been his own, very real feelings during the storm, when lightning and storm-tossed ocean threatened imminent death. Yet, in his first person account, he also turns to aesthetic conventions to characterize his experiences in text and image for his viewer/reader. Those reading Latrobe’s account as an unfolding epic might note that Aeneas delivered his speech of encouragement after a devastating storm. On February 12, while still on board, Latrobe produced Situation of the Eliza, December 21st 1795, a watercolor reworking of the sketch, which he called “an humble attempt at finishing” his representation of this harrowing experience [Fig. 1.11].fi‹ The view again assumes a distanced perspective, but repositions the viewer at ocean level. The Eliza is in the middleground, just shy of the horizon, cresting at a precarious angle. A whitecap splashes skyward, its high arc threatening the ship. Close by, jagged lightning strikes the sea. The ocean is covered in agitated whitecaps, carefully rendered through a combination of negative white space and white pigment added with a dry brush. Latrobe’s journal refers to mountainous waves; he recaptures the e∑ect in the watercolor with mountainous black storm clouds. The horizon is nearly lost— the deep blue-black ocean and grey-black clouds merge indistinguishably in the distance, separated only by whitecaps. Above the mass of storm clouds, the sky is a startling blue. A bright half-moon casts silver light that is reflected in the upper cloud mass and echoed by the lightning bolt. This seascape attempts to provoke more raw sensation than Latrobe’s more introspective views of the British coast do. The viewer has no safe perspective, but rather is cast to sea and forced to watch the ship hold on for survival. Here, nature overpowers the human. The cool moonlight dispassionately illuminates the scene. Latrobe’s “humble attempt” recreates the drama in order to absorb his viewer within the terrible sensation of riding out a storm at sea. Beyond sublime sensations, the watercolor hints at other aspects of Latrobe’s seaboard experience. Appropriately, it provides no indication of the Eliza’s location, as the ship was

perennially lost. Water, moon, and clouds fail to confirm geography and appear indistinguishable from one another. This uncertainty about the distinct elements of nature furthers the sense of insecurity, as the eye cannot be trusted. Latrobe’s marginal caption identifies the ship, but within the watercolor itself, the Eliza bears no distinctive flags or markings. She is an unknown ship, on uncertain waters, charting an undefined course and facing imminent destruction. While Latrobe’s watercolor documents his personal experience, it maintains uncertainty and anonymity in interacting with the viewer. It refuses to recount historic events or heroic actions. Rather than inspiring empathy for the unseen individuals aboard the Eliza, its sublime viewing perspective triggers an instinctive will toward self-preservation. In this storm at sea, death is anonymous and without glory. Situation of the Eliza captures the fears over legacy and personal turmoil that Latrobe experienced while crossing the Atlantic, having left everything familiar to pursue the unknown. At the Ends of the Earth After about a month and a half of travel, the Azores were spotted from the Eliza. To the passengers, having traveled so long with no view of land, they seemed a miraculous apparition, nevertheless “surprise and vexation took possession of all our seafolks from the Captain to the cabin boy,” since the mountains’ profiles confirmed the ship to be severely o∑ course.fi› To Latrobe, though, “the beauty of the morning, and the grandeur of the scene” mitigated the disappointment.fifi In two sequential watercolors, completed one above the other, he represented the Azores emerging from clouds at seven a.m. and the snow-capped mountaintop of Pico di Azores gleaming through clouds at noon [Figs. 1.12–13]. On another sheet, he produced an additional topographical view of Mt. Pico at 8 a.m., and several studies of the mountain’s peak [Fig. 1.14]. In mid-February, he completed another finished view of Mt. Pico [Fig. 1.15]. The Azores also encouraged continued Classical fantasy. Here, Latrobe imagines he has come to the very edge of the world known to residents of the ancient Mediterranean. Gazing at Pico, he muses: “Might not this mountain be the Atlas of the Ancients as well as Teneri∑e, as Gibbon suggests? Was it not equally accessible to them? The other is nearer Africa,

Atlantic Purgatory ·

it is more distant from Greece.”fifl Latrobe frames his point as an academic argument, taking Gibbon’s side in an ongoing debate over the final location of the Titan Atlas, who eventually metamorphosed into a mountain. For Latrobe, the site’s significance may have related more to ancient poetry than to Classical history. In asserting the connection between the Azores and Atlas, Latrobe again connects his journey to Vergil’s Aeneid.fi‡ Now advanced to Book 4, Aeneas has side-tracked his future by lingering in Carthage with Dido. Jupiter loses patience and redirects

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Aeneas toward his destiny, sending Mercury to remind Aeneas of his obligations.fi° While flying from Mt. Olympus to Carthage, Mercury pauses to look at Atlas: Now sees the tops of Atlas, as he flies, Whose brawny back supports the starry skies; Atlas, whose head, with piny forests crown’d, Is beaten by the winds, with foggy vapors bound. Snows hide his shoulders; from beneath his chin The founts of rolling streams their race begin; A beard of ice on his large breast depends.fi·

Fig. 1.12: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, January 6th, Δ past 7 o’clock a.m., View of the Azores nearest Island supposed to be St. Michael (afterwards known to be Pico), 1796. Fig. 1.13: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the Summit of Pico di Azores, as it appeared at 12 o’clock, 1796.

Atlantic Purgatory ·

This passage fuses nature with Atlas’s physiognomy: the mythic Titan is now truly a snow-covered mountain. Furthermore, Atlas enters the Aeneid at a narrative turn of particular interest, when the hero is o∑-course, sidetracked by love, and has strayed from his fate. Aeneas has traded miserable travels for ill-fated happiness. Gazing at Mt. Pico, Latrobe may have thought of this moment when duty to self, family, and nation force Aeneas to resume his unhappy travels. Fate counters the wishes of the hero, but for his ultimate good. Latrobe’s visual and textual reflections on Pico di Azores again are built on an epic context. A detailed journey through Latrobe’s sketches can o∑er a deeper understanding. The first, January 6th, Δ past 7 o’clock a.m., View of the Azores nearest Island supposed to be St. Michael (afterwards known to be Pico), henceforth View of the Azores, is a thin panorama, set o∑ by Latrobe’s typical black framing border, and occupying the upper third of a sketchbook sheet [Fig. 1.12].fl‚ Although Latrobe’s first identification of the islands was incorrect and later corrected with text now illegible, the editors of Latrobe’s View of America have identified the assembled islands from left to right as Faial, Pico, and São Jorge.fl⁄ The diminutive sketch captures the islands’ contours using faint watercolor wash, reproducing glimpses of the peaks along the distant horizon. The foreground and lower third are filled by deep blue ocean. The thinness of this strip compresses the distance between viewer and mountains, while also simulating the experience of looking across many miles of monotonous water toward a distant destination. The gentle ripples of the ocean’s calm surface constitute the only movement in the scene. The islands share the horizon with the pale strip of sky illuminated by sunrise. The peaks are hidden by clouds, which appear heavier than the ocean or mountains, and settle across the upper third of the image. This watercolor presents the Azores as timeless, emerging from primordial mists with mythic stature and, in Latrobe’s term, “grandeur.”fl¤ The vision removes Latrobe from his unpleasant voyage and absorbs him in a profound aesthetic experience. His fascination continued throughout the day as he, seemingly spellbound, sketched, jotted notes, and assessed what he saw using aesthetic, literary, and scientific parameters.fl‹ As the day progressed, the view became more magnificent.

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Latrobe records: “By degrees the Sun dispelling the clouds, showed the majesty of Pico di Azores, half covered with snow, the brilliant whiteness of which, was equal to polished silver. It was a view that cannot be described. With the increased elevation of the Sun it became a more distinct, and splendid object.”fl› After further inspection, he characterizes Mt. Pico as “a beautiful conic mountain,” with a snow-covered white peak “sparkling in the Sun like a Diamond, especially when backed by a cloud.”flfi Latrobe progressively characterizes the brilliant richness of the scene as “gilded,” “polished silver,” and “like a Diamond.” His second Azores sketch recreates the appearance of the islands approximately an hour and a half later. Pico, one of the Azores at 8 o’clock a.m., January 6th, bearing NNW about 10 or 11 Leagues Distant, henceforth Pico, o∑ers another panoramic view [Fig. 1.14]. This sketch occupies roughly half the height of his sheet, with the title handwritten above, and additional sketches and annotations below. Unlike many of his scenes, this scene has only a single thin, black line at the top. Above this line, three words label the islands below, from left to right, as “Fayal, Pico, Tercera.” This key explicitly connects the sketch to the graphic conventions of topography, familiar to Latrobe, and the sheet as a whole employs techniques familiar from naval charts.flfl Below Pico are two ink sketches. On the left is a study labeled “10 o’clock bearing N by W.” In it, Latrobe reproduces the peak’s profile and sketches the e∑ect of stratus clouds partially concealing the cone. The sketch at lower right is labeled “11 o’clock, bearing true N Δ W” and contains the key “A” to indicate a “pond of water” on the peak.fl‡ The view is telescoped into the peak, which is again partially obscured by clouds, to highlight this dark spot of water. The two ink sketches move the viewer’s eye counterclockwise across the sheet, gradually telescoping into the detailed study in the final sketch. This spiraling view moves across the span of time and space, since the first scene takes place at eight a.m., the second at ten, and the final scene at eleven. Like View of the Azores, Pico is a panorama and it fills the sheet horizontally. Its bottom third is also similarly dominated by the rippling expanse of the sea. In this later morning view, a stronger breeze is indicated by slightly sharper peaks and some small whitecaps. Two boats sail slightly o∑-center

Fig. 1.14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Pico, one of the Azores at 8 o’clock a.m., January 6th, bearing NNW about 10 or 11 Leagues Distant, 1796. Fig. 1.15: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Pico di Azores with one of the boats used among the Western Isles, 13 February 1796, 1796.

40 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

of the work. Recognizable to Latrobe’s viewer, the Eliza cuts a dignified figure, with her three raised sails pu∑ed slightly by the breeze and her rigging pulled in tight diagonals. A smaller scouting boat with two rectangular sails is closer to the foreground. It has presumably been sent from the Eliza for an excursion. The Azores are visible on the horizon. The two ships serve to provide scale to the scene, communicating the distance of the mountains, which are still dwarfed by the Eliza’s masts. Further, a thin watercolor wash is used to render the islands, suggesting haze obscuring a distant view. The whole sky is awash in glimmering light. Clouds dapple the sky and part in a halo ring around the upper heights of Pico. A final sketch from that day, View of the Summit of Pico di Azores, as it appeared at 12 o’clock captures the scene at noon [Fig. 1.13]. Here, Latrobe focuses on a cloud formation that he also describes: “About noon a girdle of heavy clouds collected just above the commencement of the snowy region. By degrees they fell below it, and detached the snowy top from the blue tint of the Island below.”fl° The view occupies the bottom two-thirds of the page containing View of the Azores and is enclosed by a framing border. The page again constructs a viewing relationship between two images across space and time. The earlier scene o∑ers a distant view of the islands, while the later scene focuses on the mountain’s highest peak, as if seen through a telescope. In View of the Summit of Pico, the white peak emerges from the clouds, seeming to disperse a primordial mist. Thin, dark stratus clouds spread across the view, some appearing as stripes across the surface of the peak, and a thicker cloud settles like a belt below the peak. As described by Latrobe, this belt appears to sever the head of the mountain from the body below. The e∑ect switches mountain and cloud, as the snow-capped peak appears like clouds, and the thin, dark clouds look like stone. This produces an otherworldly, even ethereal e∑ect, as the mountain seems to appear by mysterious intervention. Though rock, it seems lighter than air. The sketch Pico di Azores with one of the boats used among the Western Isles, 13 February 1796 [Fig. 1.15] is Latrobe’s most polished watercolor of the subject, and is a revision of Pico. The basic components of the two views are the same: ocean, boats, islands, and sky. In Pico di Azores with one of the boats,

Latrobe has turned the Eliza to face left and the Eliza’s expedition boat is swapped for a small, swift local sailing vessel that is positioned in the foreground, allowing the viewer to study its contours, canvas, and rigging. It holds approximately eight figures, all with dark skin and wearing identical Caribbean blue shirts that blend with the ocean. The Eliza appears substantially as rendered in Pico. Behind the ships, the profile of the Azores dominates the horizon. Here, the snowy peak of Pico is defined by a section of blank, white paper, in striking e∑ect against grey clouds. The white sunlight permeates the coastline behind Pico, edging the clouds with bright light, and extending from the peak as it appears diamond-like in the rays of the sun. Latrobe’s fascination with Pico, and the Azores more generally, reflects his interest in documenting a new landscape, but one to which his many spheres of knowledge could be applied. In these studies of Mt. Pico, he observes a mountain shining brilliantly across the ocean. Clouds alternatively shelter, expose, or frame its peak while separating it from the world. Highlighted against the water, dividing sea and sky, the Azores are shining beacons at world’s end. Latrobe renders the islands’ topography, attending to the contours of each hill and labeling various components. He collects oral accounts of details that he cannot personally observe. He obsessively documents the time, alongside latitude, longitude, and cardinal coordinates. Further, he uses the written sources available and mathematical calculations to amass facts. Latrobe pairs these exhaustive details with e∑usive description. His vocabulary is better understood from his attempts to tie the mountain to ancient history and myth than in light of dispassionate observation. Ultimately, this also suggests why he produced so many views of the Azores. Arrival there was significant; it was the first terra firma sighted since leaving the English Channel, and the first completely new site for Latrobe. Importantly, it was also the site alleged by Gibbon and others to mark the end of the known world to ancient Europeans. With the accidental sighting of the mountain, perhaps formed from Atlas’s body, Latrobe faced what may once have been considered the world’s end. Yet, his journey had to continue many more miles across the unmarked Atlantic. Viewing Pico in these terms, the clouds

Atlantic Purgatory ·

and sunlight redoubled the significance of the site, bathing it in gold, silver, and diamonds, which further associated the mountain with the divine. At the Azores, Latrobe and his companions found neither shelter nor much-needed supplies, but just a waypoint in the open ocean. Yet, for the aspiring epic artist, Pico provided a profound encounter. Like Aeneas’s fateful reception of Mercury, it may have allowed Latrobe to look to the future, its golden rays a positive prophecy. A Final (Self?-)Deception Perilous ocean travel, uncertain identity, and anxieties about the future are all themes in Breakfast Equipage, the most complex work in Latrobe’s Atlantic sketchbook, introduced at the opening of this chapter [Fig 1.2]. This rendering of the ship’s breakfast table layered with a hand of cards, a miniature portrait of a young man, and several written documents might be understood as a portrait of anxiety, originating in Latrobe’s layered, scattered, and uncertain identity during his voyage toward the United States. Though it has been called a simple “exercise of wit,” its visual cues point toward greater significance.fl· A quill lies casually across the “top layer” of the painting, its tip is wet with ink and it appears as recently set down— an e∑ect that emphasizes the presence of an artist while also drawing attention to his visual absence. At the lower right, a curl of paper reveals the scrawl “B. H. Latrobe Delr.” [B. H. Latrobe drew this], claiming attribution, though seemingly only for the uppermost sketch of the busy breakfast table. This sketch contains a motley group of objects strewn across the table, and pinned down by a grid of boards used to “prevent the Things from rolling down.”‡‚ A worthy study for the curious gaze, this collection of “random” objects is fully itemized and explained in a caption.‡⁄ Choice items include “a biscuit which has been toasted to kill the Maggots,” a “basket of [untoasted] Biscuit, all alive-o!,” and a mustard pot that “serves the Captain in the double capacity of a Co∑ee cup and tea cup.”‡¤ This array is unappetizing at best. To a man of great self-styled “sensibility,” such as Latrobe, it presents a memorable a∑ront to the senses. Reading this caption and piecing it together with the visual cues may contribute to Latrobe’s sleight of hand, a distraction

41

of the viewer from the illusion’s content, and true to trompe l’oeil form. Further text invites the viewer to read more. A mock advertisement along the right margin promotes a cure for “Headaches,” “Vomitings,” “long sea-Voyages,” and “Bankruptcies,” an accumulation of su∑erings that were aΩicting Latrobe.‡‹ The verso of a calling card signed “L.,” perhaps “Latrobe,” o∑ers the cut-o∑ phrase “return thanks [for man]y obliging Enquiries,” while another calling card, dated March 3 (the day before the painting was completed) and addressed from Norfolk, Virginia, invites the captain and passengers to pass Christmas at the hotel of “Mr. Lindsay” on arrival in the United States. Both of these cards signal Latrobe’s fatigue with the lengthy voyage, the duration of which had required “many obliging Enquiries,” and promised to drag on until Christmas, still nine months distant.‡› These cues indicate the artist’s state. Su∑ering from various aΩictions, and surrounded by a strange environment, Latrobe felt suspended indefinitely and preoccupied with anxieties. The half-concealed hand of cards, a common trompe l’oeil trope, discloses little about the artist’s future; its non-descript collection of hearts, diamonds, and clubs depends upon the content of other players’ hands, while suggesting that the future may be subject to the random luck of the draw.‡fi Two final clues point to the introspective nature of this work. A small image of a man peeks from beneath the playing cards. This unidentified man stares out from the drawing, with an enigmatic half-smile. His eyes either engage the viewer or glance sideways toward the lower right.‡fl While the figure bears no particular resemblance to Latrobe, it nevertheless stands in for the absent artist. The pile of papers pivots around him and his focused, black-eyed stare catches the viewer’s interest. The viewer ponders the young man’s identity, his role, and his future, mimicking Latrobe’s selfreflection. Finally, a fragmentary thought appears at the bottom of the image: “if maybe h[e] never could disap[pear],” an evocation of the artist’s anxieties about his earlier troubles and his hopes for a future legacy.‡‡ Lest the viewer be too confident in an interpretation, Latrobe includes a visual catch by closing this text with the words “random writing,” leaving the image ambiguous and the whole composition possibly random. Latrobe’s journals from his journey echo

42 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

these visual hints of uncertain identity, suggesting the concealed emotional honesty of the illusion. Even as it o∑ers a window into the artist’s self, Breakfast Equipage more openly uses the sensory nature of trompe l’oeil to convey the true experience of life on a ship. The result is revolting and anxiety-ridden. Paired with Latrobe’s writings, the image can be understood to reveal, with some degree of fascination, the liminal world of the ship, which presents a strange and alternative reality. Latrobe explores the disconcerting nature of the ship through sensory and spatial signals. As a gentleman passenger, he and a few other elites occupy the cabin. Though “one mass of dirt and confusion,” it is highly preferable to the quarters “between decks,” which are a “dirty and unwholesome hole” in which, after two months at sea, “the pigs, the sheep, the fowls, the goat and kid, and two filthy negroes have accumulated manure su≈cient for a small farm.”‡° Social polarities become jarringly evident in Latrobe’s descriptions, including his equation of “filthy negroes” with farm animals.‡· His notations also highlight that di∑erences of class, citizenship, and race are heightened by the ship’s close quarters. Such concerns play out, for example, in his fraught relationship with the captain. Throughout the journey, Latrobe, accustomed to the privileged life of an educated professional, is powerless to control his environment and, literally, the course of his future. The journal is punctuated by descriptions emphasizing the sensory experiences of life on the Eliza. This is especially pronounced at night, when noises disrupt Latrobe’s sleep. After three months, he grows “tolerably deaf ” to such noises except when sailors’ calls break into the night.°‚ He complains that he cannot become as accustomed to the ship’s noxious smells.°⁄ A mix of human and animal waste, ripening body odor, and rancid food often interrupts his slumber. The ship’s cuisine, distinctive only for its repulsiveness, makes a daily assault on both smell and taste, in an e∑ect central to Breakfast Equipage. The canvas tablecloth it renders, for example, is not regularly cleaned. After the crew washes it by pulling it behind the boat, Latrobe remarks that it no longer reeks. Tea and co∑ee are prepared in the same pot, corrupting flavors. With only three cups left unbroken, “the glass passes from the hand of the grog drinker

to that of the porter drinker, contains brown sugar at tea [time] and serves for a slop basin at breakfast.”°¤ The measured authorial voice with which Latrobe opens his journal begins to unravel as the voyage progresses and anxieties increase. The journal entries he writes on March 3 and 4, in sight of the Virginian shore, focus more on the discomfort and desperation of his surroundings than on the view from the deck. This corresponds with the interval in which he created Breakfast Equipage. On the same day the watercolor is dated, the Eliza encountered another ship in worse shape. Disappointed in their hopes of restocking fresh supplies, the Eliza’s crew traded rotten salt-meat and vermininfested bread for firewood and potatoes. That night at dinner the crew ate potatoes and their last good beef, and Latrobe closed his diary entry, exclaiming desperately, “Now, for saltjunk and horseflesh!!!”°‹ Within sight of land, he and his companions were caught on the sea in an uncertain position when the wind died, an experience of entrapment captured by Breakfast Equipage. Latrobe did not exaggerate their pitiful conditions, as a corroborating shipping news report recounted: “February 29, lat. 38.28, long. 71, Spoke ship Eliza, of Portsmouth (Virginia) from London, out 97 days, very leaky, had 30 passengers and not an ounce of bread; spared them two barrels. The wind being fair, they were in hopes of reaching the Capes in a few days.”°› A few days later, mocked by the sight of land, they must have felt especially miserable. Breakfast Equipage captures a state of uncertainty and claustrophobia. The painting’s representation of a sheaf of papers against a blank surface is explicitly located on a ship and geographically anchored in the Atlantic’s expanse. Likewise, an imagined advertisement o∑ers a tantalizing holiday, but the real world future holds no guarantees, and the present environs are noxious. Breakfast Equipage encapsulates many phenomena common to the immigrant experience— an uncertain future, a tenuous identity, unfamiliar spaces, and strange material culture. Faced with the end of his miserable voyage, and in view of Virginia, the artist pondered his future.°fi Putting on his brave public face like Aeneas did, Latrobe prepared to move forward. Enduring his miserable final days on the Eliza, he created Breakfast Equipage as a record, in a visual counterpoint to Aeneas’s injunction forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Atlantic Purgatory ·

Land Ho! Latrobe’s Atlantic sketchbook and journal o∑er an intensely personal account. It has been suggested that he compiled these materials for publication, but he never attempted it. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to consider that he may have had such a goal in mind—perhaps a plan for old age. Whether intended for a wider audience or not, this material situates Latrobe’s daily experiences within a sophisticated intellectual framework. Though already an experienced traveler, Latrobe understood this to be his most momentous journey, and one that he could understand within Classical and literary frameworks by interpreting his journey in the epic mode. The miserable voyage became a catharsis. Latrobe boarded the Eliza a broken, impoverished, and depressed man, refashioning himself during the voyage. In his diaries, Latrobe wrote authoritatively, employing multiple spheres of knowledge. This posits the journal as dispassionate and accurate, rather than subjective and personal, despite its expression of many fraught emotions. Such an approach, like the illusive technique of trompe l’oeil, allowed Latrobe to mask personal anxieties and aspirations nevertheless present within the travel narrative. Latrobe’s sketches maintain a similar dual identity between documentation and self-posturing. Latrobe’s images construct an experience of transatlantic travel that moves contemporaneously across past, present, and future. They progress from the known world of Europe, with its detailed ancient history, toward the unknown potential of a new Latium. Most potent among these images is Breakfast Equipage, in which Latrobe employs trompe l’oeil to consider his own anxieties, while inviting future generations to relive his experiences. Just as epic literature o∑ers a temporal experience in which readers journey with heroes and compare timeless lessons to their own lives, so Latrobe’s Breakfast Equipage engages with time, chance, and legacy, using a form that forces the viewer’s active consideration. The viewer enters an unfamiliar sensory and psychic space within the ship’s belly; thus trapped, s/he ponders life’s greater significance. Though he could not have been certain about his future, Latrobe put personal trauma into perspective through the epic lens, perhaps envisioning his travels as the prelude to

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a larger and more significant narrative. During his voyage, he was essentially suspended in a state of inactivity permitting deeply introspective thinking, writing, and sketching. It was impossible to maintain correspondence, initiate architectural projects, or supervise ongoing work. As he disembarked onto the Virginia shore, he reentered the “real” world. In a sense, he had to shed his dreamed heroic armor and face more mundane challenges. However, as the next chapters explore, he remained uncertain as to how to build his life in the United States. Divine apparitions guided Aeneas, but Latrobe had no such direction. Through writing, drawing, and designing, he slowly transitioned from homeless immigrant to an “American” in his new homeland. In the process, he experimented in his diaries and sketchbooks with a variety of past, present, private, and public personas, exploring an optimal new identity for the United States. Following a process he first established on the Eliza, Latrobe continued to work through his immigration in a highly self-conscious, yet insistently illusive, manner. After he completed First View of Virginia, Latrobe may well have flipped back to the first scene of his immigrant voyage, Dover, as seen from the Eliza. The sketchbook was not yet full, and he would continue to fill remaining sheets until the volume was complete. Nevertheless, these images o∑er the bookends of his Atlantic voyage. Dover presents a clear view of a known landscape. Historic and contemporary architecture appear and the accompanying narrative combines personal familiarity with historic interest. None of these qualities characterize First View of Virginia. Here, “the coast was entirely woody.” A viewer barely discerns the ribbon of coastline along a hazy horizon, separating expansive sky from still sea. The shoreline is dwarfed by the boats in front of it, hardly an auspicious environment for the weary traveler. The contrast between the two images presents the first challenge of Latrobe’s arrival in the United States; namely, to make sense of the American landscape. Latrobe mandates looking at the landscape of the United States with an easy, familiar, and possessive gaze as earlier he had imagined Caesar doing in surveying the British coastline. Squinting into the hazy distance, Latrobe immediately set himself the task of deciphering the American woods. 

Chapter Two

Latrobe in a European Context

Assessing Latrobe’s watercolors, Talbot Hamlin states: “they appear to have risen spontaneously from a mind nourished, however unconsciously, by all the streams of feeling that eddied through the world in Latrobe’s time. He seems to have been one of those individuals who act as a kind of funnel into which life pours its random chemicals—with the result that they come out in a single and definite stream of new and unexpected compounds.”⁄ Hamlin’s metaphor permits us to discern how di≈cult it might be to trace any individual strain of influence in Latrobe’s creativity, given the numerous “chemicals” in the mix. Latrobe’s watercolors reflect the contours of his biography, including his education, professional training, exposure to contemporary European peers, and artistic context. Highly educated, intellectually curious, and philosophically sensitive, Latrobe moved through his world, seeking congenial subjects for his “pencil.” His watercolors in turn o∑er unique evidence of his European experiences. Extensive research has traced these influences on Latrobe’s architecture, but similar critical attention to his watercolors has been limited to the introductory essays in Latrobe’s View of America. In providing a framework within which to understand the influence of Europe on Latrobe’s watercolors, this chapter also reinterprets Latrobe’s European years. Several causes contribute to the lack of knowledge concerning Latrobe’s life in Europe. Many of his personal papers from Europe were lost or destroyed. Latrobe destroyed some, noting his routine of rereading and selectively obliterating his annual journal—a practice he fortunately abandoned on emigrating.¤ Other papers may have disappeared during bankruptcy auctions held in London. In 1804, many of his personal and professional papers were stolen by a clerk, resulting in the loss of documents both from Europe and from his early years in the United States.‹ In addition to these losses, sociopolitical and religious factors have caused other lacunae in the historiography. The Moravian era of Latrobe’s life is well documented with archival materials that figure only partially in the extant Latrobe literature. Cold War politics made access to the archives impossible exactly when the Latrobe papers were being compiled, since the Unitätsarchiv, the central United Brethren archive, was located in East Germany. Other materials remain in the Moravian House Archives in London, which is not yet fully cataloged, but was severely damaged in World War II. Linguistic barriers abound for scholars primarily comfortable researching in English, since the Moravian archival sources are often in German (sometimes in Fraktur) or in Latin. Finally, Latrobe abandoned the Moravian faith at a young age, leaving little incentive to seek a lasting impact of the community in his work. Ultimately, though, the greatest obstacle to the scholarly pursuit of Latrobe’s European influence has been the persistent desire to claim him as primogenitor of the architectural profession in the United States. Although some sources refer to Latrobe as British and others refer to him as American, his true transnational

Fig. 2.26 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of East Grinstead, September 1795.

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46 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

identity has not been treated with nuance. To fully evaluate Latrobe as a cosmopolitan, highly educated European, troubles longstanding narratives of American exceptionalism. Delving into his Moravian upbringing jars his secular, rational legacy by associating him with an evangelical religious tradition. Due to these challenges, the historiography on Latrobe’s years in Europe is limited. Of more than six hundred pages in his biography of Latrobe, Hamlin devotes a mere fifty to Latrobe’s European life, and uncovering the limited related material required substantial e∑orts, including conducting family oral histories and doing archival digging. Nonetheless, Hamlin’s characterization of Latrobe as an “Englishman” whose mindset reflected the “Anglo-Saxon-Norman idealism of the English-speaking world” lacks subtlety and privileges his Anglo context.› Materials related to Latrobe’s European years constitute only a slim number of records within the first volume of correspondences in The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, though his European architectural work receives more substantial attention in the first volume of architectural drawings. Correspondence with the archivists at the Unitätsarchiv allowed the editors to include some analysis of Latrobe’s earliest architectural drawings and put them in context, though the material was included hastily during the final stages of preparation for publication.fi Michael Fazio and Patrick Snadon updated this research with a substantial chapter in The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe dedicated to Latrobe’s European work, focusing exclusively on his houses in Britain, but virtually omitting his training in Silesia and ignoring his other artistic proclivities.fl In an important article, Vernon Nelson reintroduced the significance of Latrobe’s Moravian education in architecture and architectural drawing, but left to later scholars the reintegration of this research into a larger understanding of Latrobe’s oeuvre.‡ Unfortunately, Nelson’s publication venue limited his article’s principal impact to the Moravian scholarly community. These forays into Latrobe’s complex European origins have left more questions than answers and only begun outlining the various contexts relevant to his watercolors. This chapter interweaves the threads of influences at work in the tapestry of Latrobe’s creative mind as he embarked for Virginia, reopening the door for research into a period underserved by

previous assertions made with scant or nonexistent evidence. Even here, the sources of information regarding this rich, understudied period of Latrobe’s life are not exhausted. While expanding our understanding of Latrobe’s individual oeuvre and biography within a multinational European context, I hope this chapter’s discoveries may also contribute to bridging the chasm separating American Art History from its European field counterparts for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Transatlantic scholarship has begun to alter the nationalist paradigms of the field that separate the disciplines, but more work remains to be done.° Latrobe and his contemporaries often moved within wide spheres of influence incompletely captured by modern nation-based disciplinary boundaries. Religious, stylistic, idealistic, and political points of continuity and di∑erence define analysis of Latrobe’s works better than national ones do. My analysis may assist readers in considering with greater nuance the significance of place and personal identity to artistic practice. This chapter proceeds in sections that follow Latrobe’s biography, while also building themes of relevance. First, it considers his Moravian childhood and education, giving particular attention to his watercolor education, and also assessing his cosmopolitan intellectual sphere on the Continent. The cultures of watercolor encountered in Central Europe informed his lifelong approach to the medium. Second, it analyzes his place within London’s art world in the 1780s and early 1790s, situating his work within the period’s ambitious watercolor practice. Finally, it evaluates Latrobe’s engagement with avant-garde artistic practices in drawing and watercolor. Studying Art Among the United Brethren Latrobe’s parents, Benjamin Latrobe (1728–1786) and Anna Margaretta Antes (1728–1794) were prominent within the British Provinces of the Church of the United Brethren, also known as the Moravian Church or the Unitas Fratrum.· Benjamin Latrobe, who was Irish by birth, remains a significant figure in Church history, having served as Provincial Elder for Britain for much of his career. He traveled extensively among Moravian communities, inspiring local ministers with his preaching, resolving di≈cult points of faith, and ensuring each community adhered to Church standards in life and faith practices. He corresponded regularly with Church leaders in

Latrobe in a European Context ·

Germany, periodically traveling to the Continent to participate in synods and other Church events. Benjamin Henry was the third of seven children, six of whom lived to adulthood. He alone seems to have left the Church.⁄‚ The Moravian Church maintained a rigid communal residential structure. Children lived with their parents only until approximately age three, after which time they moved into communal residences organized by gender and age group. Latrobe and his siblings were reared in the community of Fulneck, where his parents also resided during his youngest years. As his father rose within Church ranks, the elder Latrobes spent longer periods away from Fulneck. Although the influence of Benjamin Latrobe on his son should not be underestimated, Benjamin Henry’s relationship with his elder brother Christian was his most constant family childhood tie. The early absence from nuclear family and substitution of other adults and peer-group friends in lieu of parents surely had a long-term impact on his life, though one that has been little considered to date. Certainly his own tenacious, sentimental, and devoted approach to fatherhood represented a significantly di∑erent form of parenting than that which he experienced. Throughout his life, his male friendships remained both emotionally and psychologically close, perhaps beyond social norms. In her studies of education in the Moravian world, Pia Schmid asserts that such experiences “had a profound impact on a child’s emotional development, causing an experience of loss they were not equipped to understand,” though other devoted adults did provide caring contact within the residential structure.⁄⁄ Latrobe’s significant relationships with teachers and other adults in the Moravian world are documented in references made in his later life. We also know Latrobe had strong, dear memories of his mother and his father, though their relationships were strained toward the end of their lives due to his progressive separation from the Church. Little is known about Latrobe’s education at Fulneck. It was presumably devoted to religious topics, penmanship, Classical languages, history, and other fundamentals. Life in the Boys Economy House, as the communal residence for male youths was named, would have included residential instructors who supervised all activities in loco parentis. Perhaps he had some education in drawing, generally o∑ered by

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Moravian schools. Latrobe commented on his early discouragement from art: “When I first attempted Landscape, and I was then only a boy,—my pencils, brushes, and colors were taken from me by an ignorant and tyrannical Schoolmaster, who pretended that drawing and writing well, were incompatible.”⁄¤ How Latrobe came to possess watercolor supplies at Fulneck if painting was not encouraged is an interesting question. Is it possible his parents, cosmopolitan members of the Moravian community and more aware of educationally best practices than a local instructor would have been, provided them? The irrepressible youngster persevered, later recalling, “as my disposition for drawing still prevailed, I got into a habit of copying prints with a pen, a habit in which I clumsily persevered, till it was my fortune to live in countries where I was surrounded by the best artists and their best works.”⁄‹ Latrobe describes copying prints as if it were his own inventive solution, but the practice was common within Moravian schools and more broadly. Many children thus learned to be competent renderers in ink, graphite, and/or watercolor. In the Moravian Nazareth Hall collection of school drawings, many pieces are derived from students’ e∑orts to copy prints.⁄› These student drawings reveal the pedagogical encouragement to combine diligent copying and individual inspiration. Repeated studies of the same print include individual adaptations and variations, sometimes with substantial alterations. This practice nicely parallels the adaptive techniques that Latrobe routinely used in his sketches and watercolors. Latrobe found his first artistic inspiration in a region of Continental Europe at the nexus of modern-day Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic—then, as now, the heart of the Moravian Church. Departing Fulneck at age twelve, he traveled to Niesky, now located in Poland, to continue his studies, a journey on which Christian had preceded him. Perhaps in recognition of their son’s imminent departure, his parents visited Fulneck from mid-July until mid-August 1776. The Fulneck Congregation Diary commented, “Our dear Br[other] LaTrobe arrived here to our great Joy, in order to bring the Revolutions & Arrangements of the late Synod into execution.”⁄fi The elder Latrobe passed his time in preaching and administration, but he may also have prepared his second son for the important journey to Niesky. Latrobe’s

48 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

parents departed several weeks before his trip. He traveled with two other boys, accompanied by another significant Moravian minister and his wife. Their departure was marked by a traditional Moravian celebratory and devotional gathering—known as a love feast—described in these terms: Br[other] and S[iste]r Okely with their son William and the three boys John Heartley, Benj. LaTrobe and Frederick Lander, after having been recommended to the prayers of the Br[ethre]n. and S[iste]rs. in the Congregation meeting last night and after a tender farewell Love F[east] with the Boys Oeconomy set out for Hull in order to go to Germany. The three boys are going to the Pedagogium at Niesky, to pursue their Studies, and Fred Lander to live in the Unity’s Oeconomy there.⁄fl

During his life at Niesky, at the Moravian Community of Gnadenfrey (ca. 1781 or early 1782), and later at the seminary at Barby (where he enrolled in the fall of 1782), Latrobe found himself surrounded by the “best artists” and their works.⁄‡ These artists were so intimidating, he suggested that he abandoned any thoughts of a painting career in light of their abilities, later reminiscing, “My own performances soon disgusted me, and though I continued to Sketch Landscape, I contented myself with Sketching only the outlines of the scenes through which I travelled.”⁄° Despite its self-deprecation, this comment conjures an image of young Latrobe, sketchbook in hand, trekking about, capturing scenes en plein aire, and modeling the ideal picturesque tourist. Although his life was primarily filled with religious education and other schooling, this vision of the student as budding tourist is also accurate, as corroborated in drawings and watercolors produced by his peers in the Moravian schools. These schools, which were highly esteemed, educated not only the children of ministers and Church leaders, but also the sons of nobility. The students took excursions into local scenery, visited cultural sites, and even mingled with cultural leaders and nobles, such as Count Carl von Schachmann and Count Zinzendorf, the original benefactor of the Moravians. Latrobe likely visited Schachmann’s estate, which boasted an elaborate landscape garden, complete with Classicized follies.⁄· While hiking in the mountains, he viewed ruins, sought out sublime experiences, and sketched nature.¤‚ Even while on school property, students sketched the buildings, gardens, window views, and local countryside, as amply

documented in the collections of the Unitätsarchiv. Although no specimens of Latrobe’s art from this period are known, the art he studied and produced can be reconstructed based on his later writings, as well as on archival materials related to students of roughly his same cohort. If his education at Niesky in 1779 is indicative, then Latrobe received a single weekly hour of drawing instruction, dwarfed by fifteen hours of Latin and Greek.¤⁄ Nelson stated that Latrobe’s first exposure to architecture likely came from Friedrich von Marschall, who belonged to the North American Province of the Moravian Church and returned there in late 1778 or early 1779.¤¤ While at Niesky, Marschall designed the community’s second school building, a∑ording Latrobe the opportunity to observe its construction and perhaps to study Marschall’s drawings. Latrobe’s instructors in drawing at Niesky were, first, Carl (Charles) Gotthold Reichel and, later, Johann Gottfried Schulz, who joined the community in 1781.¤‹ Schulz was not merely a drawing instructor, but was also an architect and landscape designer, having been “involved in the construction of hospitals and houses and laying out of gardens” at the Gorlitz community before arriving at Niesky.¤› Latrobe may also have seen watercolors by Friedrich Renatus Fruau∑.¤fi Fruau∑ ’s watercolors, now in the collection of the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, render the environs of Niesky, frequently using a sketchy outlining technique similar to that in Latrobe’s description of his own youthful style. Among these early influences, stylistic evidence confirms Schulz as particularly significant. In his studies of the Moravian artistic tradition, Rüdiger Kröger has traced the contours of art education at Niesky, identifying Schulz’s a≈liation with the school as marking an exceptional period of student artistic life.¤fl Schulz was apparently both a skilled artist and a committed teacher and mentor. Several large-scale plans of his, with detailed cartouches and decorative renderings, remain in the collections of the Herrnhut History Museum. Considerable correlations exist between the plan of the waterworks from the Berthelsdorf to Herrnhut communities and motifs in Latrobe’s later presentation drawings for Fulneck and Fairfield, which are discussed below. For a canal project, Schulz prepared two large-scale drawings. In Plan von der Leitung des Roehrwassers vom Berthelsdorfer Territorio

Latrobe in a European Context ·

49

nach Herrnhuth, the canal’s winding course curves across a sheet several feet in length. Diminutive trees line the water’s edges and labeled plats fan out from it. Studying such images with his teacher would have exposed Latrobe to the sophisticated graphics of surveying and mapping—tools that subsequently served him well in England and the United States. The scale of the Plan von der Leitung exceeds what can be easily illustrated here, but of most interest are the title cartouche in the upper left of one sheet and the landscape vignette in the lower right of the second [Figs. 2.1–2]. The cartouche features an elaborate neoclassical monumentcum-water feature. A large urn at the top spouts water to either side. At ground level, a fantastical fountain pours into a semi-circular pool. Just above, two winged figures occupy a ledge. A younger, androgynous figure reclines in a supine pose. A large open book is spread out across its lap and both of its hands are eagerly stretched out to hold quills to the pages. The diminutive text in the book includes Schulz’s signature and date. An older male figure slouches in the shadows at right. With scythe in hand, set o∑ by a dramatic shadow, this figure counterbalances his partner’s energy, o∑setting vigor with mortality. The monument sits in a naturalistic landscape, surrounded by trees and foliage. In the landscape vignette, a large commemorative slab, rendered at an angle and leaning against a blasted tree trunk, dwarfs an array of naturalistic foliage. A prominent domed structure pours water from a cave-like aperture. Grass grows over the domed mound, but its hewnstone facade and square opening reveal human design. The pooling water is surrounded by reeds, grasses, and small shrubbery. This vignette shows the work of man and nature perfectly merged. It highlights the appropriateness of the waterworks, utilizing an aesthetic mode that integrates Classical form with natural elements.

Fig. 2.1: Johann Gottfried Schulz, Plan und Profil title cartouche from Plan von der Leitung des Roehrwassers vom Berthelsdorfer Territorio nach Herrnhuth. 1778. Fig. 2.2: Johann Gottfried Schulz, landscape vignette title cartouche from Plan von der Leitung des Roehrwassers vom Berthelsdorfer Territorio nach Herrnhuth. 1788.

50 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

Latrobe’s watercolors from these years likely included nature sketches—produced during regional travel and from replicating prints—and work in the service of his architecture and design education, including renderings, plats, and specifications. Evidence of images drawn from Latrobe’s Virginian oeuvre, but featuring European subjects and sites, alongside comparison images from Moravian friendship books (Stammbücher), can tell us much more about what he saw and produced while a student. The Tollenstein, in the Mountains of Bohemia, included in An Essay on Landscape, is a repainting of an earlier scene produced in Germany [Fig. 2.3].¤‡ A large, striated rocky outcropping in the foreground attracts the eye, though it is soon overshadowed by the extensive mountains beyond. Sky and mountains are barely distinct from one another, o∑ering an undulating cadence merging rolling hills and hazy clouds, which Latrobe also describes, noting, “All the Valley was a sea of Clouds that were in motion, ascending the steep Defiles.”¤° At right, a jagged mountaintop breaks up this organic flow.

Closer inspection reveals that the shape at its peak is a ruined castle, which Latrobe describes as sitting atop “a bare and craggy cli∑ ” in contrast to the “deep purple summits of the ridge, clothed in silver pine” behind.¤· He bases this contrast between barren and fertile land on the unsavory history of the castle. Latrobe dramatically recounts his expedition to the site. Touring the mountains with “Young Count George Einsiedel of Reibersdorf,” Latrobe attests that he painted the view “as it appeared at the moment in which I first saw it.”‹‚ The two climbed the mountain before dawn, planning to view the sunrise over the mountaintops. Their timing was perfect: “scarce had we reached the summit . . . when, as by enchantment his golden beams struck an ancient Castle upon the top of the Mountain opposite to us.”‹⁄ Latrobe describes a carefully programmed picturesque experience. Although the landscape was rugged, it was familiar, and their journey was choreographed. Latrobe claims spontaneity and eyewitness accuracy while presenting a repainted watercolor of a site he

Latrobe in a European Context ·

experienced at least a decade earlier, to which he traveled with clear knowledge of what to expect during the encounter. Latrobe’s pairing of view and travelogue takes on the expected formula of picturesque travel accounts.‹¤ The narrative, which was written, or perhaps rewritten, in Virginia, was influenced by his years in Great Britain when landscape tourism was at a fever pitch. The incident recounted, however, took place in Central Europe, and demonstrates that Latrobe’s experiences in picturesque tourism began there. To fulfill this genre’s tropes, Latrobe massages his narrative. He plays up the sublime experience of the sunrise, and casually mentions “rambling over the ruins.” The real excitement comes when he and the Count go astray and spend “a most dreadfully hot day in traversing a wild and unknown country, without the least refreshment.”‹‹ Eventually, they are welcomed at a monastery with a “jovial reception” and finally reunite with their horses and servant some three days later.‹› The watercolor, meanwhile, displays itself as a staged visual product wherein composition and lighting heighten nature’s majesty. Latrobe’s picturesque account is corroborated by other discussions of student activities at the Moravian schools and in the circle of Schachmann. Indeed, Schachmann’s published book containing images of his estate contained a view of the same rocky outcropping, though from a di∑erent perspective [Fig. 2.4].‹fi Schachmann’s image shows a group of five elite men, accompanied variously by dogs, rifles, walking sticks, and sketching paper. These figures consume the picturesque destination just as Latrobe described fifteen years later. Within this touring culture, Latrobe learned to enjoy natural excursions, accompanied with cultural activities, such as visiting ruins and observing local populations. Once in London, he continued to tour the countryside. Evidence suggests he did so with watercolors in hand. By the time he left for Virginia, these activities were lifelong habits of interacting with, and thinking about, the surrounding world. His experience of travel was closely linked to watercolor painting.

Fig. 2.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe. The Tollenstein, in the Mountains of Bohemia from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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For Latrobe and his fellow students, watercolor was also a means of evaluating and expressing relationships. Moravians were frequently on the move, generally lived in communal housing, and owned few possessions. This lifestyle put a premium on portable mementoes. One of the frequent methods by which students of Latrobe’s period expressed their friendships was in the form of verses, watercolors, or simple autographs recorded in pocket-sized books, now known as Stammbücher. One example, which captures the emotional apex of such works, is found in the Stammbücher of Johann David Cranz, begun in 1784. In the grisaille study Amicis, a young boy sits on a commemorative monument to friendship, his walking stick in hand [Fig. 2.5]. In the distance, two others descend a winding road. The seated classmate, perhaps Johann Christian Quandt, the scene’s likely watercolorist, is shown left behind, since he

Fig. 2.4: Unknown, Der Todtenstein [ca. 1780]. Title page image in Karl von Schachmann, Beobachtungen Überdas Gebirge bey Königshain (Dresden 1780).

52 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

was too young to relocate with his friends to Barby.‹fl The poignant sketch, through its use of the monument and monochrome palette, focuses on the grief of friendship torn apart, and was painted as a memento by one young teen for another. Perhaps it played a comforting role, enabling its artist to express his friendship with this parting gift. These works were trade items, advertising a∑ections and highlighting the value of friendship. Within the Moravian system, age- and gender-based peers were family surrogates. Separation from these dear friends would leave a young companion truly bereft. While this example is especially demonstrative, such complex and individualized motifs are exceptional. Instead, a landscape, a study of a building, or a decorative flourish were more commonly used to mark a∑ections. Such images documented a relationship, reminding the possessor of their friend, but they could also be reminders of distance and loss. Rendering Transition After Latrobe returned to England, he lived with his parents in London. He completed presentation drawings for ongoing construction projects at two Moravian communities. These drawings have long been known and upheld as the first records

Fig. 2.5: Unknown [Quandt?], Amicis from the Stammbuch of Johann David Cranz, ca. 1784–1797.

of Latrobe’s design experience, but their origin is more complicated. Benjamin Latrobe’s involvement with these construction projects is well documented, but his son’s only known participation is the contribution of these drawings.‹‡ The largest number of sheets of drawings are related to a new community—first called Droylsden (also written Droilsden), and eventually named Fairfield—that was under construction in the province of Manchester.‹° Latrobe also completed drawings for the new Oeconomy [Economy] House and the new Widows’ House at Fulneck. These drawings are split between the Unitätsarchiv and the Moravian House in London, holding locations that indicate the o≈cial nature of the drawings and the reason for their preservation. These images stem from a transitional period, as Latrobe was severing his Moravian a≈liation. Accordingly, they should be understood both as the final evidence about his life and education in Central Europe and the first material concerning his London residence. Although they do not yet demonstrate a sophisticated and professional hand, the sheets reveal Latrobe’s debt to his teacher and his interest in using Schulz’s visual techniques to engage and attract the viewer. They are thus also transitional works in that they visually represent Latrobe’s incremental step in rendering from student to practitioner. There is no evidence that he designed the structures depicted, solely that he created the presentation drawings based on plans and specifications previously determined within the communities. Je∑rey Cohen and Charles Brownell have suggested that these drawings were intended for informational display within the community.‹· Alternatively, they might have documented the construction plans for central Church authorities—an interpretation supported by the fact that the drawings show no indications of wear from display or use during construction. There are fifteen extant sheets of Fairfield drawings. Two sheets, retained in the Unitätsarchiv, refer to the site as the “new Congregation Place at Droilsden,” while the remaining thirteen, held in the Moravian House in London, use the final name of Fairfield. Community records for Duckenfield

Fig. 2.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Plan of the new Cong. Place at Droilsden, 1784.

Fig 2.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den], 1784.

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indicate that the name of “Fairfield” was selected in March 1784, and key decisions about Fairfield’s layout, such as siting the principle buildings, took place in June.›‚ Given the consistent layout in both sets of drawings, Latrobe would have completed these sheets after his father’s participation in these decisions, which included laying the foundation stones for the “three capital Buildings”: the Congregation House, the Single Sisters’ House, and the Single Brothers’ house.›⁄ Thus, while two sets of Latrobe’s drawings of this community exist, they all should be dated to after June 1784.›¤ Space does not allow for a consideration of all fifteen sheets here, nor are they all graphically striking. This discussion will be limited to the five sheets containing watercolor vignettes with pertinent comparative visual elements or subject matter for Latrobe’s later oeuvre. Significantly, Latrobe’s signature on each sheet is located tightly next to or on the watercolor vignettes and cartouches, linking his name to these moreso than to the architectural designs and perhaps acknowledging his work as draughtsman rather than architect.

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Plan of the new Cong[gregation] Place at Droilsden [Fig. 2.6] presents the floor plans of the property’s principal buildings along with the street grid, landscape, and cemetery plans. Two meticulous watercolor and ink details at top focus the viewer’s eye on the “Single Sisters’ House” and on a caption. Plans Relative to the new Congn [Congregation]. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den] pairs two important sets of information about the site’s development [Fig. 2.7]. On the sheet’s right half, Latrobe drew a plat of the estate, showing its position relative to adjacent roads and properties [Fig. 2.8]. At left, he laid out the elevations of key buildings, including the Congregation House, Congregation Inn, Congregation Shop, and “B. Handby’s Proposed House and Workshop” [Fig. 2.9]. The drawing also includes the ground plan of the Congregation House. The caption divides the two halves of the sheet, o∑ering distinct titles for both. Plan of the new Cong. Place at Droilsden is arranged vertically, its lower two-thirds packed with visual and verbal information

Fig. 2.8: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, plat detail, Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den], 1784.

Fig. 2.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, elevations detail, Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den], 1784.

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about the buildings and the landscape. Each feature is drafted precisely. Rooms are marked with alphabetical letters to be decoded using the appropriate columns of “keys” to the left and right. These plans employ the abstract precision of architectural drawing, communicating essential elements of space and architectural description. Understanding the forms they represent requires the viewer to look analytically, decoding patterns, lines, and voids to distinguish gardens from interior walls and stairs from courtyards. At the top of the page, this technical viewing mode is replaced by interaction and illusion reminiscent of Schulz’s visual technique. At left is a trompe l’oeil rendering of an additional sheet of drawings containing the front elevation of the Single Sisters’ House, along with its second and third floor plans, and the accompanying key to its interior spaces [Fig. 2.10]. The information in the rendering is germane to the rest of the drawing. Nonetheless, it surprises the viewer because it presents the illusion of an additional sheet of paper overlaid on top of the drafting paper. Latrobe rendered a single pin, projecting at an angle and casting a dark shadow across the drawing. Two thin lines represent a taut string suspending the sheet like a banner. The illusion is furthered by the apparent curl of both edges—the right side unfurling gently toward the viewer, as if pushed by a gentle breeze, the left side rolled backward, with the grace of an ionic capital. To negotiate the illusion, the viewer must leave the analytical mode elicited throughout the rest of the sheet. The impulse is to straighten the banner’s edges and to peak at details beneath. Neither action is possible, of course, but the implied interactivity engages viewers and makes this part of the plan more enjoyable than the technical drawings. The title cartouche functions similarly [Fig. 2.11]. The title is written on a rectangular panel, seemingly carved into a block of marble, and a large urn sits slightly o∑-center on this block. The urn is decorated with rams’ heads on its four faces, each with graceful, curling horns. Ivy and branches grow on the block, the urn, and the surrounding ground. This elaborate caption is proudly signed “B H la Trobe,” reflecting the youth’s self-promotional interests and distinguishing the artist from his father. Like the trompe l’oeil banner, this vignette brings material presence and three-dimensionality to an otherwise flat, abstract scene.

Fig. 2.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, trompe l’oeil detail, Plan of the new Cong. Place at Droilsden, 1784. Fig. 2.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, title cartouche detail, Plan of the new Cong. Place at Droilsden, 1784.

58 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

The grid of lines and writing below represents a community, soon to be constructed in stones, plants, and possessions, all present in the image. The vignette o∑ers a cautionary vanitas, communicated through the triumph of nature over ruins, appropriate to the strict faith community. Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den] employs similar tools to engage the viewer, enhanced further by arranging the sheet with multiple orientations, necessitating the active participation of the viewer. The estate plan faces the sheet’s short end. By contrast, the elevations for the significant buildings are all oriented toward the long edge. Shifting from plan to elevation requires the viewer’s eye to readjust from a sweeping aerial

view, with an overall sense of the community’s scale and significance, to the precision of facade elevations. A similar shift occurs in the lowest register as the viewer encounters the front of the Congregation House suspended above the plan of its principal floor. Latrobe plays with the viewer’s perspective one final time in the title caption, in which he presents a view from ground level of two blocks of stone covered in lush foliage and flowers. Having initially examined the sheet from an aerial perspective, the viewer now assumes a bug’s-eye view. The title is presented in block capitals as if chiseled by an ancient hand onto marble slabs. Exuberant plant life overshadows the text, while the low-lying marble block of the “Ground Plan” title appears to have fallen from a ruined frieze. Among the drawings in the Moravian Church House in London, three contain graphic elements in watercolor. The first is the sheet labeled “No. 1,” a second version of the ground plan of the community, titled No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire [Fig. 2.12]. Unlike Plan of the new Congn. Place at Droilsden, it does not include labels and captions, except for numeric designations of the buildings represented on other sheets. It o∑ers only the blocked-in and shaded footprints of the planned buildings.›‹ Rare among Latrobe’s works, this sheet’s title cartouche displays text written in script and sloppily inserted. The word “Lancashire” spills o∑ the designated text field, the word “Fairfield” is hyphenated and spread across two lines, and the word “plan” is reduced to a “p.,” seemingly due to spacing issues. The signature “B. H. la Trobe f[ecit]” spills over the framing lines. Unlike the Classicized motifs of the drawings in the Unitätsarchiv, the drawings in London feature a rustic rural motif, fitting with the small village’s site. Watercolor details are limited to small corners of the sheets and contain no information essential to the drawings. In No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield, the title vignette in the sheet’s upper right corner is a picturesque nature scene [Fig. 2.13]. The title is

Fig. 2.12: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire, 1784.

Latrobe in a European Context ·

written across a rocky slab, seemingly angled against another stone and surrounded by a grassy field, which is bounded by dense trees and foliage. A tree arches its graceful profile to partially frame the image, while tall grasses similarly border the left. In color palette, brushstrokes, and general style, this vignette closely resembles the picturesque style employed by Fruau∑ and other watercolorists in the Central European Moravian context.

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No. 11: The C.[ongregation] Shop o∑ers the second surviving watercolor vignette [Fig. 2.14]. The bottom of the sheet presents the shop’s ground and first floor plans. Turned at a ninetydegree angle from those plans and positioned across the sheet’s top is the shop’s facade, as it would appear on East Street. A grayscale vignette is inserted into the right corner of the elevation. It enlivens the sheet by showing two men working industriously to load large barrels of goods onto a cart bed,

Fig. 2.13: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, title cartouche detail, No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire, 1784.

Fig 2.14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, vignette detail, No. 11: The C.[ongregation] Shop, 1784. Fig. 2.15: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, vignette detail, No. 12: C[ongregation] Inn, 1784.

Latrobe in a European Context ·

using a pulley hung from the building’s corner to lift and position the barrels. Two harnessed donkeys wait impatiently. Sheet No. 12: C[ongregation] Inn [Fig. 2.15] is arranged similarly to No. 11. The bottom of the sheet again features ground and first floor plans with two elevations above. Due to its corner lot, there are elevations from both Ninth and Droylesdon Streets.›› Squeezed into the uppermost section of the sheet is the small elevation of the accompanying stable, which was inserted here after being awkwardly excised from the Droylesdon Street elevation below. A covered passageway connects the inn to the stable, opening into the central courtyard beyond. Once again, a vignette enlivens the scene, this time filling in this passageway. It shows the barrel vault inaccurately, angling o∑ into the distance in a dark shadow. But it gives a realistic-seeming glimpse into the dark passage. An idle cart, the primary detail noticed on first inspection of the sheet, fills the passageway. Shown from behind, this two-wheeled farm cart, identical to the one being loaded with barrels earlier in the papers, rests with team poles hitting the ground. These watercolor additions to the London set of Fairfield drawings are modest. Nevertheless, their rural focus sets an enjoyable tone, fitting for the character of the small country village represented. These watercolors adhere closely to the Moravian watercolors with which Latrobe was familiar, thus o∑ering an understanding of his mindset and abilities, and being closely aligned with Moravian practices. A final example from Latrobe’s Moravian period can be found in the pair of sheets presenting the new Boy’s Economy House under construction at Fulneck. These two sheets o∑er the most skilled watercolor renderings attributed to Latrobe from this period. A single small presentation sheet in the Unitätsarchiv, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, henceforth Oeconomy House Fulneck, is laid out carefully [Fig. 2.16]. The left edge features three floorplans arranged in a column. Along the bottom right are two sections, appropriately cut along perpendicular lines so the interior space is clear. Two elevations fill the sheet’s upper right-hand section. Finally, a rendering of the house in perspective gives a better sense of the building’s appearance. This sheet has accurately been described as having general, rather than specific, detail: “even the perspective is not far advanced beyond the

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level of drawing imbibed by non-architects under the later tutelage of Reichel at Nazareth Hall.” A title vignette has received more positive consideration, with the note “there is an intentness about the sheet that seems to betray Latrobe’s pride in his tasks of both design and presentation” [Fig. 2.17].›fi The elevations, plans, and sections in the Moravian Church House collection are spread across three sheets, of which only Oeconomy House Fulneck is germane here as it alone includes a watercolor vignette [Fig. 2.18]. Positioned in the upper right of the sheet, the title vignette gives structure to its setting, featuring a rustic view from a hilltop [Fig. 2.19]. In the distance, the Fulneck community spreads out along a climbing slope. Latrobe renders his boyhood village bathed in light, with an idyllic air. Surrounding Fulneck is farmland, which eventually gives way to a wooded foreground that is dominated by a monumental architectural feature. A square pier rises to the height of adjacent trees. A square cutout permits the viewer to peer toward the hillside beyond. Along the surface of the massive square, a tablet displays the sheet’s title in Latrobe’s script. A massive urn caps the pier. Ivy and the overgrowth of plants cascade from the urn and the pier’s corner, with loosely rendered trees and foliage surrounding. The odd rectangular pier with its peephole hints at Latrobe’s predilection for radical neoclassical design, recalling the architectural fantasy of Schulz’s work and gesturing toward Latrobe’s mature British context. Oeconomy House Fulneck shows back and side elevations of the structure, along with sections along its length and width, an isometric view of its front and side, and its three floor plans. The planned communal residence included a workshop, with spaces for weaving and spinning, along with large areas for sleeping and eating. The building provided for the future of the Moravian community by fostering harmonious living and productive activities for its youthful inhabitants. Appropriately, Latrobe pivots this sheet around a central vignette that sets an emotional tone, rather than playing a perspectival or visual trick. His vignette highlights the building’s role in raising sensitive and thoughtful young men. At the center stands a boy of between approximately seven and ten years of age [Fig. 2.17]. His bent right arm rests on a marble pedestal and his left hand holds a swag draped around the pedestal. The boy’s hair is long, tied neatly behind his

62 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

neck. He has removed a hat, which rests at the pedestal’s base. The pedestal displays the text “Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck,” written in simple print, rather than in the block capital letters displayed in other vignettes. The pedestal is surrounded by lush foliage. A tree frames the vignette at right, its trunk bracing the boy’s back, its boughs stooping to shade and protect his head. The vignette ignores realistic scale—the tree is diminutive relative to the boy. Conversely, the plants at the pedestal’s base are unnaturally large. The vignette adheres to the common eighteenth-century theme of the idealized human life in harmony with nature, here seen through a boy’s relationship with a tree, and it introduces another theme: reading. At first glance, the pedestal appears empty but it actually supports an open book. The

young boy does not merely lean his arm on the pedestal as a formal conceit; instead, he leans forward to read. A careful viewer notes the boy’s single-minded focus on the text. What was Latrobe’s intended e∑ect in focusing on a young boy absorbed in reading, while leaning on a pedestal, amid a scene of nature? Several themes appear relevant both to the architectural subject and to ideas common in Latrobe’s later Virginian watercolors. Most pertinent is the idea that the economy house is designed to cultivate the minds and souls of Fulneck’s youths, who will receive the educational foundations for their lives there. In showing a boy absorbed in reading, Latrobe implies the expected success of the building, underlining its purpose and impact. The connection between this underlying content and the structure itself is evident in the

Latrobe in a European Context ·

sheet’s graphic form. The isometric drawing of the structure recedes along a perspectival line directing the viewer toward the vignette. Likewise, the building’s beautifully rendered interior sections, which focus on the play of light, shadow, and empty space, are enlivened as the viewer imagines the spaces filled by this boy and his peers. The viewer begins implicitly to understand how this structure, with its designated spaces and minimal decoration, will promote education. The interpretation can be pushed further to identify themes of importance to Latrobe’s values beyond Fulneck. This young boy is being trained by nature and education to take on a more ambitious adult role foretold by his juxtaposition with the pedestal. The image posits the boy’s potential to one day merit a place on the pedestal. The boy’s pose recalls many a grand state portrait where one arm is bent to hold a book or shield, the other arm extended, perhaps in declamation. Here, the boy has not gained such authority. He is absorbing the words of others, draping the pedestal, instead of himself, with a swag. He is portrayed as meditative and inwardly focused rather than as action-based and heroic. While the vignette’s educational priorities fit closely with those of the Moravian Church, the promise of earthly heroic potential would fall outside Church priorities. Appropriately, therefore, Latrobe’s vignette places the book, not the boy, on the pedestal. But, the image also allows the viewer to imagine a future wherein the adult, educated man might seek the hero’s pedestal. When Latrobe completed the Fulneck and Fairfield drawings, he was no longer an active member of the Brethren, though he had not fully severed his ties. This watercolor suggests his skill both at adhering to imagery that would be acceptable within the Church, while layering in other, more expansive, possibilities. Latrobe’s separation from the Moravian Church was gradual but was the catalyst both for his return to London on August 28, 1783, and for much of the nature of his life in England. The chronology and rationale for his abandonment of the United Brethren has been incompletely explored, though records may well exist at Barby or Niesky to explain it more fully.›fl Church records indicate divisions over the intellectual permissiveness of pedagogy during the interval when he attended Barby. Several of the young ministers-in-training began to raise questions that fell outside of

Fig. 2.16: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 1784.

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permitted bounds. August Gottlieb Spangenberg, a significant Church leader, was called in to investigate in March 1783. His report singled out Latrobe as an instigator, due to “doubt and disbelief concerning the truth of evangelical teaching.” Spangenberg concluded that Latrobe’s “continued stay here at the seminary seems very questionable and would cause a great deal of damage.”›‡ Later in life, Latrobe described his faith issues as revolving around ambivalence in judging one Protestant set of beliefs as truer than any other.›° As he settled into life in London, Latrobe’s di∑erences extended beyond doctrinal questions. He enjoyed musical performances and may have toyed with being a professional musician (a direction pursued by Christian, but within the confines of Moravian belief ). He socialized extensively beyond the Moravian community, gradually building connections. In 1789, for example, he became a member of the Society of Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce.›·

Fig. 2.17: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, title vignette detail, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 1784.

Nevertheless, Latrobe continued to live with his parents until his father died in December 1786. Though outside of the accepted faith circle, he still received his father’s blessings and held vigil with other family members and visiting faith leaders when his father died.fi‚ Although still securely within the family circle, he was not welcomed as a member of the Brethren when he visited Moravian communities, but rather was treated as an outsider guest.fi⁄ It was not until his first marriage, to Lydia Sellon Latrobe on February 27, 1790, that he finally abandoned the Moravian circle, leaving behind his many personal, professional, and intellectual connections within the Church. Thus, at least between 1783 and 1790, Latrobe lived in between the Moravian community and mainstream London society. As a bachelor, he maintained a lifestyle su≈ciently close to Moravian ideals to be acceptable to his family. Then, Latrobe lived in London for only five years after his marriage. Between 1790 and November 1793, he was absorbed in his new marriage, the births of two children, and the work of launching his architectural practice, on which his family’s livelihood would depend. Catastrophically, Lydia died in childbirth, along with the couple’s third child, a double loss that plunged Latrobe into dark years of depression, during which he failed to work and fell into bankruptcy. This chronology allows us to realize that while Latrobe refocused his social orbit beyond the Brethren, he never fully joined secular London society. The break between his “Moravian” and “British” years is murky at best. A British(?) Artist Latrobe’s watercolor oeuvre from his British residence has received scant attention. In these years, he produced architectural and engineering renderings, which are his bestknown British scenes. He also made tourist watercolors while traveling around the countryside, just as he had done in Central Europe. Concerning these years, Latrobe comments in his journals: “a long residence in a City from which I only occasionally escaped into the open air, and the varied prospects of the country—confined my pencil almost entirely to the labors of my profession.”fi¤ Though he testifies that he set aside his e∑orts at watercolor while in London, the professional “labors” of eighteenth-century architecture and engineering relied greatly on drawing and watercolor. Architects Fig. 2.18: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 1784. Fig. 2.19: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, title vignette detail, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 1784.

Latrobe in a European Context ·

and engineers were the era’s chief topographical artists and frequently rendered landscapes and produced maps. Antiquarian studies and renderings of buildings in perspective within presentation drawings were often exhibited and were vital to client-architect relationships. Skill in watercolor was so significant that the architectural renderer was sometimes a distinct professional within the architecture studio—as was Joseph Gandy (1771– 1843) in Sir John Soane’s (1753–1837) atelier. Many of Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors fused his “professional” and “amateur” use of the medium, blending architectural rendering, for example, with landscape watercolor, suggesting he may have blurred these practices. As with the Fairfield and Fulneck drawings, I will focus on assessing his watercolors outside of a single vocational context.

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View of Hammerwood Lodge from the Southeast, henceforth View of Hammerwood Lodge, completed in 1791 or 1792, shows the ambitious country home/hunting lodge Latrobe designed for John Sperling (1763–1851) and is a good specimen for assessing the changes in Latrobe’s watercolor style during his years in London [Fig. 2.20]. It exhibits his mastery in staging a scene, his facile use of landscape and architectural form to communicate stylistic concerns, and his investment in utilizing specific Classical references to enhance content. Hammerwood Lodge occupies the middleground, its bulk receding from the viewer, and enhanced by a foreground lawn and the backdrop of blue sky and mountains. Light bathes the house, casting dramatic shadows from its entrance portico across the facade. Sperling stands beneath the portico,

Fig. 2.20: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Hammerwood Lodge from the Southeast, 1791 or 1792.

Latrobe in a European Context ·

accompanied by his hunting dog and with gun in hand. The house is a solid, severe neoclassical block, with wings stretching in arcades in either direction, promising a light and airy interior, uplifted by country vistas. These arcades both end in solid Doric temple facades, adding to the aspirational dignity and rustic appearance of the house. The use of the primitive Doric, coupled with the close relationship of the house to its natural environment, hints at the building’s promotion of an Arcadian lifestyle. In the foreground, underneath a generous shade tree, Harriet Sperling sits with three children at her knee. Partially concealed by the shade and wearing a fashionable hat, she returns the viewer’s gaze. Her cultured appearance communicates that this house of rural pleasures can foster happy domestic life. Latrobe further enhances this formal message with the panels that are above the entrance doors to the pavilions, though the panels are barely visible to the uninformed viewer of the rendering. Completed in Coade Stone and inserted above the doorways, the panels are still extant and correspond closely to those in the view [Figs. 2.21–22].fi‹ Selected from among the Coade Stone catalog o∑erings, these frieze

Fig. 2.21: East Temple Façade (with Coade Stone panel visible above the door), Hammerwood Lodge.

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panels present scenes of Dionysian revelry in the woods, assembling figures adapted from the Borghese Vase, likely as represented by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) [Fig. 2.23] and then interpreted in relief by the sculptor John Bacon (1740–1799) and manufacturer Eleanor Coade (1733–1821) [Figs. 2.24–25].fi› The neoclassical adaptation of these figures and their integration into Latrobe’s Classicized vision for his house, as captured in View of Hammerwood Lodge, communicate a great deal about the conceptual and stylistic values to which he adhered at this early juncture in his career as an architect and renderer. In the panel over the east pavilion, Dionysus stands in contrapposto at left, his arm embracing Ariadne. She poses as his mirror image and strums a lyre, a hunting dog at her feet. Dionysus and Ariadne sway in a gentle dance. Four other figures join in the revelry. A satyr, with an animal pelt draped over one arm and a flute to his mouth, skips on one foot. To his right, a muscular man stoops to support a stumbling friend, wrapping a strong arm around his torso. Undeterred, the faltering reveler reaches for a drinking cup on the ground. At far right, a beguiling woman dances, her right hand sweeping in

Fig. 2.22: East Coade Stone Panel, Hammerwood Lodge.

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front of her torso, while her left gestures toward the woods. Her translucent robes swirl around her. On the west pavilion relief, five figures join in a sylvan dance, with three female figures tempting two satyrs. At left, a woman, slightly larger than the others, lifts a drinking cup and o∑ers it to her companions, while supporting a large amphora on her hip. The scene centers around tensions among the other four figures. Immediately to the right of the wine-bearer stands a satyr, his back to the viewer. Nude except for an animal pelt, he plays a pronged flute with both hands, while staring across the relief at three dancing figures.

Next are an ambiguous pair—a woman has her back to a man. Maybe this is a flirtatious dance move, or maybe she is shunning him. A sling around her shoulder recalls the hunter’s quiver, and suggests a connection to Artemis, or to the story of Apollo and Daphne, as much as it evokes a Dionysian revelry. Adjacent to this woman is a nude male, his body only concealed by her flowing robes and an animal pelt tossed over his shoulder. He grasps at her robes with both hands; his head is tossed back and his splayed legs are tense, reminiscent of the Barberini Faun. At far right, a third woman engages in a sprightly dance, back to the viewer, one

Fig. 2.23: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Borghese Vase. Vasi, Candelabri. . . . ed Antichi (Rome, 1778).

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hand grasping the edge of her robes, the other blithely shaking a tambourine overhead. She glances back toward the flute-playing satyr. Although the reliefs indicate revelry and sensuous pleasure, this should be seen in counterpoint with the building’s overall program, blending neoclassical, Arcadian, and rural landscape themes with domestic pleasures. Of the Classical pantheon, Dionysus best models a life close to nature. Likewise, his marriage to Ariadne after her abandonment by Theseus is one of Greek mythology’s rare tales of conjugal bliss. This relief ’s pairing of Ariadne and Dionysus may suggest marriage’s triumph as the highest and most enduring of life’s earthly pleasures. As the other figures twist and turn in a counterpoint rhythm, Dionysus and Ariadne embody sedate, perfectly matched harmony. While the relief suggests the country home’s pleasures—music, dancing, nature, drinking, and the hunt—it couples these with domestic delights. This message is especially strong in the Coade Stone relief adaptations of the Borghese Vase. Hammerwood’s reliefs contain glimpses of nudity and female figures in clinging drapery, which appear somewhat risqué until juxtaposed with the sensuous musculature and teasing nudity of the originals. The figural reinterpretations in the reliefs soften and mute their sexual charge, a shift respecting social mores for the domestic context. These reliefs add further context to the content conveyed in View of Hammerwood Lodge. The neoclassical architecture and the view’s implicit Arcadian allusions imply a Classical ethos. While this watercolor would not be characterized as neoclassical, Classical culture was so present in contemporary British society that its contribution to visual content would have been virtually implicit to viewers and inseparable from the British family ideals present within the view. The husband stands protectively before the home—both guardian and provider for the family. The wife and children form a demure, contented group, displayed like the house

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as signifiers of Sperling’s prosperity, success, and happiness. Latrobe’s view allows both husband and wife to see themselves in idealized roles, with emphasis placed on reinforcing the husband’s imaginative vision of himself as the family’s masculine protector. Classical messaging enables this sophisticated set of ideas and ideals to be communicated among artist, patron, and viewer. This is consonant with the powerful use of architectural rendering established in Britain by the 1790s. As Latrobe increased his facile ability to merge architectural design with social and moral messages communicated through a view’s visual style, he exhibited skills common to other expert architectural renderers, including Gandy, George Hadfield (1763–1826) (in the architectural firm of John Wyatt), and Joseph William Mallord Turner (1775–1851)

Figs. 2.24–25: John Bacon and Eleanor Coade [att.], Bacchanalian Figures from the borghesean Vase from Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory, Coade’s Lithodipyra, or, Artificial Stone Manufactory: for all kind of statues, capitals, vases, tombs, coats of arms, & architectural ornaments, &c, &c (Lambeth and London: 1784).

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(whose career began as a renderer). All three of these watercolorists produced resonant images, using form in a manner comparable to that which is employed in this view. Three years after creating View of Hammerwood Lodge, and a few months before his departure for Virginia, Latrobe completed a watercolor view of East Grinstead [Fig. 2.26].fifi This previously unknown image, which was brought to my attention in the final weeks of editing this book, presents a view of a large cart climbing up an incline, with a small village at right and a large number of figures out walking about the town. The cart, which is draped in a cloth, is being accompanied by two men in long coats and hats. Their bodies strain to climb up the hill, emphasizing the imposing vertical ascent that the heavily laden cart faces. The cart may be carrying stone for a construction site up the hill that is hidden from view.fifl Somewhat atypical of Latrobe’s later work in watercolor, this view presents a genre scene that is closely akin to similar scenes in the Moravian watercolor oeuvre.fi‡ Significantly, the watercolor also presents clear evidence that at least some of Latrobe’s sketchbook watercolors from his

years in Britain survive, with others perhaps still unknown and held in private collections. Given the association of this image with East Grinstead, it is possible that the watercolor was preserved in collections related to the Hammerwood commission, perhaps alongside View of Hammerwood Lodge. Since additional context is currently lacking for the image, I have included it here alongside the Hammerwood images, though it is important to also consider its relevance as a picturesque traveler’s scene and a genre view. Another significant type of watercolor Latrobe undoubtedly produced during his London residence—topographical views—are often related to presentation watercolors. He produced many such views in Virginia, several of which are discussed in detail later in this book. Unfortunately, no known examples survive from his London years, nor do any images survive from later in his life showing European sites. Despite the absence of these examples, the proliferation of such views in his subsequent watercolor oeuvre, as well as his brother Christian’s completion of topographical watercolors during travels to South Africa, points to Latrobe’s likely

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creation of topographical imagery while in London.fi° Since topographical views were frequently produced by architects and military engineers, it is relevant that some have asserted that Latrobe received training in military engineering in Germany once he abandoned his plan to join the Moravian ministry.fi· Much of his work during his years in the firm of Samuel Pepys Cockerell (1753–1827) is known to have fallen within the modern practice of engineering, as with his earlier work with John Smeaton (1724–1792).fl‚ Latrobe likely trained in creating topographical views across this series of contexts. Such watercolors served a broad array of purposes and were encountered by artists and professionals in several di∑erent types of spaces. Issued as maps, printed as plates in books, or—as watercolor became a significant genre in the 1790s—exhibited as ambitious art objects, these views were considered useful and potent in various contexts. Latrobe employed topographical skills to render di∑erent elements he found interesting, such as individual buildings or ruins in a landscape. View of Hammerwood Lodge, for example, includes the spatial context for an architectural commission. At other times, such images might capture a city or settlement’s profile, essentially rendering the character of a place. Both kinds of images appear regularly within Latrobe’s watercolor oeuvre from 1795 to 1799. Topographical scenes held a special place within the development of exhibition watercolors and were likely of particular interest to Latrobe. In his writings and imagery, Latrobe demonstrated a strong commitment to the accurate representation of landscapes, with minimal changes for aesthetic reasons, content, or fancy. However, as he explicitly states in An Essay on Landscape, he was aware that landscape scenes could still manipulate and direct the viewer through techniques such as selection and framing. Scholars have only recently begun to give critical attention to topographical painting as an artistic genre beyond its accepted vocational/ professional purpose. Despite such views’ prosaic accuracy, topographical artists often succeeded in imbuing landscapes with diverse interpretive meanings, in modest parallel to grand manner painting. From contemporary works such as Paul Sandby’s A View of Vinters at Boxley, Kent, with Mr. Whatman’s Turkey Paper Mills (Vinters and Turkey Mill), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1794, Latrobe could have

Fig. 2.26: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of East Grinstead, September 1795.

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studied valuable examples for combining realistic topographical watercolor with ambitious content [Fig. 2.27].fl⁄ For Latrobe, trained in the techniques needed to produce both accurate and visually compelling topographical views, and also drawn to ambitious content, such an image would have modeled an appealing new watercolor paradigm. Sandby’s somewhat antiquated use of gouache instead of transparent watercolor might also have a∑orded the younger Latrobe a space of critique that could have inspired, rather than suppressed, his own aspirations in watercolor. Other topographical works by British contemporaries would have modeled how watercolors made within the context of architectural commissions could elicit significant aesthetic and intellectual engagement. Thomas Sandby, brother and collaborator of Paul, made watercolors that combined topographical rendering and architectural design of a type that may well have inspired Latrobe. An excellent example of such work is View of Boxhill from Norbury Park, Surrey, henceforth View of Boxhill, which dates to 1775 [Fig. 2.28]. When William Lock commissioned Sandby’s design of a house on his Norbury Park property, the architect produced not only a plan and elevation, but also a series of views “from several windows” of the house to illustrate the relationship between house and landscape.fl¤ View of Boxhill shows a panorama spread out over the property toward Boxhill, a local landmark. Because of the visual techniques it uses to engage viewer and site, this watercolor merits further examination. A manicured lawn spreads across the foreground, its green monotony broken by bunched groupings of livestock and figures. The largest group presents three gentlemen on horseback, two in conversation with a fourth man standing before them, holding a walking stick, and gesturing toward Boxhill. A man and woman in an open carriage accompany the equestrians. All are well dressed, perhaps modeling the ideal elite visitor to Lock’s planned estate. Farther in the background, two men turn their backs to the viewer, both contemplating the scenic view. One is seated, his profile barely visible above the lawn’s grassy knoll. His companion leans on a walking stick. Farther o∑ in the middleground, a herd of deer rest on the lawn, while another bounds toward them from the right. An idyllic view of clumped trees, expansive lawns, and the gently

Fig. 2.27: Paul Sandby, A View of Vinters at Boxley, Kent, with Mr. Whatman’s Turkey Paper Mills (Vinters and Turkey Mill), 1794. Fig. 2.28: Thomas Sandby, View of Boxhill from Norbury Park, Surrey, 1775.

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rolling profile of Boxhill and its neighboring peaks lies beyond these figures while, in the left foreground, an old growth of trees climbs toward the top of the sheet. The grove’s gnarled trunks and lush leaves project the dignity of age and cast a deep, protective shadow on the lawn. With the exception of this leafy intrusion, the view’s upper two-thirds present pale blue sky, with gently di∑used sunlight and picturesque groupings of flu∑y, white clouds. View of Boxhill was not intended for exhibition. Rather, its intended viewers were prospective patrons. The scene surveyed is, thus, private. Although Boxhill and some of the visible land did not belong to Lock, this particular vista did. Indeed, although the scene captures the stunning Boxhill panorama as if en plein air, Sandby specifically captures the view from within a domestic interior. This reinforces a sense of security in both the social fixity and natural timelessness of the scene. Sandby thus reinforces his patrons’ predilections and piques their desire for a house that would a∑ord them this perfect vista. In so doing, the image models a visual language adroitly marrying architecture, landscape, and topography. Though Latrobe may not have seen this watercolor, it is exemplary of a type of image created and circulated among elite architectural circles in London, and Latrobe surely learned both the aesthetic and the professional potential of such images. In creating a scene to provoke a viewer’s desire or reinforce social expectations, a skilled renderer could conjure a world in which a proposed building would belong and persuade viewers to share in this fantasy. Even after the new home’s construction, such views might serve to remind patrons of how to benefit from its calculated vistas. As considered later in this book, Latrobe employed precisely this set of techniques in the illustrated manuscripts he prepared for his architectural projects in Virginia, suggesting that he had absorbed such lessons. A significant third category of image relevant to Latrobe’s British work was tourist watercolors. Here, some evidence exists for the type of images that Latrobe produced during his travels in the British countryside. Latrobe includes three views of Kirkstall Abbey in An Essay on Landscape. As with the Tollenstein view, these images were painted in Virginia, while based on British originals.fl‹ Kirkstall Abbey is located outside of Leeds, a site Latrobe possibly visited while traveling

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to Fulneck and Fairfield, or, perhaps, on a separate hunting or view-seeking tour.fl› All three views of Kirkstall Abbey share a single sheet. At left is a view Latrobe called the Saxon stile of the West entrance of the abbey [Fig. 2.29]. At right is An exact view of the great East Window of the Abbey, which now leads into the Church [Fig. 2.30].flfi These two fragmentary building sections are rendered with a muted palette in hues of sepia and grey, interspersed with occasional ochre highlights. The larger central vignette, Kirkstall Abbey, is positioned within two nested circles that, like an oculus, o∑er the viewer a privileged glimpse of Kirkstall Abbey’s ruined profile against a blue sky [Fig. 2.31]. In the left foreground, a young man sits on a rock, pack on his back, walking stick in his hands, and dog at his feet. Appropriately, this figure models the meditative stance expected of the viewer. The pervasive grey-blue tones emphasize stillness, broken only by a large flock of birds, darting about the ruin. As Latrobe remarks in his description, a viewer cannot look on the ruins “without feeling a solemn melancholy, that is almost painful. All is now silent, excepting when the stillness of the damp air is interrupted by the cawing of a thousand Jays, who are now its only inhabitants.”flfl Kirkstall Abbey shows Latrobe’s mastery of the picturesque tourist watercolor and, further, his understanding of its possible impact through evoking sensations of melancholy. In his study of the abbey, Latrobe constructed both text and image to convey those sensations. The site prompts reflection on religious history, as well as on England’s social and political history. Its viewer may ponder the close ties of nature and spirituality, though Latrobe undercuts its spiritual heft by recounting the tale of the site’s founding with skepticism. The site for the abbey was selected when the “holy mother of God” appeared in a vision to a monk. Yet, Latrobe questions the monk’s motivations, since the Holy Mother’s “admirable taste” somehow led her to skillfully select the best land in the region for the Church.fl‡ Importantly, as part of Latrobe’s transitional years of separation from the Moravian Church, the content of this study criticizes the self-righteous nature of organized religion, specifically featuring its destructive impact on society, while meditating on a combination of spirituality, nature, and human transience. Beyond this personal association, the watercolor explores Latrobe’s interest in the profound relationship

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individuals develop with places. Beautiful places can motivate extreme human action, due to the desire to possess, inhabit, or enjoy them.fl° Latrobe’s Kirkstall Abbey images also suggest his engagement with the antiquarian tradition, which by Latrobe’s period had developed its own trope of tourist imagery associated with the exploration of architectural history, the history of landscapes, and the ruin. Latrobe’s attention to the “saxon style” window, as well as his “exact view” of the east window, would satisfy specialized antiquarian concerns about stylistic development, often associated with the transmission of ideas and development of civilizations. One well-known text o∑ering similar antiquarian motifs is Samuel and Nathaniel Buck’s Buck’s Antiquities, a book with which Latrobe may have been familiar.fl· In their introduction to the text, the authors asserts that their imagery has a “noble” and “meritorious” purpose because of its ability to unearth cultural origins that would otherwise disintegrate into oblivion.‡‚ The topographical plates within the books are thus seen as a form of cultural preservation. As in Latrobe’s commentary on Kirkstall Abbey, and consonant with the picturesque cult of the ruin, the authors also associate melancholy with British antiquarian views, noting: “there is something in ancient Ruins that fills the mind with contemplative melancholy; for . . . they point out to us a striking proof of the vanity of those who think their works will last forever.”‡⁄

Latrobe’s vignettes of Kirkstall Abbey can be appropriately compared to the image The East Prospect of Kirksted Abbey near Horncastle, in the County of Lincoln, contained in Buck’s Antiquities, which focuses on a similar style and historical period, and was drawn and engraved by Samuel Buck in 1726 [Fig. 2.32]. Centered on the remaining ruined fragment of the abbey, Buck’s view closely documents the architectural features of the ruin. Beyond strict documentation, it stages a dramatic contrast of light and shadow, piercing the abbey’s empty windows with beams of light that recall the structure’s spiritual purpose. Further, the plate emphasizes the supremacy of nature over human achievement. No figures appear in the view and the balance of the image is filled with specimen trees, grass, and picturesque clouds (although a more modern building appears close to the horizon). Even the ruin is overtaken by nature, as weeds grow from it and define its upper reaches as they blow in the wind.

Fig. 2.29: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Saxon stile of the West entrance, Kirkstall Abbey, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Fig. 2.30: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, An exact view of the great East Window of the Abbey, which now leads into the Church, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99. Fig. 2.31: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Kirkstall Abbey, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

Latrobe in a European Context ·

Both Latrobe and Buck’s views carefully capture the profiles of the buildings, set o∑ in dramatic contrast against the sky. Both employ light and shadow to heighten reactions to the ruin. Latrobe includes notations on the ruined abbey’s founding and destruction. Buck’s Antiquities o∑ers a similar caption. There remain substantial di∑erences between the images, though. Most notable is the human figure in the foreground of Latrobe’s image. Whereas both artists consider the ruin’s melancholy associations, Latrobe uses the figure to model this emotion for the viewer and inspire sympathy. Turner’s Transept of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire (ca. 1794, possibly exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1795) o∑ers another valuable comparison [Fig. 2.33]. This exhibition watercolor is larger in scale and more polished than Latrobe’s sketch and was intended for a di∑erent context than Buck’s view. Transept of Tintern Abbey conforms to traditions of both architectural rendering and antiquarianism. It is ambitious in scale and form, contributing to the avant-garde project of elevating watercolor in the eighteenth century’s final decade.‡¤

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Turner o∑ers a perspective from within the once-majestic abbey. Deep foreground shadow draws the eye toward rays of light flooding the middleground, then along the line of the transept, across the nave, and toward the church’s far wall. There is virtually no visible background, only slight hints of light blue sky. This image conveys a sense of containment and enclosure within the ruin. Turner communicates continued divine presence through rays of light piercing empty tracery and streaming through the open roof. Foliage grows all along the ruined stonework, rendering nature and human hand inseparable. On the threshold between transept and nave stands a man, dressed as a common laborer in a blue apron. He pauses in his visit to the site, legs braced, facing the viewer across Turner’s image. This man gives scale to the ruins. More significantly, he seems to shift the stakes of the view. Devoid of a human form, the scene would appear melancholy, yet steeped in pious reflection. With this figure, however, the viewer is asked to ponder time’s passage, the transient work of the human

Fig. 2.32: Samuel Buck, The East Prospect of Kirksted Abbey near Horncastle, in the County of Lincoln from Buck’s Antiquities (London: Printed by D. Bond, 1774). Engraving.

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hand (emphasized by the workman’s apron), and the relative lives of medieval versus modern man. Turner’s scene presents a detailed study of the ruins, simultaneously situating them within a philosophical and aesthetic perspective capable of inspiring significant reflections. His image has the freshness of a scene painted on site, though it was reconstructed from sketches. Careful staging is nonetheless discernable through the insertion of the figure and the contrast of light and shadow. The ruin becomes a stage for the human drama it has witnessed. Turner’s watercolor focuses as much on his contemporary British viewer as on the ruins, placing the laborer in direct interaction with the viewer. Engaging with this scene’s lessons about British history inherently involves meditation on the nation’s past, present, and future. Building on a cultural context created by earlier nationalistic landscape views, such as those in Buck’s Antiquities, British artists at the end of the eighteenth century turned to watercolor as a medium through which buildings and landscapes might communicate large social and moral concepts. Although Latrobe’s Kirkstead Abbey sketches are more modest than exhibition watercolors, his views adopt some aspects of Turner’s ambitious content, perhaps indicating engagement with works such as Turner’s Trancept of Tintern Abbey, and suggesting his similar interest in elevating the use of watercolor. Heroic Visions Latrobe’s watercolors consistently build in ambitious social, moral, and intellectual content, and the context of watercolor practice in London in the 1780s and 1790s surely helped to mature his interests. The city o∑ered a rich cultural context for artists who sought to serve larger social ideals through their craft. Watercolor and drawing were considered significant media because of their ability to capture the spontaneity of hand and mind, distilling complex notions into gestural contours or the aura of translucent pigment. To put the ambitious content of Latrobe’s work into some further context, this section places him alongside two better-known contemporaries: William Blake (1757– 1827) and John Flaxman (1755–1826). Latrobe’s ties to Blake and to Flaxman are substantially di∑erent. He never mentioned Blake and there are no known

direct connections between them or their work. However, Blake’s content is often close to Latrobe’s and is complementary in aspects of its visual form. By contrast, Latrobe’s fascination with Flaxman has long been noted, though never fully parsed. Latrobe periodically borrowed figural imagery from Flaxman in his watercolors, a practice that he openly acknowledged.‡‹ What is most significant in considering Latrobe through the combined comparison to Flaxman and Blake is that all three developed a profound interest in epic imagery centered around a tortured understanding of heroism. Blake’s impassioned watercolors and Flaxman’s spare outlined figures o∑er alternative, yet equally fertile, approaches for the viewer to muse on historic acts. Blake famously created his own mythology and engaged with early British history as well as contemporary crises. In his outline drawings, Flaxman focused on reenvisioning ancient epics, appealing to and inspiring contemporary Britons through common themes and moral quandaries. Latrobe’s sketchbook watercolors never develop Blake’s level of fantasy, nor the purity of Flaxman’s spare aesthetic. However, Latrobe similarly imagined the emotional and psychological tensions between epic heroism and modern life. In his Virginian watercolors, he peopled the landscape with figures from Flaxman’s line drawings, as well as from his own imaginative fancies. Bringing figures from Classical epic to North American shores allowed him to entertain complex ideas about identity, heroism, nationhood, and artistic identity. To provide further artistic and intellectual context for the period of Latrobe’s London residence, I will introduce one Blake work and an interrelated pair of Latrobe and Flaxman pieces. In the early 1790s, Blake published a succession of wellknown illustrated texts that used original poetry and visual representation to explore politically radical themes: The French Revolution (1791), America: A Prophecy (1793), Europe: A Prophecy (1794), and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1794). These were all issued prior to Latrobe’s emigration and he may have been familiar with them. These texts adopted a poetic style closely akin to James MacPherson’s in his influential Ossian fabrication, which Blake mimicked to allude to Britain’s ancient history.‡› MacPherson published as Ossian, a supposed ancient British bard whose work he

Fig. 2.33: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Transept of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, ca. 1795.

Fig. 2.34: William Blake, Plate I Frontispiece, America. A Prophecy, 1793.

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claimed to have rediscovered and “translated” into modern English. Ossian appealed to those interested in heroic tales of ancient Britons put into context with ancient Mediterranean heroes. Latrobe’s pacifism, his interest in epic literature, and his concerns about the social unrest of revolution would have made him sympathetic to Blake’s projects. One example drawn from Blake’s America. A Prophecy can allow for the comparison between Blake and Latrobe. Blake’s “America” is a theoretical concept, a place, and a historical reality. He sees America as the earth’s only location not purged by the Old Testament flood, where “primitive liberty lost to the other continents” could continue to exist.‡fi The “spirit of revolt rises there before spreading to Europe, Africa, and Asia.”‡fl This spirit of revolt, embodied in the figure “Orc,” is capable of purging tyranny and oppression from the civilized world. America centers on Orc’s encounter with “Albion’s Angel,” the tortured spirit of the British people. America opens with a frontispiece dominated by a massive, winged male figure seated with arms hanging loosely at his sides, head bowed, and face hidden behind bent knees [Fig. 2.34]. His wings are poised and perfectly still, conveying power and promising action. The figure’s shaggy, dark curls suggest youth and virility, compounding the surprise of his desperation. Eventually, the viewer realizes that the figure is handicapped by black shackles binding both of his arms, chaining him to a ruined stone edifice. The winged figure is not identified as either Albion’s Angel or Orc; it may allude to both characters, while representing neither, depicting instead the physical and mental state of the “inchained soul.”‡‡ This figure represents a state of conjoined heroic possibility and irremediable despair. He does not strain at his shackles, which seem weak alongside his powerful musculature. He sits dejected, his spirit broken rather than his chains. Yet, his body’s latent power reminds the viewer that he may yet rise to heroism. Other details support this message. The winged figure sits on the ruins of a stone threshold, with shattered broken remains of a monumental building filling the middleground. A frieze panel recalls the ruined empires of the ancient Mediterranean, while gesturing to universal ideas of civilization’s cycles. Humanity’s historic trials overburden,

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erode, and break the individual heroic spirit, even though that spirit endures across time. The masculine “inchained spirit” contrasts with the dependence of a nude, female figure to his right. She sits, looking anxiously at him, two similarly nude children clinging to her for protection. This woman may be interpreted as “America,” sorrowing witness to the wreckage of Europe’s empires, now facing her own bloody violence and revolution and hoping for rescue from a rising human spirit. The brooding, monumental figure dominates Blake’s text, prompting the viewer to question whether he holds the answer to the world’s problems and to contemplate who has the power to release his strength. As Blake allows his viewer space for imagination, association, and intelligent reflection, his illustration creates a context for the viewer to see the American Revolution as a beginning, rather than an endpoint. In America, the artist’s powerful interpretive voice demonstrates the social and moral potential for the viewer to act, thus inspiring heroic action. Whether or not he was familiar with Blake’s work, Latrobe shared these sentiments in both their particular and general points, seeing the American Revolution as a phenomenon within humanity’s long and troubled historical continuum. He considered revolution’s historical and epic potential within the context of ancient imperial histories and that of his homeland. Latrobe’s Oft by the Setting Moon has an immediate visual a≈nity with Blake’s frontispiece in its focus on a despondent male heroic figure [Fig. 2.35]. Interestingly, it also borrows the figure of its prominent male protagonist from Flaxman, connecting the heroes of ancient Britain to those of Troy. Oft by the Setting Moon was completed in Virginia on July 20, 1797, and interprets a scene from “The Songs of Selma,” part of Macpherson’s Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem‡° that was attributed to Ossian. The form of Latrobe’s work seems to model itself on this deception and the exposure of Macpherson through the embedded Flaxman figure that “poses” as a hero from Fingal. Here, Flaxman’s Priam from the Iliad plates is used to represent Armin from Fingal, blurring the line between these figures. Latrobe’s sketch builds on the original plate from Flaxman, Iliad Plate 38: Iris Advises Priam to Obtain the Body of Hector, which is a scene of mourning [Fig. 2.36]. Homer describes

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Priam, the king of Troy, and his surviving sons seated in an outer courtyard of their palace, mourning the death of Hector. Flaxman outlines a spare spatial context, rendering Priam hunched over on the outer threshold of his palace. Three of his grieving sons huddle at right, with two more on low-lying

Fig. 2.35: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Oft by the Setting Moon, 1797.

stools at left, their bodies doubled over as they rest their heads on their hands. The central drama concerns the interaction between the messenger goddess Iris and Priam. Flaxman cites Line 207 of Book 24 of the Iliad: “Before the King Jove’s Messenger

Latrobe in a European Context ·

Appears.” Iris and Priam are frozen in greeting and in recognition. She hovers on tiptoe above the ground, carrying a messenger’s sta∑ and accompanied by her signature rainbow. Inclining slightly toward Priam, she reaches toward him, her arm extended at waist height, palm up and empty, gesturing to convey her purpose. She has come to o∑er solace. Though Achilles has slain Hector, Iris directs Priam to cross enemy lines to recover his son’s body from the Greeks, thus a∑ording Hector proper burial and entry to the underworld. While Iris is clearly divine, the only indication that Priam is a king, a leader, and a hero is his relative scale. He sits in a fetal position behind the other figures, his head lifted ever-soslightly, his ample hood pulled back to see the goddess. He looks like he has been weeping, or else has collapsed in sheer despondence. Seen in profile, his bulging eyes, swollen cheeks, and downturned mouth are clearly apparent. Priam is interpreted as a mourning father, not as a powerful leader. Indeed, he is a failed father, having been unable to shield Hector from a horrific death. He is bereft of hope for self and nation and is completely dejected, his sadness compounded with fears that, without a proper burial, the peerless Hector will eternally remain an unmoored soul. The scene’s content is both emotional and civic, with themes important to both Homer and Flaxman. Priam’s grief is familiar in an era of high mortality rates, though Hector’s heroic death lends him extra dignity. As both a king and father, Priam must weigh di≈cult, interrelated personal and civic decisions, balancing duty to family against duty to society. Flaxman’s focus on Priam’s mourning forces recognition of the public figure’s extensive sacrifices. Oft by the Setting Moon similarly considers a leader mourning his deceased children. In it, the ancient chieftain Armin gazes over troubled waters toward the site where his two children died. “The Songs of Selma” is an elegiac passage in which Armin joins other figures in presenting his tale of woe, recounting the loss of his beautiful daughter Daura and heroic son Arindal, slain by Erath to avenge his brother’s death at the hands of Daura’s lover. Like the Iliad, the tale involves intertwined a∑airs of the heart, family, and public life.

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Although the visual correspondence between Latrobe’s Armin and Flaxman’s Priam is very close, Latrobe slightly alters his figure. Priam’s body forms an almost perfect sphere, which drives a rhythmic and meditative viewing experience. Latrobe’s Armin sits more rigidly, with legs bent at a tighter angle, producing an ovular, rather than spherical, arch to his back. Their facial expressions also di∑er. Armin sits on a low rock beside the sea. He has lifted his head from dreaming and stares at the moonlit scene, his head raised higher than Priam’s is in Flaxman’s work and his face more visible. Unlike Priam’s tear-pu∑ed eyes, Armin’s eyes are wide in fear or shock. His face is harshly illuminated, taking on a spectral pallor against the cave’s dark walls. Compared to Priam’s fresh grief, Armin’s loss is more remote. Armin appears almost ghostly, a specter from the past, a quality that serves Latrobe’s purposes well, for Macpherson’s text is focused on ghosts. In it, Armin describes his ongoing mourning: “When the storms of the mountain come; when the north lifts the waves on high; I sit by the sounding shore, and look on the fatal rock. Often by the setting moon I see the ghosts of my children. Half viewless, they walk in mournful conference together. Will none of you speak in pity? They do not regard their father. I am sad, O Carmor, nor small is my cause of woe.”‡· Latrobe poses Armin on a dark, rocky shoreline. Bold, black lines of stone contrast sharply with his brilliant white robes. At left, the ocean is troubled, reflecting the moon, which glows powerfully in the dark, overcast sky. Presented in a scale that

Fig. 2.36: John Flaxman, Iliad Plate 38: Iris Advises Priam to Obtain the Body of Hector, 1793.

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defies perspective, the two ghostly figures of Armin’s children hover above a jagged rock in the ocean. The viewer, encountering the apparitions, understands Armin’s expression. The specters, dressed in a Renaissance style somewhat fitting to the narrative’s era, stride across the view: Arindal wears tights, a tunic, and a prominent hat, Doura a flowing dress and scarf. Arindal points confidently forward, and they hold hands, as if engaged in absorbing conversation. Her long hair billows behind her, echoing the clouds’ sinuous line. They glide peacefully across the sky, oblivious both to the raging storm in the living world and to Armin’s laments. In his allusion to Flaxman, Latrobe builds his content through association. Brownell o∑ers an initial consideration on this point, highlighting a≈nities between Homer and Ossian, and connecting the watercolor to Latrobe’s personal life, noting that the artist matched an illustration to Homer, the poet who had sung of an early phase of culture in the Mediterranean, with the supposed text of Homer’s counterpart, the poet who had sung of an early phase of culture in the North. More specifically, in the Flaxman plate, as in the Macpherson text, an aged leader grieves for his o∑spring beholds an apparition from another world. (Like Armin, Latrobe, a widower had temporarily ‘lost’ his son and daughter, the small children whom he left behind in England in 1795. It is wiser, however, not to guess at what the parallelism meant to him).°‚

Latrobe’s connection of Homer and Ossian would have been important to his thoughts about the content of the work, and he surely hoped a viewer could make the same association, allowing comparison of these epic figures and their respective civilizations. As Brownell further suggests, Armin and Priam are both shown in significant encounters that enhance the meditative content of the works in which they are featured. Seeing Priam and Iris interact focuses viewers on the complexities of human faith and the impact of faith on human a∑airs. Latrobe’s scene takes a di∑erent, equally significant tack, inviting reflection on the encounter between life and death, while also engaging the viewer of the present with the a∑airs of the past. I have written elsewhere about the emotional state captured through Latrobe’s watercolors, arguing that through the process of “heartren[der]ing,” Latrobe created images of

heartbreak, mourning, and loss as a form of art therapy.°⁄ As is explored in Chapter 5, Latrobe testified that watercolor a∑orded him a powerful emotional outlet. Oft by the Setting Moon is one resulting potent image, for it meditates on love, loss, and recovering identity after life-shattering experiences. Latrobe’s personal mourning is only one element of this piece. He also asks viewers to consider hero figures in mourning for their civilizations and their family members. Both Priam and Armin are elderly and both face the demise of their cultures. The Iliad closes with Hector’s funeral, foreshadowing the destruction of Troy described in the Aeneid. Macpherson’s fictive chieftains hale from a British past so distant that no texts describe it. Both Armin and Priam are heroes mourning for an extinct lifestyle. Flaxman expected his British audience to ponder contemporary realities prompted by Classical imagery. Similarly, Latrobe reflected on the present via Fingal and the Iliad. His image focuses his viewer’s thoughts on the civilization of the United States via lessons of ancient epic and British myth. Armin’s children hover above a stormy ocean similar to that which is depicted in Latrobe’s stormy Atlantic studies, introduced in the first chapter, while the moon rising and setting over water is common to many of Latrobe’s melancholy Virginian and Atlantic scenes. The key thematic elements of Oft by the Setting Moon—Armin, his spectral children, and the rising/setting moon—may all be spatially plotted along a central triangle, its hypotenuse across the ocean’s surface between Armin and the moon. Arindal’s raised arm similarly directs the gaze deeper into the work, leading to the moon in the distance. Even more forcefully, Armin’s gaze also looks toward the moon. These elements suggest themes prominent in many Virginian watercolors by Latrobe: his mind’s immigrant psychology shuttling endlessly across the Atlantic, the passing of British civilization, and the rise of a new civilization in the United States. Latrobe’s Armin invites lessons from ancient British civilization and from Troy’s tragic history. Although no such “ancient heroes” exist to populate American history, Latrobe draws a continuous historical trajectory between those points. Finally, both Flaxman’s original image and Latrobe’s reconfiguration guide the viewer to simultaneously assess heroism

Latrobe in a European Context ·

and the artist’s role in evaluating human accomplishments. Flaxman’s Iris Advises Priam is drawn from the last passages of the Iliad when the great heroic deeds are complete and the bard describes Hector’s funeral, recounting Priam’s actions and o∑ering an elegy for Hector and for Trojan civilization. In “The Songs of Selma,” Macpherson focuses on the aging, impotent hero Armin, no longer able to perform heroic deeds. His bard, Ossian, also voices his own poetic obsolescence: But age is now on my tongue; my soul has failed. I hear, sometimes, the ghosts of bards, and learn their pleasant song. But memory fails on my mind; I hear the call of years. They say, as they pass along, Why does Ossian sing? . . . Let the tomb open to Ossian, for his strength has failed. The sons of the song are gone to rest; my voice remains, like a blast, that roars, lonely, on a sea-surrounded rock, after the winds are laid.°¤

Ossian’s robust, youthful voice has aged to a dim echo, leaving him with an ambivalent legacy overshadowing his heroism, since his artistic “soul” has failed along with memory. Priam, similarly, is accused by his wife Hecuba of losing his wits when he follows Iris’s instructions. Hecuba fears he will be killed while visiting Achilles, but Priam responds that his ambition has sunk so low that merely recovering Hector’s body is enough for him and further survival is unnecessary.°› Both Priam and Armin lead readers to consider what is of lasting value. Ossian, reflecting on his own mortality and on the transience of his poetry, articulates these feelings even more emphatically. Both Flaxman and Latrobe echo these limited visions of human achievement. Yet, beneath this melancholy, both Flaxman and Latrobe introduce an element of hope in future action, not unlike the latent power of the “inchained” human spirit for Blake. All three artists rely on a cyclical, and thus a regenerating, understanding of history. If one heroic voice fades, another will rise. The agency of the ambitious artist is drawn from precisely this hopeful point, investing its hope in deep content that can motivate the viewer for future social good. A Door Closes Fleeing London, Latrobe abandoned much he would never recover. In the young United States, he would find a pale imitation of the rich social, cultural, and artistic milieu he

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enjoyed in the Old World. Tenuous as his Moravian ties were by 1795, when he boarded the Eliza, he bid a final farewell to his many friends and associates within the Brethren. Most painful of all was his separation from his brother Christian, the greatest constant throughout his life to date. Though they exchanged letters over the years and Christian continued to manage some of Latrobe’s a∑airs, their intimate companionship was forever lost. Latrobe’s bankruptcy and relocation also severed many professional connections. Unlike the extant occasional letters to friends, no records exist that document Latrobe maintaining professional connections after leaving London. But along with these losses, Latrobe took with him the enduring value of his artistic and mental training. He found few individuals in Virginia whom he could esteem as intellectual peers. The breadth and depth of his literary, Classical, historical, and linguistic education was such that few contemporaries in the United States could approach his erudition. Much of his knowledge was memorized, carried in his head in an inner library of diverse sources through which to interpret the world. In a similar way, his watercolors are permeated by, and in dialogue with, the texts, artists, and images he encountered during his European life and education. Even as he captured Virginian people and landscapes, he represented them in ways that reflected his past influences. Watercolor, his preferred medium, was central to many profound changes in artistic production during the eighteenth century, particularly in Britain. Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors reflect his generation’s ambitious content and artistic aspirations. The close association of architecture with watercolor rendering meant that Latrobe’s estimations of his professional worth, creative ability, and personal agency were closely bound to his watercolor practice. These themes were of great significance to his generation’s artists and remained important to Latrobe. Even from his exile in the Virginian woods, he maintained these engagements, while also interacting in profound ways with his new environment. Over the course of the succeeding chapters, it is crucial to remember that his works reflect both Virginia and Europe. Latrobe’s experiences, dreams, and history across the Atlantic were always present and active within him. 

You are now like a Stranger in your own Country, like a traveler through your own town. You have new friends to seek, new modes of life to study, a new language to acquire, and what you will find still more di≈cult, you will have to unlearn all your former habits, to cast o∑ all your former peculiar customs, to get rid of your dialect, your walk, your customary mode of putting on and pulling o∑ your hat, your love of coarse food and liquors, and in fact of every thing that could possibly remind those who see Thomas Rhoades Esquire of Tommy Rhodes the cobler [sic].⁄

Chapter Three

A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods

With this advice, Reverend Benjamin Latrobe, “friend and counselor of all the distressed in the neighborhood,” counseled the cobbler Tommy Rhodes on how to survive after inheriting twenty thousand pounds sterling and in so doing becoming a member of the British elite.¤ Although he could buy himself a new position, could Rhodes fully play the role? Could he transform his demeanor, persona, and predilections while remaining a happy, fulfilled person? Observing that Rhodes had been content living at subsistence level, Reverend Latrobe warned him that changing his station could be traumatic. Ultimately, as Benjamin Henry Latrobe later recounted, Rhodes considered the advice carefully and relocated to Germany, where his behavior and personal traits could not so easily be tied to the status of his youth. Having emigrated, Rhodes found a new and contented life, using Latrobe family connections to acquaint himself with the nobility. Latrobe’s retelling of Rhodes’s story has gone uncorroborated, but its veracity is not at stake here.‹ Rather, this narrative is useful for its resonance with Latrobe’s reflections on his own immigrant condition. The advice here recommends that Rhodes radically transform himself, using shifts in language, demeanor, and a∑ect to move from one social class to another. The final goal is to make Rhodes into a completely new individual, unrecognizable to former associates. Though these suggestions were meant to transform Rhodes in his homeland, this discussion is equally useful for an immigrant. After landing in Virginia, Latrobe encountered great challenges of identity. Residents of both Britain and the United States spoke English, but Virginians nonetheless seemed to speak a di∑erent language. Despite their conjoined history and shared ethnicity with Britain, Virginians had a distinct sense of self and culture, with which Latrobe struggled to identify. He befriended some elite Virginians, such as Bushrod Washington and John Woods. Nevertheless, his most intimate friends remained other traveling European intellectuals— including Scottish, Italian, and French travelers. Even after he styled himself “Virginian,” which he did relatively frequently in his writings of 1798 and 1799, Latrobe nevertheless continued to refer to being British or European. He shifted between categories seemingly at will, depending on his correspondent, topic, or argument. Latrobe recounted Rhodes’s story during an extended stay in Richmond, when the complexities of his immigrant identity were weighing on his mind. Indeed, his diary entry of October 13, 1797, o∑ers a lengthy reflection on the

Fig. 3.7 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West, 1796.

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cultural connections between Britain and America, with special attention to Virginia. Latrobe notes an increasing fissure between those Virginians who favor the French and those favoring the British and asserts that those considered “Democrats” (a label he applied to himself ) are also vehemently against the British. He argues that Virginians must acknowledge the a≈nity between Britain and the United States, commenting: “I have often thought it strange that it should be already forgotten that at furthest the two Nations are first Cousins. With all the real and a∑ected preference given to the French, neither the French language nor the French manners are ever likely to gain the least ground, and I have great reason to think that instead of losing, the manners of the Country are daily gaining more and more of the English character.”› Latrobe’s assertion that Virginia was daily growing more like Britain suggests that he was feeling more at home daily. Still, this may not have been so. In most of his personal letters of the time, he describes himself as lonely—missing his children and seeking a life partner while clearly detached from Virginian society. Within this same entry, however, he adds complexity by highlighting his detachment from British society—both in Britain and within the expatriate British community in Virginia. He avers that this detachment, which he attributes to being neither British nor of British heritage, is what allows him to speak openly about the Virginians’ mistaken perspective toward the British. In denying his Britishness, he argues that blood constitutes identity, noting: “I can stand up as the defender of the English, not having either on my father’s or Mother’s side a drop of English blood in my veins.”fi Though perhaps technically correct, this inaccurately belittles his birthright to British citizenship, while acknowledging that his position within British society was complex. He then reinserts class into the picture, blaming Virginian distaste for the English and the Scots on an influx of low types, whom he criticizes: Most of the Emigrants from Britain who have remained in the towns have entered into trade. I must confess that the majority of them are very illiterate and illiberal men. Nothing can be much more ignorant of Men, of things, and of books than an English tradesman. . . . The imprudence of these men brings a general odium upon their nation, and though their industry and commercial speculations render them useful, they are very unpopular members of the community.fl

Clearly, Latrobe feels no connection to the local British community and detaches himself from the pragmatism of the laboring classes. In these two diary entries, Latrobe raises various interesting points about Virginian society in the 1790s, the relationship between Britain and its former colonies, and the real dynamics between immigrants and Virginians. After a year’s residence, Latrobe hardly felt at home and still struggled with his identity. He no longer found it useful to play the reassuring role of the English intellectual, adopted aboard the Eliza. Neither did he fit easily into the social communities he identified upon landing. How, then, could he find happiness in Virginia? How could he adapt his father’s advice to Rhodes? What would it take to transform Benjamin Henry Latrobe, dejected and unknown British immigrant, into Benjamin Henry Latrobe, successful and respected Virginian? This quandary preoccupied him throughout his residency in Virginia, from the moment he disembarked, and perhaps before. In order to adapt to Virginia, he realized, he first must understand it. His first order of business was to identify key attributes of Virginian dialect, a∑ect, and attitude and to adapt to them accordingly. Yet, the di∑erences between American and British culture were sometimes subtle. Toward the end of his Virginian residence, while weighing the move to Philadelphia, he commented that Philadelphians were nearly identical in character to their English counterparts, while Virginians exhibited something “di∑erent.”‡ Ironically, once he felt comfortable enough to pursue his passion for American politics, he realized that his immigrant status made him more vulnerable to public ridicule, and he experienced hurtful othering.° After several years of observation, he developed a nuanced attitude toward Virginia and Virginians. This chapter examines one aspect of his observations—the study of Virginia’s buildings and landscapes. Sketching houses, rocks, rivers, and trees might reflect casual interest for a tourist seeking to enjoy the local environment, but for Latrobe, such sketching was not just a casual pastime. It allowed him to evaluate the landscape and, through it, its inhabitants. By studying its architecture, plantation landscapes, urban topography, and distinctive natural environment, Latrobe assessed the positive and negative aspects of his

A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods ·

would-be home, while also engaging in studies with a clear application to his chosen profession. Although he generally framed his observations in the dispassionate languages of science, engineering, or manufacturing, Latrobe’s visual and textual reactions were most telling when he shed this intellectual veneer. As he began his Virginia journals, he self-consciously decided to change his writing style, working to eliminate personal exclamations from his journals.· His Virginian journals are more dispassionate than, and without as frequent dramatic and emotional passages as, his Atlantic journal. Still, the confusions, anxieties, and doubts of an immigrant remain, if sometimes below the surface. His written and visual studies of the Virginian landscape reflect his evaluations. In their cracks, interstices, and occasional outbursts, these studies reveal the struggles of his immigrant condition. For Latrobe, interacting with Virginia’s landscape was integral to making his new home there. While he studied many aspects of the state, his most sophisticated works are those dealing with its appearance, from which this chapter analyzes a selection of landscapes dating from 1796 to 1798. Beyond their context in Latrobe’s life and work, these views are particularly important since they are among the first naturalistic studies of the landscape of the United States, and are even more rare for their focus on the American South rather than on New England or the Mid-Atlantic. Latrobe wrote extensively about what he saw in Virginia and, as in journals from his Atlantic crossing, many of his written anecdotes and analyses can be correlated with his sketches. This correspondence allows for a quite precise interpretation of his physical, intellectual, and emotional interaction with the scenes depicted. More broadly, the Virginia materials are open to analysis of the cultural currents running through them, as Latrobe shifted uncomfortably between his British persona and the American self he sought to adopt. Latrobe explored natural and built landscapes, and he simultaneously assessed his feelings of a≈nity and detachment toward them. In the process, he identified experiential di∑erences between Europe and America and sought a personal middle ground. Landscapes o∑ered Latrobe special opportunities to explore his own experiences, draw connections, and pinpoint the underlying contrasts between these two

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worlds. He explored contrasting feelings of belonging and displacement, triggered by certain associations and sensations. Latrobe’s Virginian landscapes invite the viewer to become absorbed into specific spaces, through multiple physical and intellectual angles, modeling his own manner of immersive experience. He created single views of a number of sites, many of which are beautiful, fascinating images. Growing from the paired landscapes of his Atlantic crossing, Latrobe also created innovative serial images. Some of these multiple views of a single site, when viewed without captions, might appear to be completely di∑erent landscapes chronologically, geographically, and in terms of significance. These creative serial landscapes are of special interest and appear to be an innovation of Latrobe’s residence in Virginia that has no specific precedent. Located within Latrobe’s sketchbooks, and perhaps accompanied either by his verbal narratives or by the text of his journals, his landscape watercolors are understandable as meaningful within a progression that is generally synchronous with his journey through the landscape. Though they were shared with friends and made with some thought toward descendants of future generations, Latrobe nonetheless primarily made these images for himself. Documenting his ongoing journey of immigration, Latrobe rendered an account of his emotional, intellectual, and physical experiences, continuing to formulate himself as the heroic protagonist of a New World epic. Latrobe’s Virginian landscapes have long been recognized as a significant oeuvre. Although his sketchbooks have strong similarities to other period travel accounts, Edward C. Carter argues that the duration of Latrobe’s travels and his broad intellectual training make his reflections of exceptional value. Further, Carter notes that Latrobe, “like few others, saw America with both the perceptive vision of a foreigner and the understanding of a citizen long resident.”⁄‚ The legacy of Latrobe’s observations has been coupled with his subsequent prominence.⁄⁄ Carter argues that scholars should take a lifelong view when assessing the significance of Latrobe’s sketching and journaling. However, the focus in this book on Latrobe’s Virginian residency can also serve as a reminder that our assessment of Latrobe’s watercolors should take the progression of his life into account. Thus, his final images in New Orleans may be understood as informed by

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earlier experiences, but the reverse is not possible. We should not look at his Virginian landscapes and read into them the mature work of the federal architect, nor do they represent the established American identity of a long-term resident. Nonetheless, the Virginian landscapes are exceptional in that they document Latrobe’s initial attempts to construct the knowledge and persona later evident in his public life. These landscapes document space and place, but they also develop an innovative representational aesthetic and a carefully honed personality, seeming to work toward crafting a new American identity. The self-referential content of these images is not readily evident in their subject matter, but becomes quite clear through Latrobe’s writings. In these images, Latrobe reveals the concerns of an uncertain and lonely man who is far from family and friends, traversing an unfamiliar environment, and struggling to rebuild a ruined life. Sometimes he finds solace in the American landscape, sometimes he finds it alienating. Thus, these studies capture his immigrant feelings of place and displacement. They do not reflect the dispassionate clarity with which Latrobe set out to write his journals. Rather, they are multivalent and exploratory. Latrobe thought of himself as a “solitary traveler in the American woods,” an apt, though dramatic characterization.⁄¤ He made many friends in Virginia and he maintained rich correspondence with some of them; nevertheless, he felt alone. Not yet a public figure, Latrobe moved in and out of di∑erent parts of Virginia and met a wide sample of society, though with little public notice. His renderings are those of a man a world apart from those surrounding him. He knew less about the society, history, and culture of Virginia than his acquaintances did and he keenly perceived this shortcoming. For a man who touted his authoritative knowledge in Britain, this was uncomfortable. Nevertheless, he was confident that via his broad education he knew more about the larger teleology of history and about truths of space, landscape, and aesthetics than his new peers did in a society that proved lacking in intellectual community. Learning to See Latrobe arrived in Virginia with preconceptions based on reading completed before his departure. Describing his first view of the Virginian coastline, he asserted that the

hillsides were entirely forested [see Fig. 1.1]. Correlating with prevailing European understanding, he approached North America as largely a wilderness with little history. Latrobe soon recognized that the landscape he encountered was much more complex. He identified towns and infrastructure similar to that of Europe, but also disturbingly di∑erent. Despite its familiar features, he could not readily characterize the landscape. Published resources o∑ered limited aid to Latrobe’s project of assessing the Virginian landscape. Concerning the southern coast of Britain, he cited texts ranging from works of ancient history through those of natural history. In the United States he found a landscape whose national history spanned barely a decade. Of course, studying Virginia is not equivalent to understanding the United States, but only a single state or region. Thus, he further found he could not accurately employ all the information he had amassed regarding the United States in his assessment. Instead, he had to attend to regional material, further limiting his bibliography. His first Virginian journal entry, written March 23, 1796, speaks to the inadequacy of available sources.⁄‹ Referring to Thomas Cooper’s Some Information respecting America, Latrobe comments: Cooper thought 5 or 6 months a su≈cient length of time to collect decissive [sic] information . . . upon a country extending 1000 miles every way. His book is well written, and contains truth enough to make it a usefull [sic] companion in a jaunt of speculation from Virginia to New Hampshire; but I find it is not entirely approved here either by the Federalist or Antifederalist parties, whose combined judgement, as they look at their Country in di∑erent lights ought to be decissive [sic].⁄›

Indeed, Cooper supplied substantial general information about the United States, but little about Virginia specifically. Cooper spent most of his time in Philadelphia and gathered his information about the Southern states secondhand. Latrobe quickly found cause to question Cooper’s authority. Latrobe may have chosen Norfolk for his arrival since it was the port at which Cooper’s informant disembarked. Concerning Norfolk, and other Virginian cities, most of Cooper’s information consisted of data on local rates for goods and services. Cooper supplements these with some summary remarks credited to a “Mr. Toumlin,” namely:

A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods ·

The country about there [Norfolk] is very barren. Animal food cheap. Houses of wood are cheaply built. A house of two stories, six yards by four, will cost 50 £ sterling. . . . Norfolk is about as large a town as Taunton in Devonshire, or Wigam in Lancashire. Most of the houses wood; some of brick. A neat house, 30 feet by 29 feet, 2 stories high, with a kitchen on one side and a smoaking [sic] room (for bacon, hams, &c) in the yard, costs, compleat, 150 £. Dress of the people, much the same as England. Slaves all barefooted.⁄fi

This description is neither glowing, nor detailed. For an individual planning to reboot an architectural career, references to cheap housing stock would have been inauspicious, as they would seem to imply that there were few clients prepared to engage a professional architect. Further, Cooper favored Pennsylvania as a destination for British emigrants, noting: “The objections to Maryland and Virginia relate to climate and slave labour. These states are very unpleasantly warm in the summer season to an English constitution, particularly the former; and the impossibility of procuring any servants but Negro-slaves is an objection almost insuperable.”⁄fl The faults of Cooper’s text may have been o∑set for Latrobe by his compatible politics. Cooper argues that the reason to leave Britain for the United States—any state therein—is to benefit from its new form of government. He states, with passion: Perhaps some part of my predilection for America may be justly attributed to my political prejudices in favour of the kind of government established there. It certainly does appear to me preferable to the present British government; and being convinced (as I am) that the majority of people in this country, are of the opposite opinion, and not being an advocate for propagating liberty by the bayonet, or terrifying a nation into freedom by the guillotine, I chuse [sic] for this also among other reasons, to quit a country whose politics I cannot approve.⁄‡

Latrobe’s reasons for emigration were not primarily political, but nevertheless Cooper’s text provided a favorable rationalization. Yet, Latrobe’s reference to the “combined judgement” of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists against Cooper’s text indicates some immediate suspicion that partisan realities di∑ered from Cooper’s idealistic sense of American politics. Cooper’s prospective émigrée is motivated to flee by Europe’s turbulence:

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As the period of civil commotion and internal warfare seems, in your opinion, not far distant in almost every part of Europe; you would wish, I suppose, to fix in a place where you are likely to enjoy the blessing of peace without the hazard of interruption from any circumstances at present to be foreseen. Dreading the prospect, however, distant, of turbulence and bloodshed in the old country, you will hardly expose yourself unnecessarily to similar dangers in the new.⁄°

Cooper accordingly explains that immigrants should avoid areas with prevalent or likely conflict. Latrobe’s observations of extreme partisan divisions, and an entire world aflame with discord, demonstrate the special challenges of his search for a homeland. Latrobe’s struggles with Cooper’s text are characteristic of other concerns he may have found with resources about the United States, all of which surely only strengthened his resolve to assess the nation accurately for himself. Transatlantic Senses Latrobe expected that, well-read and well-educated as he was, he would easily master knowledge of the United States. After two weeks of touring, he was disappointed by his inability to equal Cooper’s evaluative confidence. He complains in his Virginian journals, “in a fortnight [I] have got no further in settling an opinion of Virginia and Virginians, than to lay down a few principles, all of them perceived by the senses.”⁄· Rather than reasoned conclusions, he can only o∑er sensory data, generally considered inferior in this period.¤‚ His first commentaries pertain, not surprisingly, to di∑erences between the familiar European built environment and the American alternative, wherein shabby wooden architecture and ill-positioned towns contrasted with pleasing views of ancient forests. Initially, Latrobe found little that was physically similar to Britain. Latrobe struggled to verbalize his observations, finding common descriptive categories of British landscape theory inadequate to the Virginian landscape.¤⁄ This phenomenon is fully apparent in his account of a trip along the Appomattox River.¤¤ Latrobe’s first descriptions from the boat rely heavily on picturesque theory. He admires the natural riverbank, but criticizes local farmers’ inattention to aesthetics: “The woods are beautiful, but the modes of cultivation prevent the e∑ect of contrast they might produce, were the ground cleared in small patches and the woods separated into bodies of less extent.”¤‹ Valuing appearance over agriculture, Latrobe’s

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impractical critique suggests that farmers should plant based on color and textural contrast, not on yield. Ultimately, he determines that nature gave the riverbanks a picturesque skeleton, but the residents have not appropriately realized this adornment, and the beautiful woodlands, varied by gently undulating hills, lack a refining touch. Such criticisms reflect prevalent elite British landscape values and fail to distinguish between farming for profit and for pleasure.¤› Continuing along the Appomattox, though, Latrobe realizes the natural landscape is more pleasing than he first judged. He comments: “The various beauties of the Banks of the river employed our admiration su≈ciently, and though we saw nothing beyond the immediate verge of the river, the same ingredients of Landscape were thrown into such various composition, as to keep up a constant succession of Novelty.”¤fi Rather than wishing for a gardener to rearrange the natural elements, he grows to appreciate their inherent variety. This leads Latrobe to reevaluate familiar landscape treatises. He remarks, “It is in vain to attempt to describe its scenery. Mrs Ratcli∑ herself would be puzzled for words. And after all it is the same thing over and over again.”¤fl He recognizes that basic landscape elements are familiar and universal, even if their precise Virginian manifestation is distinct. Reflecting on the connections between landscapes, he inserts a verse that he attributes to Richard Payne Knight: Search, as you will the whole creation round ’Tis after all but water, trees, and ground Vary your spot, seek something new to please, What see you? Water, ground, and trees!¤‡

Universal elements are important, as are Virginia’s unique features. Imagining Knight on the same voyage, Latrobe concludes: “had he seen the dignified playfulness of nature in the composition of these three ingredients into Landscapes as various as they were harmonious, unless he had recanted he should have received a severe ducking in the Water, have been set a shore on the rocky ground, and then hung upon a tree as a blasphemer.”¤° While his proposal to lynch the poet is burlesqued, the passage conveys his growing interest in capturing Virginia’s landscape in both its essential similarity to and fundamental di∑erence from places he has seen before. Latrobe ’s process of assessment is physically and intellectually immersive, particularly so since evaluating the nature of

the American sense of place causes him to reckon with his own displacement. As he traveled through Virginia—from Norfolk, to Hampton, Yorktown, and Portsmouth—these British place names were coupled with familiar sites now an ocean removed. As Revolutionary War sites, many also confronted Latrobe with issues of conflict, division, and warfare, thus further intensifying his sense of disjuncture between New- and Old-World sites that shared names. Latrobe’s encounter with Richmond brought his evaluative ambivalence to a head, as revealed in an evocative passage concerning the traveler’s experience of displacement: There are I believe few towns, places, or counties in old England that have not a namesake in North America. In few cases has the similarity of situation had the smallest influence upon the sameness of name. Richmond, however, is an exception to this remark. The general landscapes from the two Richmond hills are so similar in their great features, that at first sight the likeness is most striking. The detail of course must be extremely di∑erent. But the windings of [sic] James river have so much the same cast with those of the Thames, the amphitheatre of hills covered partly with wood partly with buildings, and the opposite shore with the town of Manchester in front, and fields and woods in the rear, are so like the range of hills on the south of the Thames, and the situation of Twickenham on the north backed by the neighbouring woody parks, that if a man could be imperceptibly and in an instant conveyed from the one side of the Atlantic to the other he might hesitate for some minutes before he could discover the di∑erence.¤·

The notion of being “imperceptibly and in an instant” carried across the Atlantic powerfully captures the individual immigrant’s experience of self in space. While it is clearly impossible for a person in Richmond, England, to simultaneously gaze on Richmond, Virginia, Latrobe, familiar with both landscapes, could physically occupy one while his mind and his senses suggested that he saw the other. The twin Richmonds intrigue Latrobe—the James River and the Thames echo one another, while the wooded hillsides of Virginia recall the famed landscape park of Twickenham—yet they also disorient him. The passage describes the trickery and misperception inherent in the displacement he endures as an immigrant. While exploring the New World, his mind and body resolutely tie him to familiar sensations of the Old. How can Latrobe uncouple or disambiguate these twin landscapes? He continues the imagined experience of his

A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods ·

hapless viewer, transported instantaneously and unknowing across the Atlantic. First, his senses warn of something amiss: “The want of finish and neatness in the American landscape would first strike his eye, while his ear would be arrested by the roar of the falls of the James river below him.”‹‚ Diverse sensory signals inform this spectator of his new environment. Next, the viewer realizes he is amid wilderness, not within a refined landscape: He would miss the elegance of the Richmond bridge and find in its place the impatient torrent tumbling over huge masses of granite. To his right he would see the small neat willow Island in the Thames towering into a woody Hill, which separates the curled stream of James river. Instead of the velvet lawns of Mr. Cambridge’s park and the precise arrangement of Twickenham, the wild trees growing among the irregular Islands, and the rambling edifices of Manchester would bewilder his attention. The neat walks and iron railings surrounding him there, would be changed into rough roads and wooden inelegant fences. The perfection of cultivation in the first instance, in the second, the grandeur of Nature, would fill his mind.‹⁄

Latrobe’s characterization of the two Richmonds juxtaposes the beautiful versus the sublime, though without using these terms; the beautiful describes England, the sublime denotes Virginia. Gradually, Latrobe’s observer pieces together su≈cient evidence to judge that the two Richmonds are distinct: “Other circumstances of important Geographical di∑erence, would pass much longer unnoticed. The Thames flows on the North, the James river on the South side of Richmond. The former runs from the left to the right, the latter from the right to the left.”‹¤ Although the landscapes di∑er in character, Latrobe hypothesizes that this is a matter of time: Britain’s landscape carries the marks of centuries of civilization, whereas Virginia’s is still young. Thus, he imagines the first immigrant’s naming of this Virginian “Richmond” as inspired by bodily familiarity with the landscape, observing: “when . . . the whole country was in wood, I am convinced that it was the general similarity of the characters of the two situations that impressed upon this spot the name of Richmond.”‹‹ This a≈nity of landscape would allow a feeling of being home, once again, in England. Two watercolors, View of Richmond from Bushrod Washington’s Island, henceforth View of Richmond, and Sketch of Washington’s

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Island, James River, Virginia, henceforth Sketch of Washington’s Island, visualize Latrobe’s feelings of displacement [Figs. 3.1–2]. These images, likely from April 1796 and separated by two sketchbook pages, reflect respectively the Britishness and the Americanness of the Virginian scene.‹› Although he does not discuss them in these terms, the two views are spatially interrelated and paired similarly to those in his Atlantic sketchbook. View of Richmond presents a vista of placid beauty taken from Washington’s Island and looking across the James River, which is still as glass, toward Richmond. Spring foliage along the riverbank gently varies patterns of light. Richmond shines in brilliant white, dominated by its new Capitol, the Classical style of which prompts the viewer to associate the view with other times and places.‹fi The Capitol is the work’s focal point and is staged as such by a framing foreground tree. The Capitol is surrounded by gently undulating hills and clustered trees, seeming more garden folly than public structure; thus, the viewer looks at Richmond, Virginia, but sees Twickenham. With the Capitolturned-tempietto as its focus, the watercolor adopts the picturesque. Still river and trees present themselves appealingly. At first, the falls of the James seem part of the park-like image, yet their scale and roaring plunge eventually force the viewer’s realization: this is the “wilderness” of Virginia, not refined Britain. Turning to Sketch of Washington’s Island, the viewer resumes decoding Richmond after the “roar of the falls” has signaled displacement. Now, with city skyline behind, the viewer faces Washington’s Island and views near-total wilderness. Two African American boatmen in one corner are the only human presence. The river sweeps roughly across the middleground, its speed accelerated by the unseen force of the falls. Instead of presenting individual trees, Latrobe indicates a continuous mass of foliage punctuated with protruding trunks and branches. This indistinct vegetal mass confuses and repels the European sensibility. Sketch of Washington’s Island and View of Richmond are joined spatially by the river, which is a prominent visual element of both scenes. Latrobe’s text considers the sensation of displacement transferring the viewer back and forth across the Atlantic and, here, the James stands in for the ocean.

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Flipping between the sketches moves the eye easily across the water, mimicking the sensation of the mind’s rapid transit. Latrobe’s spatial manipulation between the scenes provokes a bodily awareness, which catches the viewer in the troubling, disarming sensation of displacement. The sensations Latrobe captures in his journal and related views are profound and durable. His assessment of Richmond came in his first month in Virginia, and throughout his residence in the state he maintained close ties to this site, capable of transporting him easily back across the Atlantic. After two years, Latrobe grew to consider himself American—more specifically, Virginian. However, as he explained to Giambattista Scandella, various circumstances had again thrown him into

personal, professional, and financial distress.‹fl In this time of trouble, he planned to create a refuge on Washington’s Island: I have purchased of Mr. Washington an island in the midst of the Falls of the James river. It is a beautiful, fertile and romantic spot. It contains about 80 acres of good land, and its scenery would not disgrace the magic rivers of Italy. I mean to live there. . . . I have half ruined myself by living in this expensive city upon my own moderate capital. I mean therefore to be independent, and shutting myself up in my island to devote my hours to literature, agriculture, friendship, and the education of my children, whom I hope to see here this Spring. And yet if I thought that in any part of America my talents, my acquired knowledge, and my honest intentions . . . would meet with moderate respect, I believe I should be happier in the active pursuit of professional reputation.‹‡

Fig. 3.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Richmond from Bushrod Washington’s Island, 1796.

A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods ·

Latrobe describes a common trope: retreat from public life, with its long European tradition and strong contemporary salience in the United States.‹° He further testifies to his poor state of mind: “Indeed I am here truly unhappy. My only friend is [Bushrod] Washington. He can feel with me, and I believe loved me. But yet he is only a Lawyer, and I have the itch of Botany of Chemistry, of Mathematics, of general Literature strong upon me yet, and yawn at perpetual political or legal discussion especially conducted in the cramp, local manner in which it is treated in Virginia.”‹· Having recently spent an extended period with Scandella and their mutual friend, Scottish intellectual William McClure, Latrobe realizes the incomplete nature of his American

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friendships. He has broad interests his peers do not share. Having resolved that he can never fully fit within Virginian society, yet unable to return to Britain (itself no ideal society), he plans retirement from the world. Latrobe’s intentions, which ultimately go unfulfilled, are less important to this narrative than is his selected retreat. Washington’s Island was, in many ways, Latrobe’s refuge between two worlds. Severed from Britain, yet thwarted from building a satisfying life in Virginia, he bought Washington’s Island as the only American space where he could imagine himself transported “imperceptibly and at an instant” back across the Atlantic. Resident on Washington’s Island, Latrobe could simulate being again in Richmond,

Fig. 3.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of Washington’s Island, James River, Virginia, 1796.

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England. He dreamed of living in limbo between two worlds. If he could not remake himself as fully American, then he would inhabit a dual space that was, like him, split between two identities. For Latrobe, Washington’s Island became a space for ideal fantasy, satisfying a sense of self and society that could actually exist nowhere. At Home at the Edge of the World The built environment of Virginia presented distinct challenges to Latrobe’s evaluative project. Its domestic landscapes are of special interest, as he approached them as a significant indicator of the residents’ character. After landing at Norfolk, Latrobe set out immediately with a critique of the city’s houses: The stile of the houses of private Gentlemen is plain and decent, but of the fashion of 30 Years ago. They are kept very clean and independent of papering, which is not universal, fitted up much in the English style. The inferior houses are chiefly framed and weatherboarded, and the sort of double roof, called by the French un Mansard (from the Architect who first employed them in France)—by the English Carpenters, a Curbroof, are very common. I suspect that they may have been introduced by German builders, after the fashion of Saxony, and most other parts of Germany. All the buildings are covered with shingles, a light and durable covering, but dangerous in a country where fires are not provided against by any regulations of police, and where wood is the most common fuel. The Shingles are plain pieces of board round at the edge, and nailed on in the manner of tiles, not groved into one another like the German shingles.›‚

Latrobe’s first description of Virginia’s common housing reflects his observation that it derived from an indiscriminate mix of vernacular European building types, reflecting the influx of varied immigrants, and resulting from its construction by “builders” and “carpenters.” This first response considers the overall character of Norfolk’s housing, but much of Latrobe’s attention in his Virginian travels was dedicated to the study of elite homes, which were of particular interest to him. Observing these houses allowed Latrobe to fine-tune his reflections on Virginian civilization. Some exceptional buildings could invite Latrobe to reveries of transatlantic doubling. In 1796, he experienced some semblance of Britain in Amelia County, though this impression was quickly displaced. He recorded:

In Amelia I could have again fancied myself in a society of English Country Gentlemen (a character to which I attach everything that is desirable as to education, domestic comfort, manners, and principles) had not the shabbiness of their mansions undeceived me. Of the latter I do not mean to speak disrespectfully. It is the necessary consequence of the remoteness of the Country from towns where Workmen assemble and can at all times be had. An unlucky boy breaks two or three squares of Glass. The Glazier lives fifty Miles o∑. An old Newspaper supplies their place in the mean time. Before the mean time is over the family get used to the Newspaper, and think no more about the Glazier. The same is the case in every other respect, and as all the houses are in the very same state, they keep one another in countenance.›⁄

Latrobe met individuals in Amelia who seemed like English country gentry, but he was “undeceived” by their houses.›¤ Although not intentionally “disrespectful,” this slight is nevertheless judgmental. To him, adaptation to newspaper in broken windows was a single degradation that signaled a wider collapse of standards. Observing that they have let “domestic comfort” slide, Latrobe was undeceived, and prepared himself that these individuals may also be lacking in English standards of “education . . . manners, and principles.” At Amelia, Latrobe found himself completely isolated, perhaps for the first time, recording: “I felt myself almost out of the World. I found it impossible to get a letter to Richmond only 32 Miles distant. Our latest Newspapers were a fortnight old.”›‹ Further, he experienced a traumatic demonstration of his otherness, which he cloaks in humor: A county meeting had been summoned to meet at Stingytown upon the subject of the treaty with Great Britain, on the 12th instant. Only two days before a report was spread that congress had made the appropriations necessary for carrying it into e∑ect; but whether the act containing such modifications and injurious compact, nobody knew. About 50 Gentlemen met. I was there as a visitor, many said as an English spy, and my friends entertained themselves by promoting the idea. But as not a soul knew any thing positive as to the resolutions of Congress, and not [a] Newspaper could be had no one ventured to speak at hazard; the sturgeon was silently eaten, and every one departed to his home.››

Although Latrobe is enthusiastic about democracy, he observes its dysfunction, here exacerbated by the incomplete infrastructure of the young nation. Gathered to exercise their democratic rights, the assembled crowd cannot discuss current events because they lack information. Though they have the

Fig. 3.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the North front of Belvidere, Richmond, undated [1796 or 1797].

A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods ·

right to free speech, they eat in silence, afraid of demonstrating ignorance. Further, Latrobe is mistaken for a spy and made unwelcome. His friends treat the misperception as a joke, but Latrobe is clearly uncomfortable. Ultimately, his first impression in Amelia of regaining the comfort of English society is replaced with finding himself “almost out of the World.” Shabby architecture reveals cracks in the social veneer. From within Latrobe’s sketchbooks, numerous studies of houses reveal Latrobe’s in-depth interpretation of Virginia via its domestic environment. Selections from among these images reveal how Latrobe made use of rendering techniques to advance his conclusions and observations about Virginia. A presentation watercolor of Bushrod Washington’s house Belvidere o∑ers a dramatic visualization of the sublime in Virginia, deploying European aesthetic theory in a Virginian context. A multi-sheet study of Henry Banks’s property Airy Plain makes use of Latrobe’s innovative spatial experimentation in

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watercolor view and topographical study to guide the viewer toward an interpretive—and again, a judgmental—experience of the Virginian plantation. Finally, Latrobe’s Mount Vernon views are the most culturally significant studies of his Virginian period. These images employ and perfect his spatial interrelation of landscape scenes and also, for the first time, introduce the epic form to the Virginian landscape. View of the North front of Belvidere, Richmond, henceforth View of Belvidere [Fig. 3.3], presents Bushrod’s house, located on seventeen acres along the James River.›fi Belvidere was a frequent destination during Latrobe’s residence in Virginia to which he paid extended visits, as Bushrod and his family become Latrobe’s closest Virginian friends. Bushrod accompanied Latrobe on travels around the state, and when Latrobe traveled away from Richmond, he missed the Washington family’s companionship. From the resort of Petersburg, for example, he wrote to Bushrod, “I feel as if I could be happier

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in the full buzz of the conversation at Belvidere than I am in the lively clamor of the gay society here.”›fl Although he enjoyed some of Petersburg’s recreations, he found its focus on horse racing, gambling, and prostitution uncomfortable and looked back to Belvidere as a port in the storm of Virginian society. View of Belvidere presents this metaphor of a refuge from a storm visually. The cream-colored Georgian building is large, but modest, and features symmetrical wings. Like many other Southern homes, it is oriented toward a river. This view is taken from within the property, facing the northern entrance, just o∑ a circular carriage approach. A two-story porch capped by a pediment adorned with a simple dentil pattern is the only decorative extravagance. This gesture at Classicism is combined with structural features attuned to the local vernacular, adapted to Virginia’s climate and conventions. The view contains, in addition to the mansion house, a small, single-story building to the mansion’s left that shares the same architectural language. Spotlit to dramatic e∑ect, Belvidere is bathed in light and centered, with foreground and background both in shadow. A storm is raging. A slim tree, lush with foliage, is bent by the wind and its bowing profile provides a useful framing element at right. Dark storm clouds pelt water on the river in prominent diagonal sheets. In the right-hand background, sunshine and blue sky produce warm light that pours over Belvidere’s facade. The mansion is rendered in thin, drafted lines, but the balance of the view features rough painterly strokes that convey the appearance of speed. Belvidere’s solid and secure beauty contrasts with nature’s sublimity. The storm’s darkness, wind, and rain, caught up in frenetic motion, threaten the viewer, while the house is serene in its welcoming light. Belvidere is rendered as a cozy home, o∑ering a peaceful retreat in an otherwise unwelcoming world. The contrast in style between the drafted house and the semi-abstracted, romantic style of the scene seems to extend beyond the distinction between drafted drawing and watercolor sketch. With the landscape and house depicted in di∑erent aesthetic modes, the image invites the viewer to perceive contrasts—establishing the house as a safe harbor in an otherwise hostile environment. It is reasonable to wonder if Latrobe is exploring content that can be read both metaphorically and personally. Although this image shows

Belvidere as a restful home, it seems reminiscent of Latrobe’s unrest and melancholy and of his longing for a secure homecoming. On a larger scale, the scene could evoke the firm stability of homelife within an unstable sociopolitical sphere. As in Latrobe’s other images around Richmond, so here the James River extends toward a distant horizon, appearing as an endless ocean. Again, the viewer is temporarily tempted across the Atlantic, though the agitated water warns against this. Although Belvidere’s stylistic insu≈ciency means that it fails to achieve the standards of British country life, Latrobe’s image nevertheless urges the viewer toward its domestic security, o∑ering peaceful shelter from the “commotion” of international public life. View of Belvidere can be situated still more specifically within Latrobe’s own Virginian history. When Latrobe felt like an uncomfortable stranger in Petersburg, he cited Belvidere as his refuge. At Belvidere Latrobe found a place that could o∑er some solace from his unpleasant fate, as he would find at Washington’s Island. Accordingly, similar to his sketches at Richmond, this watercolor gives visual form to his feelings of the transatlantic experience while also rendering his dreams of a new home in the young United States. In March 1797, Latrobe recuperated from a sudden illness at Airy Plain, Henry Banks’s estate, located along the York River.›‡ Following his recovery, he completed a detailed plan of the estate, a panoramic sketch of the property (executed across three sketchbook sheets), and a watercolor view showing the mansion house and the river [Figs. 3.4–5]. Latrobe’s renderings of Airy Plain are his most complete study of a Virginian plantation. Banks requested that Latrobe complete a plan of the estate to indicate its assets, and the finished plan would have fulfilled this purpose. Studied alongside the two other views Latrobe worked on independently, his further reflections on the estate can be understood. Sketch of the Estate of Henry Banks Esqr. On the York River, henceforth Sketch of the Estate of Henry Banks, exists in two nearly identical versions, of which only one is reproduced here [Fig. 3.4].›° This plan shows the extent of the property’s seven hundred acres. Its various natural and commercial resources are indicated using a combination of written labels and graphic techniques. The property is triangular, its longest edge along the York River, with principal buildings

Fig. 3.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Estate of Henry Banks Esqr. On the York River, 1797.

facing the river. Roughly one-third of the property has been cleared near the water, though a thin strip of trees along the water’s edge was left to frame and shield views and to act as a windbreak. The clearing containing the house and other significant buildings is irregularly shaped, suggesting either an ad hoc evolution or a (rather unlikely) gesture toward the picturesque. Seven structures make up the central core of buildings. One of these, located at a slight distance from the others, is labeled “quarters,” presumably indicating slave housing. This is the only written label Latrobe inserts among the buildings. Although unlabeled, the mansion house is readily identifiable; it occupies the largest footprint, is closest to the river, and is approached by a long avenue and semicircular carriageway. Other resources are strategically arrayed. Two orchards with geometrical plans in a square and a rectangle are planted within the large clearing. The remaining property is divided between trees and water and ribboned by roadways. At right, Church Point Creek creates a serpentine boundary and leeches into substantial marshland. Two roads converge on the western edge, feeding into a single route that bisects the estate. A triangular cap of woodland fills the southern half of

the estate, divided by winding fingers of streams. A mill is indicated as one of the commercial assets and a large millpond forms the eastern boundary of the property. Overall, the plan strongly contrasts the “woods” and the river, indications of nature’s hand, against the human touch, including the clearings, buildings, and millpond. York River, looking N.W. up to West Point, henceforth York River Looking Northwest, is a panoramic view rendered across three sketchbook sheets [Fig. 3.5]. It is a pencil and ink study, with watercolor washes along the horizon. It may be unfinished or intended as preparatory to another watercolor. This view exercises Latrobe’s topographical expertise. The sketches appear to o∑er a spontaneous en plein air study, transparently representing unstructured reality without a conceptual construct, but the complexity of the view, along with certain key elements, indicates its careful manipulation toward inter pretive content. As a frame for his panorama, Latrobe selected a perspective from a blu∑, looking to the north toward the Banks estate. Airy Plain is positioned at the far left. The wider panorama spreads across the expanse of the river, especially magnificent owing to a sharp oxbow curve, doubling back the water and

Fig. 3.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, York River, looking N.W. up to West Point, 1797. Digitally completed full image of the panorama, consisting of three original sketchbook sheets.

expanding its width. A thin strip of land defines the horizon, where a dark pencil and watercolor wash suggest forested shoreline. The opposite riverbank is a small, woody outcropping along the right-hand edge of the third sheet. Along the foreground, the river’s curve produces another strip of land, which provides a comfortable vantage point and elegant framing device. York River Looking Northwest pulls the viewer toward its two edges. At left, Airy Plain is prominent. The eye is drawn to the mansion immediately by a strong contrast of light and dark in the trees along the riverbanks. Sketch of the Estate of Henry Banks indicates only a thin strip of trees along the river, but here, thick tree cover o∑ers visual interest in its texture and dappled light. At right, activity on the water draws the viewer’s attention. Four ships sail along the river, with one boasting three prominent masts. Hugging the riverbank closest to the viewer, a canoe glides along with a single man paddling north toward Airy Plain. The man sits upright, his arm slightly lifted as he dips his paddle into the water. His dignified pose and prominent hat convey his status. Although the figure is too small to identify, precedent from Latrobe’s View of Hammerwood Lodge suggests the boatman may be

Banks. Whatever his identity, the diminutive figure lends a cultured air to the view and strategically links the two margins of the panorama. Only after traveling across the sweeping panorama does the eye focus on letters hovering above the thin horizon. The town of West Point is barely visible above the river, and Latrobe takes the opportunity to indicate the presence of the settlement. The letters “a” through “e” designate key sites in the town, including the houses of prominent individuals, public sites (such as a ferry landing and tavern), and geographic features (such as “Go∑ ’s point”). What first appears to be a panoramic view of nature is, instead, a sweeping scene of Virginia’s built environment. Despite the serenity of the panorama, in his series about Airy Plain, Latrobe ultimately focused on his discomfort with Virginia, now turning to confront its greatest fault: slavery. In his estate plat, Latrobe labels the slave quarters, but hides slavery from view in his panorama. In his final study, he brings slavery to the foreground. View of the fishing Shore on the York river at Airy Plains, henceforth View of the Fishing Shore, looks from the river up toward the mansion [Fig. 3.6]. As in many of Latrobe’s watercolors, the middleground (here

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encompassing the mansion) is bathed in sunlight, while the foreground is masked in shadow. This shade tinges four African American figures with mystery. Set o∑ against a sunny backdrop, they are especially striking—their skin almost pure black, the river’s surface almost completely white. Two of the figures stand in profile, highlighting their facial anatomy. The other two stand featureless, their backs toward the viewer. View of the Fishing Shore seems a simple genre scene, demonstrating assets available at Airy Plain, including fishing, good water access, and slave labor. In reality, the view provides little information about these resources. The men are arranged in near-perfect stillness, in the act of pulling a boat back to shore. Their work is nearly complete. They stand at

rest with a rope coiled by their feet. There is no sign of the bounty collected in their excursion, nor do they carry any of the utilitarian tools of fishing. The scene fails to inform about the activities the artist has observed, such as by describing the type of fish available or the manner of fishing. If Latrobe’s purpose was to characterize the landscape, not describe activity, the scene is similarly flawed. Its composition is awkward. Airy Plain is visible only along the far edge of the view, playing a secondary role to a blocking hill with scraggly trees. The human figures seem to o∑er little visual substance and could be eliminated to improve landscape aesthetics. Further, the image centers around a tall blu∑ in the middleground and here, too, View of the Fishing Shore seems uncomfortable. The blu∑ has been washed out by wind or rain. Unlike the

Fig. 3.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the fishing Shore on the York river at Airy Plains, 1797.

A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods ·

cli∑s at Dover or Hastings, this sandy soil has no known historical merit. Instead, it seems merely eroded and disheveled. Scraggly and haphazardly planted, the trees at the hill’s crest are unlike the bushy woods of the panorama or the careful, protective strip depicted in the map. Picturesque pu∑y clouds and an attractive distant promontory are visually pleasing, but fail to o∑set the balance of ugly landscape features. Airy Plain could simply have been ugly, but even though Latrobe favored realism in landscape, he nonetheless manipulated this standard as necessary to produce the desired e∑ect in his views. At Airy Plain, he chose not to improve the view. There, the awkwardness of the site cannot be easily dismissed as the blithe license of the watercolorist. Perhaps, then, Latrobe painted View of the Fishing Shore to undeceive. Latrobe’s two other studies give sweeping visions of the estate. It is easy for the eye to glide over the forms and to appreciate the beauty of the plantation’s landscape. Like the magisterial gaze, this gliding view accepts, and even expects, civility.›· These expectations are reinforced by carefully employed markers of thriving civilization, beauty, and industry. None of these characteristics operate in View of the Fishing Shore. Obstacles block the viewer at every turn, preventing a sweeping, casual gaze and, instead, forcing a plodding and methodical gaze. What is most readily visible—the scraggly riverbank—seems an obstacle rather than an end in itself, a visual interjection between the mansion and the human group. These figures, further, are hidden in shadow despite their foreground position and obvious significance. Even this aspect of the piece must be discovered as the viewer slowly works through the image. This discovery of the slaves hidden in plain sight seems to be the point of this image. The beauty of Airy Plain is called into question, facing the reality of the Southern slave economy. The focus is not on active abuse of slaves or cutting criticism of the slave trade. Rather, Latrobe simply renders their presence, leaving interpretation to the viewer. In a set of images itemizing the bounties of Airy Plain, these slaves could be seen as elements of the estate’s riches. However, Latrobe discourages this perspective through his formal decisions and by freezing the slaves’ productivity. Latrobe takes some e∑ort to raise the viewer’s concerns. He positions his viewer in a sympathetic position to the slaves and

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beneath the gaze of the mansion house. Set in shadow, rather than sunlight, behind the figures, everything the viewer sees is mediated through their inscrutable presence. The viewer approaches the figures from close at hand, with some degree of intimacy, and on equal footing, rather than as their superior. The figures completely resist conveying any data about their actions and the viewer gains no insight into their work—two facts that deny the viewer the entitlements of the white slaveholder. In this image, the viewer faces the reality of African slavery upon which the wealth of Virginia was constructed with uncomfortable intimacy. If the landscape of the other two views is as beautiful, well designed, and civilized as it appears, then Latrobe exposes it as also being unpolished, even perhaps ugly, and built on an immoral system. Even as he seeks to become Virginian and to curry the favor of elite Virginians like Banks, he stumbles upon the realities of his own di∑erence and dissatisfaction with Virginia’s culture. Despite their beauty, Latrobe’s studies of Airy Plain guide his viewer to perceive the same discord. His visual undeception and the jarring contrast between multiple scenes of one site allow Latrobe to render his conflicted experience. A final realization of Latrobe’s intent to convey this message comes in reconciling the relationship among this series of images. Returning to the panorama, it is not di≈cult to locate the area of the property in which the three slaves stand to pull their boat ashore. Though their exact location is hidden behind a bend in the river, it is easily discerned as along the riverbank, and to the lower right of the mansion. Once found, it becomes apparent that the small canoe, with its leisurely gentleman boatsman, is paddling straight toward the slaves. The act of discovery and undeception is built directly into the image, as viewer and boatsman join in their unplanned encounter with slavery. Domesticity and the Hero In paying a visit to George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Latrobe encountered an exceptional domestic landscape that allowed him to interpret Virginia in the epic mode. His friendship with Bushrod garnered him personal time with George Washington during his two-day stay, in mid-July 1796.fi‚ While on the estate and thereafter, he produced a

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range of images, including landscapes and figural studies. His exceptional interest in visually presenting Mount Vernon was apparent in his combination of two distinct techniques. He adopted epic imagery borrowed from John Flaxman, and he also coordinated serial landscapes. In employing two complex visual approaches, Latrobe created a body of images focused around intellectual and visual content, and o∑ering a testimony to Mount Vernon’s special status among the Virginian sites he encountered. At Mount Vernon, Latrobe entered a landscape intimately tied to American federal ideology, based on Washington’s peerless reputation. While journeying there, Latrobe anticipated awe at encountering the great leader at his home. Although he had met famous men in Europe, and cited meeting with King Frederic the Second of Prussia, as well as Christian’s chance encounter with the King of England, meeting Washington was di∑erent. Hereditary European nobility maintained such an a∑ected lifestyle as to barely appear human. Latrobe described Washington as “one of the greatest men that Nature ever produced.”fi⁄ Yet, in opposition to King Frederic, “that least-like-man-looking-king,” Washington presented exceptional humanity.fi¤ Latrobe described him as “a man raised by merit or reputation above the common level of his fellow creatures,” whose demeanor captured this quality: “Washington has something uncommonly majestic and commanding in his walk, his address, his figure and his countenance. His face is characterized however more by intense and powerful thought, than by quick and fiery conception. There is a mildness about its expression; and an air of reserve in his manner lowers its tone still more.”fi‹ Latrobe described Washington as a rational and steadfast leader. When their conversation turned to the dissipated morals of the Virginian resort town of Bath, Washington met the subject with pragmatism, commenting, “this . . . must naturally be the case in every large collection of men, whose minds were not occupied by any pressing business or personal interest.”fi› Latrobe concluded, “In these and many more observations of the same kind, there was no moroseness, nor any thing that appeared as if the rapidly increasing immorality of the citizens particularly impressed him at the time he made them. They seemed the well expressed remarks of a man who has seen and knows the world.”fifi Their conversation

emphasized Washington’s commitment to public duty. Even while resting at Mount Vernon, Washington worked on matters related to his public duties. Yet he was a gracious host, seeming interested in Latrobe’s life and opinions. He was not self-important and was contented to discuss everyday topics of mutual interest, such as the navigation of rivers, developments in Washington, D.C., and Virginia’s various resources. Latrobe’s admiration for Washington enabled him to draw ancient world comparisons, reflecting, “For Washington, had Horace lived at the present age he would have written his celebrated ode: it is impossible to have ever read it and not to recollect in the presence of this great Man the Virum justum, propositique, tenacem &c. &c.”fifl Latrobe likened Washington to Horace’s characterization of a great leader, though misquoting Horace’s “Justum et tenacem propositi virum” (as translated by Thomas Blakelock, “The man whose mind, on virtue bent, Pursues some greatly good intent”).fi‡ Latrobe probably knew that Horace described Augustus with these words.fi° Accordingly, Latrobe’s citation connects Washington’s leadership to the Augustan Golden Age.fi· In his Mount Vernon images, Latrobe produced a series designed to represent the landscape and pay homage to Washington and his role in the young republic in terms of Horace’s ode and the concepts in it. In a further meditation on heroism, Latrobe integrated a visual reference to Flaxman to connect these Mount Vernon works with Homer’s Iliad, an allusion producing a second layer of content about heroism. To understand Latrobe’s assessment of Mount Vernon, we must further evaluate his reference to Horace. The phrase Latrobe excerpted, somewhat inaccurately, would have been familiar to contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic.fl‚ It had been used as early as 1793 in a poem attributed to Phillip Freneau and addressed to George Washington, though Freneau intended the reference to give weight to his critique of Washington.fl⁄ Other periodic references connect the ode to Washington in a positive light.fl¤ It is uncertain whether Latrobe encountered any other specific use of Horace’s ode to describe Washington. He certainly saw other instances of the first line used to characterize just leaders. Whether he followed others’ comments, or derived the connection independently, his decision to describe Washington in these terms was significant. The ode contemplates the pressures a great leader must resist

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and the strength he needs to uphold his convictions. When Latrobe met Washington, the leader was concluding his second presidential term, negotiating complex domestic and international politics. Given Latrobe’s concerns over the fraught politics of the United States, his allusion to Horace was a high-stakes endeavor, underlining both his own confidence in Washington’s integrity and his awareness that such integrity must be constantly maintained amid great obstacles. Although Latrobe cited the Latin, an English translation by Thomas Blacklock, published in Hume’s History of England, helps to parse contemporary understanding of its meaning: The man whose mind, on virtue bent, Pursues some greatly good intent, With undiverted aim, Serene beholds the angry crowd; Nor can their clamors, fierce and loud, His stubborn honor tame. Not the proud tyrant’s fiercest threat, Nor storms, that from their dark retreat The lawless surges wake; Not Jove’s dread bolt, that shakes the pole, The firmer purpose of his soul With all its power can shake. Should nature’s frame in ruins fall, And chaos o’er the sinking ball Resume primeval sway, His courage chance and fate defies, Nor feels the wreck of earth and skies Obstruct its destined way.fl‹

The rich connections between the ode and Latrobe’s social commentaries suggest why he would have turned to it to describe Washington and his estate. Mount Vernon, in Latrobe’s view, bolstered the leader’s resolve, supported his endeavors, and shielded him from society’s storms. Latrobe’s description of Mount Vernon was self-conscious, as he was aware that audiences both eagerly sought information about Washington and his home and likewise critiqued the resources used providing that information. Latrobe intertwined discussion of the natural landscape, the built environment, and the Washington family members. Significantly, at Mount Vernon he identified a site that appropriately bolstered an American leader, rather than a feigned “English country gentleman.” In his evaluation, it was an authentic

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estate with one purpose: supporting the unwavering justice of this remarkable national leader. Though Virginian, therefore, it is important to note that Mount Vernon is also a site with national associations. In his journals, Latrobe describes his visit from first approach to the house through final farewells. There he found agriculture, industry, and aesthetics well integrated. For example, concerning the mill near the estate’s entrance, Latrobe comments: “Its neatness is an indication of the attention of the owner to his private concerns. The farm of the President extends from the Mill to his house. Good fences, clear grounds and extensive cultivation strike the eye as something uncommon in this part of the world.”fl› The house and gardens fare more poorly under evaluation, since they are “of the old School” and in rather “indi∑erent taste.”flfi His discussion of the gardens near the house is the most critical, especially concerning the Serpentine walk and formal parterre: “The ground on the West front of the house is laid out in a level lawn bounded on each side with a wide but extremely formal serpentine walk, shaded by weeping Willows. . . . For the first time again since I left Germany, I saw here a parterre, chipped and trimmed with infinite care into the form of a richly flourished Fleur de Lis: The expiring groans I hope of our Grandfather’s pedantry.”flfl Although such signs of antiquated taste are not to his liking, they fit well with his evaluation of Washington, a member of an older generation, more interested in necessity than in ostentation. Latrobe’s aesthetic critique of Mount Vernon also allows him to di∑erentiate Washington from European nobility. A single marble chimney front catches Latrobe’s eye. Otherwise, he remarks, “Every thing else is extremely good and neat, but by no means above what would be expected in a plain English Country Gentleman’s house of £500 or £600 a Year. It is however a little above what I have hitherto seen in Virginia.”fl‡ Washington’s house reminds the visitor that the president is an ordinary citizen, not royalty. Though, by Virginian standards, Mount Vernon was extremely luxurious, a point that Latrobe notes, but downplays. If the estate is stylistically modest, its natural setting is magnificent. Latrobe particularly praises the property as it faces east across the Potomac, and focuses his watercolors on this area. He observes, “Nature has lavished magnificence, nor

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has Art interfered but to exhibit her to advantage.”fl° A broad, sloping lawn dominates this eastward view, connecting the property to the Potomac and from there to the new federal city. The breadth of the Potomac opens wide vistas, framed attractively by “bold, woody hills,” “enriched” by the clearings of plantations. Here, nature and cultivation are juxtaposed. The Washingtons enhanced the natural landscape, ensuring it was “variegated by lawns and copses” to increase the pleasure of the scene, and trimmed trees and shrubs along the banks to “furnish an agreeable border to the extensive prospect beyond.”fl· So central is this vista to his site experience—and to the Washingtons’ own experience of their home—that during Latrobe’s first conversation with Martha Washington, she “immediately entered into conversation upon the prospect from the Lawn.”‡‚

Despite his extensive observations, Latrobe expresses concern that his words will misguide readers as to the true character of Mount Vernon and its inhabitants, worrying: What are descriptions of the Face of Nature good for? They convey just as much an idea of the scene as the description of the features of a Lady does, of her face. The pen and the dictionary of Mrs. Ratcli∑ has done little more than to tire her reader by setting him to paint imaginary scenes of Landscape that interrupt the story. Descriptions of buildings are more successful in general, and I think she is particularly so in them, though I once endeavored to plan the Castle of Udolpho from her account of it and found it impossible.‡⁄

Latrobe frets over the challenge of fixing words to form. As he once struggled to visually recreate the imaginary buildings and landscapes of novelist Ann Radcli∑e, he imagines his readers will similarly derive faulty perceptions from his words.

Fig. 3.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West, 1796.

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Moreover, his warning is of greater significance in that it cautions that words can never fully capture Washington’s essence. Only by assembling various details—texts as well as images—can he hope to o∑er the most complete perspective, though even so, the reader is left to imagine the man and the place. Latrobe’s Mount Vernon views work in tandem with his written narrative to capture his visit through multiple dimensions and better guide his reader-viewer’s imagination. During and after his visit to the estate, Latrobe produced small pen and ink sketches, including a bust-length profile of Washington, a plan and front elevation of the house and carriageway, a sketch plan of the footprint of the mansion and attached dependencies, and a quick sketch of the garden’s serpentine walks. These diminutive sketches accompany

Fig. 3.8: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Mount Vernon looking to the North, 1796.

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his journal, helping preserve details and illustrating textual points.‡¤ In addition, he completed three landscape views of the portico facade and lawn [Figs. 3.7–9]. In a final study, Latrobe produced an additional view of the portico, View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West (Version 2), which he completed with portraits of Mount Vernon’s inhabitants, rendered with the influence of Flaxman, added to the scene [Fig. 3.10]. Two preparatory sketches helped Latrobe work through figural poses and studies for this finished watercolor [Figs. 3.12, 3.14]. In this important series, Latrobe not only recorded Mount Vernon’s appearance, but also communicated his lived experience of the estate’s key aesthetic aspects. His recorded vision links these features to the overall ideology of the nation’s justum et tenacem propositi virum.

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In representing the positive aspects of his Mount Vernon experiences, Latrobe included those qualities of the site in his watercolors about which he felt positive and omitted those he did not find pleasing. Therese O’Malley has noted the selective nature of these views and reflected that Latrobe manipulated his representation of a highly rigid and symmetrical landscape by adopting angled perspectives and neoclassical references more in line with the contemporary aesthetics he embraced.‡‹ In making his subtle improvements to the landscape, Latrobe relied on avant-garde techniques of estate portraiture that he imported from Britain. Virginian viewers would not have known why Latrobe presented the building from the side, but they would have appreciated the compelling ways these scenes led them into Mount Vernon. Through such watercolor tricks of his trade, Latrobe sought to shape his viewer’s perception of the property. Approached from Latrobe’s angle, as a monument to the justum virum, the plantation becomes even more enthralling. Further, a careful viewer of Latrobe’s landscapes, with access to his journals, also can uncover the intricate spatial relationship among the Mount Vernon scenes that builds their interpretive content. Now expanding the technique used in his paired Atlantic scenes, Latrobe here creates a trio of images that choreograph his viewer’s experience of space and place. View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West (ca. July 16, 1796) and View of Mount Vernon looking to the North (dated July 17, 1796) are twinned views [Figs. 3.7–8]. Both present the riverfront portico at Mount Vernon, but from di∑ering perspectives. In both, the viewer’s position and perspective are central, so much so that their relationship hinges on viewers exchanging glances across the two depictions of Mount Vernon’s front lawn. View of Mount Vernon looking to the North shows the property bathed in full summer sunlight. A blue sky with flu∑y white clouds o∑ers a pleasing backdrop. The viewer looks out from the dappled shade of a tree, which casts a vivacious zigzag of shadow across the lawn. Although we see only one tree rising in a luxurious silhouette, shadows indicate the presence of two trees, perhaps one with a concealed trunk near the viewer’s standpoint. The gaze climbs a gently sloping lawn toward the house. This lawn bends in a near-perfect arc, guiding viewers toward the mansion, its coloration growing

paler and more yellow as it arrives at the grand portico. The Potomac is visible in the distance, as are hills shaded with trees and undergrowth along its far bank, which contrast attractively with the smooth lawn. Just beyond the mansion, along the crest of the hill, a tidy line of trees borders the lawn, emphasizing the role that planning and cultivation have played in enhancing the site’s beauty. Although the house is clearly crucial to the work, it is located to the farthest left edge. The building is outlined in neat, black lines. Appropriate shading and tinting are used to realistic e∑ect. The receding line of the portico adds classical grandeur and guides the eye into the distance. As the gaze recedes along this line of columns, it meets the ascending line of trees at the crest of the view and these intersecting lines direct the eye to a single point just beyond the mansion house, at the northern edge of the lawn. This specific point toward which View of Mount Vernon looking to the North brings its viewer is also the precise location from which the viewer gazes out in View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West. Looking from deep shadow in front of the line of trees skirting the northern edge of the lawn, the perspective of View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West stares back across the lawn to the exact point from which the viewer’s perspective in View of Mount Vernon looking to the North is framed. Light, shadow, and perspective lines are all carefully organized for this e∑ect. In View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West the portico recedes from the viewer’s gaze. Here, it is bathed in shadow and silhouetted strikingly against the sunlight and the silvery reflection of this light on water. Skirting along the intense shadow cast across the sloping lawn of Mount Vernon is a single thin strip of lawn, bathed in light. This bright light, which is the only warm tone in the view, attracts the eye. Two pairs of trees rise from the lawn along this slope, framing and ornamenting the Potomac. Seen from across the lawn, these two di∑erent sets of trees appear twinned and intertwined, an illusion created by the viewer’s distance and line of sight. A close look at the foremost tree in the left-hand pair reveals the same slightly curved V-shaped branches evident in the single, silhouetted tree of View of Mount Vernon looking to the North. As the eye travels along the sloped line of the front lawn, it is guided toward this same

tree. Perspectively, viewers exchange glances across the two sketchbook sheets. Latrobe attempts to o∑er a holistic understanding of the site from the perspective of real and simulated sensations; engaging the spectator between the twinned views supports this endeavor. Like his views at Hastings, these scenes are also related through perceptual contrasts. View of Mount Vernon looking to the North is bathed in sunlight, View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West is deep in shadow. In addition to capturing di∑ering times of day, these scenes produce diverging moods, one in warm summer daylight, the other at dawn or dusk, in a liminal atmosphere characterized by a silvery half-light and wispy stratus clouds. View of Mount Vernon looking to the North, with its textural sense and variety of forms, adopts the picturesque, whereas the rhythmic smoothness of View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West can only be described as beautiful. Their di∑erent moods present Mount Vernon as the setting for an experience of

strategically opposite sensations, which take the viewer on a momentous journey while merely traversing a lawn. A third image, View to the North from the lawn of Mount Vernon (dated July 17, 1796), completes Latrobe’s initial series, providing only a view from the lawn across the river. Only a very knowledgeable viewer will recognize this is, in fact, an image of Mount Vernon [Fig. 3.9]. The mansion is absent and the view o∑ers only the three universal elements of landscape: water, rocks, and trees. The scene focuses on a low-lying undulating body of water across the middleground. The lower third of the view is a verdant landscape of trees, fields, and water. The upper two-thirds are a deep blue sky highlighted with dramatic white clouds. Shadow casts the front strip of lawn into a deep green, contrasting with a brilliant bright sunlit slope further down the hill. Along the riverbank, dark green trees and bushes gradually guide the eye into the distance. The same e∑ect of bright green grass with bordering lines of trees is found far in the distance,

Fig. 3.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View to the North from the lawn of Mount Vernon, 1796.

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where shadows cast by clouds, the haze of distance, and increased tree cover combine to darken the hills. Below the lower border, the capital letters “A” and “B” gesture to Latrobe’s notes, which here highlight topographical features. He indicates that the water shown is actually the juncture of two rivers: the Potomac and the Piscataway, a fact that Latrobe recommends the viewer verify by consulting the map of Virginia in Thomas Je∑erson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Latrobe highlights this observation to make a point that this deceptively tranquil landscape cannot be easily taken in, but rather must be slowly and carefully scrutinized. Thus, we are encouraged to consider the relationship between this view and the two landscape scenes from Mount Vernon’s lawn. In an exciting reveal, the persistent viewer finds that this third scene relates to Latrobe’s other two through the triangulation of viewing perspective, which coordinates lines of sight across all three. Although related texts provide the breadcrumbs allowing us to reconstruct this spatial relationship, these clues are scattered and assembling them takes e∑ort. Latrobe both reveals and conceals his visual treasure hunt, heightening the satisfaction of decoding the relationship. Consider these views in sequence to understand their relationship: first, View of Mount Vernon looking to the North, at a remove from the house and looking upward, indicates our next destination; View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West relocates us north of the mansion, in front of the shade trees aligned on the hill, and we must turn and follow these trees to the end of the line in order to progress to the viewpoint from which the third scene is drawn; as Latrobe notes carefully, View to the North from the lawn of Mount Vernon is “taken from under one of the Locust trees extending from the House to the North.”‡› These trees, readily visible in the first scene, are the shade source in the second. Now they anchor the third. This is especially important since the mansion is absent from this final view, and only the trees position us securely within the property, tying the third view to the others. Traveling through these three views creates the e∑ect of shifting experiences across space, time, and aesthetic modes. Sequentially, they transport the viewer from daylight to twilight and again to daylight. This acts as a visual metaphor for larger concepts, such as the passage of time (both on a daily

basis, but also within a lifetime, and on a larger sociopolitical level). The third view ultimately removes the viewer from the civilized estate. Cultivated fields contrast with distant woods that reflect no apparent touch of civilization. This seemingly natural environment tricks the viewer, concealing complexities and the artist’s editing hand. This culminating view exists outside of time and place, anchored to Mount Vernon only by its precise topographical setting and by Latrobe’s jotted notes that give it specific context. Without such text, it seems to present Virginia as it was in its natural state before human contact. The final word in Latrobe’s Mount Vernon series comes with his reworking of his View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West into a second version that includes the Washington family members, henceforth View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West 2 [Fig. 3.10]. This final view exists outside the careful sequence of the other three views. It was a gift to Washington for his hospitality. Nevertheless, it is integrally related to the others. With the exception of the figures included and a few other details, the landscape is identical to View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West. Most notably, the two trees in the middleground are altered, removing the continuity that allows the sequential motion of the viewer from one scene to the next. The original four trees in two pairs are reduced to two trees, both with a carefully stylized conical umbra. Through the addition of figures, Classical influence, and stylized elements, the scene is transformed into an independent watercolor view, encapsulating Latrobe’s reflections on his Mount Vernon visit. This scene incorporates information, forms, and sensations from a series of figure sketches. In addition to the Mount Vernon landscape views, here Latrobe produces a visual site response synchronized with ideas about heroism drawn from ancient literature. He renders the house, the estate, and its inhabitants as contributing to an idealized site, encompassing George Washington’s heroism and virtue. In View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West 2, the Washington family is gathered on the portico. The foreground is still—the lush lawn rolls gently downward from the house toward the Potomac. Only a small lap dog bounds back toward the five figures. George and Martha Washington sit facing the river, a bounteous tea table in front of them, on

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which an amphora-shaped vessel emits steam into the air. A small boy sits on the edge of the porch, interacting with the dog. An older youth stands alert between two columns; stepping forward with one leg, he peers through a telescope at the vessels beyond and points with his outstretched right arm. His motion suggests that an exclamation may accompany his excited stance. Perhaps he is focused on the large sailing vessel that appears on the Potomac, highlighted by its significant position between the two anchoring tree trunks. Another large boat sails farther in the distance. An additional young female figure leans against a column of the portico. In this scene, Latrobe fuses the traditions of landscape, topography, genre, and history. Charles Brownell observed

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that the mansion house is the “primary subject matter” here, thus departing from the expectation that buildings are merely meant to decorate a landscape scene.‡fi But Latrobe also carefully seeks to inspire the imagination with this piece, which, as Brownell further observed, is piqued through framing and screening elements. Brownell considered this interaction with the viewer’s imagination the byproduct of Latrobe’s interest in paying homage to landscape painter Claude Lorrain. By grouping trees and creating glimpses of scenes through the portico’s columns, Latrobe is “tempting the imagination to journey beyond the reach of the eye,” o∑ering multiple vignettes for the viewer’s delectation.‡fl Further, Brownell argued, Latrobe stages this landscape using

Fig. 3.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West (Version 2), 1796.

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theatrical techniques, thus this recession into space is not gently winding and natural but rather is crafted using “coulisses, elements like wings in stage scenery, with edges past which the eye jumps into deeper distance.”‡‡ Even as the viewer surveys an essentially realistic view of Mount Vernon, the watercolor still emphasizes its a∑ect. The eye’s experience is directed and surprised, the imagination engaged. Given Latrobe’s concerns over the disjuncture between words, site, and imagination, Brownell’s attention to Latrobe’s strategies for inspiring and guiding the imagination are particularly noteworthy. Even more significant are the allusions to Flaxman on which this view and its related sketches hinge. The tie to Flaxman, and thus to Homer, is made, somewhat surprisingly, by the figure of Miss Eleanor Custis taking the guise of the peerless beauty Helen of Troy. Flaxman’s Iliad Plate 7: Venus Disguised Inviting Helen to the Chamber of Paris inspired Latrobe’s Outlines of a group for another drawing of Mount Vernon [Figs. 3.11–12]. Conceptualizing this relationship, Latrobe rhapsodizes: “Miss Eleanor Custis . . . has more perfection of form of expression, of color, of softness, and of firmness of mind than I have ever seen before, or conceived consistent with mortality. She is every thing that the chisel of

Phidias aimed at, but could not reach; and the soul beaming through her countenance, and glowing in her smile, is as superior to her face, as mind is to matter.”‡° Latrobe posits that Custis would outdo Helen, as the soul’s beauty exceeds physical beauty. Helen is a morally ambiguous figure, a pawn of both gods and men, whose abduction leads to the disasters of the Trojan War. This moral distinction between two beauties is weighty, as it conveys implicit judgments of the values of the ancient and modern worlds. If Custis is authentically both the most beautiful and the most moral female figure, then she trumps Helen and provides a context for the United States to outshine the past. Latrobe turned to Flaxman’s representations of Helen, seemingly to further illustrate his own judgment in comparing these incomparable models of beauty. His selection of this particular figure for his allegorical representation of Custis was strategic and revealed the larger content of his Mount Vernon drawings. Latrobe orchestrated a close correspondence between his textual connection of Helen with Custis and his visual connections of the two women, which were dependent on the viewer’s familiarity with Flaxman’s work. Flaxman’s images relied on his public’s knowledge of Homer. Just so, Latrobe assumed his own sketches would benefit from his sympathetic viewer’s ability to recall Flaxman’s print and connect it with his own watercolor.‡· Flaxman used a single, key phrase from the original Iliad, and Latrobe similarly “cited” Flaxman’s individual figures to communicate his broader message. Latrobe first experimented with such references in two Mount Vernon sketches inspired by two Flaxman di∑erent plates. Ultimately, he integrated the results of this exploration into his finalized watercolor view. Understanding the Flaxman reference in Outlines of a group for another drawing of Mount Vernon, and its significant relationship to other Iliad allusions in the Mount Vernon images, involves first understanding Flaxman’s image. Flaxman’s print, engraved by Tommaso Piroli, is paired with a single phrase, “The Goddess softly shook her silken vest,” from Homer’s

Fig. 3.11: John Flaxman Iliad Plate 7: Venus Disguised Inviting Helen to the Chamber of Paris, 1793.

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Iliad, Book 3, line 479 in Alexander Pope’s then-popular translation.°‚ The scene shows five figures against a minimal, though significant, architectural backdrop: the upper ramparts, namely the famed Scaean Gates, of Troy. In Flaxman’s image, only the simple outline of the gates communicates the larger context of the place. Nevertheless, this specific, abstract architectural context links the visual drama to a particular place and time and situates the viewer among the non-combatants of Troy. The spare rendering provides relevant context, while focusing the viewer on the actions and psychological drama of the figures.

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A woman enters from the left, her identity uncertain, though the fortunate viewer may read the label below and recognize “Venus disguised.” Flaxman’s decoding of his images constitutes one of the a≈nities between his scenes and the ancient texts he cites. His mediation parallels the inside information gained from an epic’s narrator. Let into the “trick,” Flaxman’s audience notices that the woman floats ever so slightly in the air, a sure sign of her divinity. She is dressed plainly; a cap hides her hair and she wears a simple, flowing, peplos. She reaches out with her left hand to touch the shoulder of a second woman, who turns in surprise. This

Fig. 3.12: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Outlines of a group for another drawing of Mount Vernon, 1796.

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figure, labeled “Helen,” keeps one elbow resting on the wall. Dramatic events are unfolding below; Helen still leans toward them as she shifts to assess her interlocutor. Twisting toward Venus, Helen also turns toward the viewer and her right hand gently pulls back her long veil. Her motion is graceful, her pose a subtle contrapposto. She is more elaborately dressed than Venus, with a flowing himation (veil) and clinging chiton (dress). Her face is inscrutable, perhaps registering confusion—an apt reaction, for Venus appears as a vision from Helen’s past, disguised as an elderly Greek wool-carder, of whom Helen was very fond during her marriage to Menelaus.°⁄ This image represents the first instant of encounter between two legendary beauties. Here, Venus attempts to conceal her appearance, though it is easily revealed to the viewer. Helen’s veil also partially conceals her physique. In the Iliad, Helen’s realization of Venus’s identity (evident from the sparkle in her eyes and her loveliness) will still not occur for several lines, thus the suspense and confusion suggested here captures the two figures in careful scrutiny. To the right are three women, their backs to the viewer. Although there is no caption, the Iliad text makes up for this: Helen stands on the Trojan ramparts among the women of Troy. The women pose here, arms embracing one another like the three Graces, in tight mutual support. They lean on the wall, just as Helen did moments before. Their anxiety is evident in their bowed heads as they peer down and out with intensity. Flaxman’s viewer, familiar with the Iliad, understands their anxiety. Book Three o∑ers a potential turning point in which Troy has a chance at salvation. The warring armies have made a tentative pact: Menelaus and Paris will fight to the death in single combat to resolve their di∑erences. The winner will claim Helen. No matter who wins, their two nations will commit to additional reparations to establish enduring peace. As the three women follow the encounter below them, they hope the siege will cease. Naturally, the scene is especially fraught for Helen, whose uncertain future hangs in the balance. Yet, the women squint into the mystery unfolding below. The encounter between Menelaus and Paris has already occurred—the reader knows that Paris, clearly beaten, is whisked away by Venus in a sudden fog, and taken to the safety of his own bedroom. The women try to decipher the

confusion below, certain Paris has been defeated, yet he has disappeared. Trojan and Greek warriors alike scramble, trying to locate him. In the confusion, a tenuous peace hangs in the balance. Flaxman’s work balances this suspense and tension. Helen and Venus strike a pose in virtual stillness. Their encounter is unresolved. Their eyes locked, the most beautiful goddess and the loveliest woman stare at one another as the tense action unfolds below. Outlines of a group for another drawing of Mount Vernon inserts Flaxman’s figure of Helen for Custis. Her pose is identical to Helen’s in Flaxman’s piece, though her facial features are adjusted, presumably to create a likeness of Custis. This sketch remains unfinished, with partial figures and jottings around the periphery of the central grouping. Custis and one other figure are traced in ink, a manner of outlining similar to Flaxman’s technique. One additional seated woman is half-traced in ink, the remainder sketched in pencil. The figural grouping consists of six fairly clear figures and one partial outline of a man to the right. The central drama of the sketch focuses on the relationship between Custis and two young men. A dapper young man stands at the left, leaning his left elbow against a chair, his chin on his fist in a pensive pose. Brownell has noted this figure’s stance is strikingly like that of Paris in another Flaxman Iliad scene though the figural likeness is not nearly as strong as that between Custis and Helen, as face, clothing, and physiognomy have all been altered.°¤ To Custis’s right another young man approaches. He is dressed in what may be European military attire, though the details of his clothes are vague. Because Latrobe’s narrative mentions “Young la Fayette” was staying with the Washingtons, one of these figures may well represent the young Frenchman or another member of his party.°‹ Custis stands next to the second man, but she turns to face the pensive figure. The sketch sets up the drama of a modest young maiden courted by two men. The scene includes another seated woman, her features unclear, but a young boy approaches her, raising his arms as he reaches her knees, as if reaching out toward his mother. In the background, a slave holds a large basin. He raises his chin haughtily, serving the family with a learned a∑ect of snobbery. Flaxman’s Iliad Plate 8: Venus Presenting Helen to Paris inspired another of Latrobe’s sketches of Custis [Figs. 3.13–14].

A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods ·

Flaxman cites Pope’s translation of Homer, Book 3, line 530, “Full in Paris’ Sight, the Queen of Love / Had Placed the Beauteous Progeny of Jove,” in a scene that closely follows his previous plate within the epic narrative. Again, this scene focuses on figures with minimal props. Venus and Helen stand at left, next to the outline of an empty chair. Venus has dropped her disguise and is nude, except for a cloth flung over her shoulder. She floats on a cloud, hovering about one foot in the air. She bends over, grasping and arranging Helen’s clothing, while the gentle inclination of her head suggests she is speaking in the mortal woman’s ear. Helen turns away from Paris, looking back over her shoulder, with head slightly bowed. She tightens her dress with her left hand and she rests her cheek shyly in her right hand. Her body language demonstrates reluctance; she seems to lean against Venus for support. A long bed ornamented with a plush bolster pillow and a scrolling anthemion with leafy fronds is a prominent prop. Paris reclines on the bed, his form slight under a blanket, his pose quasi-e∑eminate, as he drapes his left arm over the pillow and turns slightly toward Helen, casting her an expectant and flirtatious gaze. The epic context helps to explain Flaxman’s image. The plate refers to a scene in which Helen, angry and reluctant, is led by Venus to Paris’s bed. Helen expects Venus is tricking her into returning to the spurned, angry Menelaus. She cannot imagine that Paris has won the duel. Once she faces Paris, though, her mood shifts. As the poem progresses, she berates his cowardice. Peace for both Greece and Troy rested on a fair fight. By allowing himself to be whisked away to safety, Paris again risked Troy’s future. Paris argues that Menelaus beat him only with Athena’s help. He promises to fight again, confident in the support of his own patron gods. He calls Helen back to his bed, and the couple hide away in their love nest. Meanwhile, drama builds on the battlefields outside the Trojan gates and among the gods. In the pictured moment, pensive Helen is without individual agency. O∑ered up by a goddess, received by a hero, she may reflect on her own fate, but is powerless to a∑ect it. She is the visual focus of the scene but not its protagonist, nor will she decide what happens next. In Sketch of a group for a drawing of Mount Vernon, Latrobe again borrows the exact pose and expression of Flaxman’s Helen, but changes her face [Fig. 3.14]. This sketch is more

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highly finished, including Latrobe’s painstakingly detailed rendering of architecture and surrounding plantings. Custis leans against the portico. Her face turns toward Martha Washington, who is seated beside a tea service, complete with an amphora-shaped vessel on a supporting stand, out of which steam pours like sacrificial smoke. Martha extends her arm, gesturing to her left, toward an empty chair, seeming either to invite Custis to sit or to highlight the absence of another figure. A young boy, dressed fashionably, sits on the floor and has placed a plumed hat to his left. Behind these protagonists, a slave looks on attentively. This genre scene has no apparent individual content, but can be further parsed when placed in context with Latrobe’s finished watercolor View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West 2. The sketch conveys an air of anticipation, modeled by the actions of Custis and Martha Washington. Both seem to await a decision or action to be carried out by somebody else. When contrasted with View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West 2, in which the men of the Washington household reappear, introducing decisive heroic male action to the scene, the absence of masculinity from the Sketch of a group for a drawing of Mount Vernon seems particularly pronounced. Within the context of Mount Vernon, Latrobe’s appropriation and reinterpretation of Flaxman’s figures are especially appropriate. The viewer perceives the construction of the scene unfolding across the sketches. Indeed, while the figures in the sketches are historically accurate, they are introduced for their abilities to role-play. They are poised between their current, lived biographies and the epic, heroic form through which they will come to be known. Latrobe alludes to Flaxman to create an automatic, implicit understanding via a neoclassical aesthetic in which these mortals become timeless for the viewer, even without the prompt of the senior Washingtons wearing neoclassical garb. Further, if Latrobe indeed intends to inspire the imagination through his landscape selection and framing, then his use of Flaxman’s forms achieves a similar result. These figures do not illustrate a historic moment in a known narrative. Instead, they allude to the narratives of Classical epic by means of Latrobe’s appropriation of Flaxman’s Helen for his own Custis. Like Flaxman’s figures, the Washingtons are poised in stillness, contemplating future actions. The viewer’s anticipation is heightened and their imagination set in motion

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by the expectation that these figures will soon leap into action. Latrobe guides his viewer to consider the realities of the dedicated public servant. His emphasis on the beauty of both body and soul exemplified in the young Custis suggests that the Washington family o∑er public moral, as well as physical, models. Latrobe’s borrowing from Flaxman also reflects aesthetic and technical lessons he learned from his contemporary. Flaxman’s works employed Homer’s personages and reinterpreted the social and moral lessons of the epic, alongside its emotional drama, for a contemporary audience. Unlike Flaxman, Latrobe approached the Washington family without the direct interpretive mediation of poetry, though he accessed the epic via Flaxman. Further, Latrobe rendered living figures, rather than legendary heroes interpreted with the benefit of hindsight. His View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West 2 presents one moment that he interprets within a heroic conceptualization of Washington’s life. The household members presented o∑er a typology for ideal personae of the United States, past and present. By carefully crafting this view of Mount Vernon and its inhabitants, Latrobe himself played the role of the epic artist. Lacking the inspirational poetry to give further context to the viewer’s meditations, his watercolors must speak for

Fig. 3.13: John Flaxman, Iliad Plate 8: Venus Presenting Helen to Paris, 1793.

themselves to praise Washington. Latrobe placed himself as a bard, interpreting and identifying the heroic form for his audience, transmuting the hero’s body, and visualizing the trajectory of epic history. In this final image, a seated Washington faces the Potomac. His back straight, and his gaze direct, he is positioned beneath the classicized portico of his mansion, which could almost be a temple facade. Washington’s rigid pose and tallbacked chair recall Flaxman’s reigning divinities in his Iliad and Odyssey prints. Washington reposes, but his bent knee signals readiness to rise at a moment’s notice if action is required. Although damaged, the glowing quality of light across the water and the hills suggests the auspicious rise of a new era. Ships sailing along the river convey the gradual influx of settlement, trade, and civilization. Washington, unperturbed, watches as a young man gestures toward these activities. The hero is confident, vigilant in repose. Custis (Helen) glances over her shoulder awaiting a cue from the nation’s leader. The entire estate, in stillness, bolsters and furthers his resolve, while awaiting his judgment. If Latrobe’s other views of Mount Vernon communicate the bodily experience of his visit, literally inviting the viewer to move through the estate with the artist, this final scene encapsulates what he hopes to communicate as the meaning of the place. Unlike other Virginian landscapes that evoked uncertain and deceptive British associations, Mount Vernon provides a glimpse of a new, quintessentially American, heroic identity. Building on the words of Horace and on Flaxman’s reinterpretation of Homer’s Iliad, Latrobe gives idealized form to this new mode of heroism, which he can articulate only through his familiar aesthetic tools, coupled with Classical associations of form and prose. At Mount Vernon, old and new worlds collide. Present-day heroes encounter epic figures. Augustus meets Washington. Through this fusion, Latrobe o∑ers another philosophical rendering of his own immigrant experience. As he traveled through Virginia during his years there, Latrobe documented what he saw and also used his art to

A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods ·

interpret the environment of the United States. Seen through his immigrant eyes, much of the landscape was familiar. Trees, rocks, hills, and water helped Latrobe connect to his homeland in Europe, as did the related traditions of architecture, landscape design, and urban planning. Nevertheless, di∑erences between the landscapes abound. Latrobe’s writings and images from his Virginian years use the built environment to explore the identity of the United States. The sites deceived and undeceived their immigrant viewers. In these places, Latrobe sometimes felt at home and, at other moments, realized his di∑erence. Even as he struggled for a level of comfort with, and understanding of, the Virginian landscape, he also sought

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to render his experience. In his views of this landscape, Latrobe attempted to communicate his sensations. These are images about place—and about the simultaneous senses of belonging and displacement Latrobe felt as an immigrant artist. They also allowed him to render his senses about the connection between ideology and landscape, a phenomenon most readily understood in the analysis of his final view of Mount Vernon. In studying Virginian landscapes, Latrobe sought knowledge of the new nation to which he had immigrated, since he firmly believed in the relationship between landscape and society. Yet, through the landscape’s lineaments and characteristics, he also hoped to rediscover himself. 

Fig. 3.14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of a group for a drawing of Mount Vernon, 1796.

Chapter Four

Learning to Read the Stones

Within a month of landing in Virginia, Latrobe reversed his understanding of the United States as having a landscape without history, revealing his new perspective in a view of Norfolk. View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk, completed on a sheet of Latrobe’s sketchbook, presents a scene of complete desolation, wrecked by dramatic, violent human action [Fig. 4.1]. Despite the evidence of war, the landscape is peaceful. A large expanse of sky with a delicate wash of clouds fills its upper two-thirds. Low-lying hills hug the horizon. The Elizabeth River winds gently through the middleground and two large vessels sail down it. In the foreground, though, the earth appears gashed open. Scraggly grass tufts fail to conceal a jagged gully. Near the center of the view, Latrobe renders a massive ruined brick chimney in chiaroscuro, heightened contrast pushing it forward immediately toward the eye. Behind it are nondescript, low-lying ruined walls, no longer su≈cient to communicate the form or scale of their erstwhile building(s). Careful scrutiny reveals three additional hearths and chimneys in ruins, located farther o∑ at right. At left, a large ruined building, deprived of both roof and window glazing, gapes at the viewer through empty window frames. Its scale dwarfs the surrounding ruins, suggesting it served a public function. Twenty years before Latrobe’s arrival, Norfolk was shelled by the British, then burned by American forces.⁄ The city was ravaged. In the intervening decades, little was done to repair the area; by 1796, the city was a total loss, ruined chimneys and gashed landscape the only survivors of the Revolution. Still, the community lived on around the ruins. In View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk, Latrobe shows two ships sailing down the Elizabeth. To the left, he sketches the rigging of several additional vessels. His description further emphasizes that the city was not in complete decay. Although his sketch presents destruction, he created it in complete comfort, for “This View was taken near Mr. Whittels [sic] house, between Catharine Street and the river.”¤ The view, then, is perused from behind the window of a Norfolk home. Ruined colonial city and newly regenerating American town coexist. Even in this new world, Latrobe discovered, past and present mingled. Reflecting on the White Cli∑s of Dover, Latrobe considered both their ancient and their current appearance, imagining the landscape viewed by Caesar as well as himself. At Norfolk, he viewed a landscape contested by two embattled British populations. He studied the ruins intensely. In them lied material evidence of a contest of wills and firepower and their motivating ideologies. These ruins present the scars of either civil war or biting revolutionary resistance, depending on one’s perspective. As Latrobe worked to analyze the characteristics of Virginia’s landscape and built environment, he was surprised to realize that they bore the mark of human history. Traveling around Virginia, he identified numerous traces from decades of human struggle. Accordingly, he realized that learning to be American means,

Fig. 4.1 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk, 1796.

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in part, being able to identify history in the landscape. He felt a possessive familiarity with the southern coast of Britain, just as his Virginian companions understood their surroundings, reading therein markers of revolutionary events, noting estates of elite leaders, and preserving personal associations. As a new immigrant, Latrobe lacked such familiarity, and aspired to rapidly acquire it. This chapter considers the pervasive theme of history, often rendered via the presence of ruins, within Latrobe’s Virginian images. By discerning traces of Virginia’s past, Latrobe sought a window to a better understanding of its present and future. These images of Virginian ruins allowed Latrobe to draw further transatlantic comparisons. By connecting and contrasting landscapes through visual metaphors across time and space, he probed opposing feelings of belonging and otherness. He also meditated on the past, present, and future of the United States relative to Europe— finding many unhappy reminders of human violence recorded in the ruins. Latrobe highlighted associations between sites and the transient events driven by human action connected to them, meditating on how places retain cultural memory. His sketches demonstrate awareness that memories may manifest physically, while they also corrode, lose legibility to untrained eyes, and, eventually, disappear. Thus, these watercolors also reflect on the limitations of memory. Latrobe attempts to clarify the nature of places, but also plays with his viewer’s inevitable misunderstanding and limited perceptual capacity. We need a textual guide to successfully navigate the serial images considered here, sets of watercolors created through the spatial technique identified in Latrobe’s Mount Vernon series. Latrobe’s studies of ruins are individually interesting images, but without the mediation of companion texts, the viewer’s understanding of them is limited and even inaccurate. Inevitably, then, these works also illustrate many facets of Latrobe’s own memory, with his perspectives and notes as the guiding keys to the series’ hidden e∑ects. In focusing on ruined landscapes, he may also have been adding a layer of personal meaning, relating to his perceptions of his own shattered self. These Virginian landscapes explore the boundaries, interpretations, and experience of memory within the contours of personal and (inter)national history.

Latrobe’s studies of history in Virginia’s landscape depend on a narrator and on the interaction between vision and text. In them, Latrobe produces art self-consciously engaged with the form of ancient literary prototypes. In ancient epics, the narrator is central. In Homer’s epics, for instance, the poet’s first-person voice speaks to the audience, presenting the story as an individual interpretation. The voice of the poet mediates the narrative, interpreting its significance and alternately praising, mourning, or berating its heroic figures. Central epic figures often are led on their way by the intervention of a guide, whether divine or human. In both Vergil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Inferno, protagonists venture to the underworld only under careful escort. Even heroes have limits and success is dependent on guidance. Heroic figures also often act both as narrators and protagonists. Dante’s poem is a first person account, while Odysseus and Aeneas both receive opportunities to recount their own adventures. Latrobe positions himself in these images in the role of poet, guide, or recounting hero, thus adopting the epic form. As the distanced and reflective narrator, he does not aspire toward personal heroism. Instead, he uses memory and representation to question the value of heroic action and overly idealistic interpretations of history. He creates a visual mode where recollection and meditation can lead to further knowledge. In a philosophic meditation on ruins, he uses these views to reconfigure the myth of the American Eden, as well as the democratic ideals of American citizenship, seeing both as further wounds in the troubled trajectory of history. Even the idealistic legacy of the American Revolution is marred by violence and corrosion, rather than marked by heroism. The previous chapter displayed Latrobe’s obvious enthusiasm for George Washington as a great democratic leader, which alone is su≈cient evidence that he did not intend to condemn the American democratic ideal in his landscapes. Nevertheless, these images o∑er a cautionary, philosophic tale. Latrobe’s viewer is asked to reflect on the morals, progress, and nature of human civilization through the violent traces of ruins, and to seek a more positive future. As mediating narrator, Latrobe uses his images to question the truth of history’s narratives. Latrobe is the viewer’s interpreter of these landscapes, concealing and deceiving while also revealing and clarifying. His viewer must think for him- or herself, maintaining a healthy

Learning to Read the Stones ·

skepticism concerning the historical accounts presented. In his accompanying texts, Latrobe alludes to deceitful histories on both sides of the Atlantic. His images manipulate the interpretive mode of history, questioning its omniscience. This distinction between truth and fiction extended beyond history for Latrobe. In his Virginian years, he considered the contemporary fanaticism for novels, including his own

Fig. 4.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk, 1796.

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fascination with the genre, the deceptions possible in the interactions of landscape and the built environment with viewers, and the insu≈cient or inaccurate information disseminated through the press.‹ In all of these instances, Latrobe conveyed his awareness that skepticism and responsible viewing are necessary in pursuing truth, though he questioned the very existence of reality and acknowledged that knowledge is

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subjective. His images play precisely on this point, creating an inherently subjective viewing process, in which the experience of viewing is turned on its head by narrated mediation that surprises and contradicts the viewer’s vision. These studies of ruins in the American landscape invite broader meditation on the relationship between nature and human civilization. Through them, ideology and landscape become intertwined. Following themes Latrobe pursued at Hastings and Dover, these images invite the viewer’s consideration of the persistent inscrutability of nature, which always, ultimately, gains the upper hand over human action. Thus, whether heroic or amoral, human agency is transient. The positive impact of heroic action remains susceptible to gradual decay and ruin. Latrobe believes in the organic, interlocking nature of existence—human, animal, and inanimate—in cycles of life and death permeating whole environments. His images of decay play a philosophical role. Beyond conceptualizing human history, they allow him to explore, and indulge in, those subjects philosophically consonant with his melancholic reveries. Latrobe closely associated his observations of decay in nature and civilization with his own life. Depicting ruins allowed him to visualize melancholy, a crucial theme for him in this period when he still su∑ered greatly from Lydia’s death, and mourning was an ongoing struggle.› In addition to su∑ering from solitude and depression, Latrobe began to feel his age and complained that his body and mind were joined in a downward spiral. In a journal entry dated April 14, 1797, a few days before his thirty-fourth birthday, he commented: I really believe that in leaving 30 behind me, I am growing old—going down hill in opinions and strength of mind. With my health I parted last September, and am become a sort of valetudinarian, and I think my mind and my body coincide very much in their feelings. For a week together I am sometimes in good health, and in good spirits. I am satisfied with men and things, and enjoy my dinner and my company as well as any body. Then again I am bilious and sick. I nauseate beef and society at the same time, I fancy the country I live in worse in every respect than every other, I hate to work and I detest being idle; I cannot draw nor read nor write nor walk nor sit nor talk nor lay down to sleep with any satisfaction. One very dangerous symptom that attends me is a desire for Novel reading. I get hold of some sentimental rhapsody, and presently work myself up into God knows what sort of impracticable frame of mind: which is fortunately commonly attended

with a total inertness, otherwise, were I to go abroad ‘in these my lunes,’ I should at once establish my character as a lunatic, which is at present only suspected from my strange propensity to read and write. This . . . may serve at once as a symptom and a proof of my disorder, and should [I] ever be very violently aΩicted my friends may be judge of the probability of procuring me relief by observing that its standing is to be dated from somewhere about the 1st of April 1797.fi

This statement is comically overwrought, but nevertheless reflects his deep melancholy. Within a society that regarded his chief pleasures—reading and writing—as deviant, he gradually lost his passions. Deep psychological distress corroded his health and he feared progressive ruin of both body and mind. Latrobe’s fears were not irrational. Sudden early deaths were common among his family and friends, as in society more generally, and Latrobe felt taxed by advancing years. This journal entry witnesses his condition, itemizing his progressive ruin. Narrator of his own troubled life journey, he o∑ered an account paralleled by the introspective, experiential themes of his watercolors. If Latrobe opined personal ruin, he also extended such melancholic meditations to all creation. As is considered in detail in Chapter 5, Latrobe believed that the entire natural landscape grows out of the death and decomposition of earlier life-forms. Looking at a rock formation beside a Virginian river, he prompted his reader to enjoy “delightfully miserable” reflections on this melancholy concept.fl Such ideas integrated Latrobe’s writing and imagery with deep traditions concerning both ruins and melancholy reflection.‡ In evoking a philosopher’s indulgence in melancholy reflections on death and decomposition, Latrobe invited his observer to indulge in melancholy devoid of real su∑ering. Images of ruins allow for deep reflection on dark topics. Intended to provoke melancholy, these works launch their viewers on an emotional or psychological voyage, though one that they may enjoy for a frisson without any real losses. This journey is consonant with the experience of the sublime, through which viewers are frightened by reminders of mortality, but derive pleasure due to their own awareness of their safety. Another aspect of reflective melancholy lies in cathartic emotional probing. As a hero descends voluntarily into the underworld (e.g., Aeneas’ trip to bid farewell to Anchises), a philosopher’s descent into melancholy is similarly

Learning to Read the Stones ·

therapeutic, allowing the exercise of the individual ability to demonstrate sympathy for others and to experience a whole cycle of dramatic emotion without actual su∑ering.° Indulging in “some sentimental rhapsody,” the philosopher of ruins experiences melancholy, which makes use of physical and mental responses to inspire more universal associations. The aesthetic experience, though staged, becomes real through bodily experience and reflection, perhaps thereby a∑ecting the individual’s life. Proper consideration of Latrobe’s Virginian views and, in turn, the landscapes that they interpret, requires the viewer to see things in the right way. The viewer of Latrobe’s watercolors depends on his guidance. Without the labels and accounts he provides, the images of ruins appear European rather than American, and the spatial complexities interrelating the views go unremarked. Similarly, the viewer must understand how to look at ruins, with an attitude and education that reflects training in au courant European aesthetic values. But Latrobe himself also needed guidance through these landscapes. Though his images provide his own reflective conclusions about the sites, he was only able to identify their significance due to American informants. He relied on local interpreters, some of whom he named, for providing accounts of history and for noticing cultural landmarks on the landscape. At times, these locals not only identified details of historical importance, but also helped Latrobe distinguish truth from fiction in accounts he received. As he traveled through Virginia, Latrobe learned about famous and generally forgotten historical details, all captured in some fashion in the landscape. Some stories concerned renowned generals and leaders—Latrobe recorded tales of Cornwallis and Lord Dunmore—while others focused on the su∑ering of anonymous individuals.· From one journey along the Elizabeth, Latrobe recorded a tragic account of the mass grave of several thousand African slaves lured by Lord Dunmore to desert their American slaveholders after false promises of freedom in Britain. The slaves starved while awaiting British rescue. Latrobe and his companions could identify “the remnants of decaying rags [that] still point to the skeletons of many of these miserable victims of the ‘enormous faith of millions made for one.’”⁄‚ Without his guides, Latrobe would have passed the pitiful rags—evidence of many

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deaths—without noticing and remained ignorant of the role played by the clash of empires in the fate of those decomposing bodies. The narrative highlights underlying tensions as Latrobe weighed the actions of both British and Revolutionary American forces. Ultimately, Latrobe’s interests did not concern one single social issue. For example, he did not introduce the above narrative principally to condemn slavery. Rather, he focused on larger forces at play, assessing the social compact binding individuals under di∑erent systems of ordering civilization. Though the account of finding the mass grave finds fault with both warring sides, Latrobe’s closing remark is a pointed commentary against monarchy, using the slaves’ misplaced trust for Lord Dunmore to condemn any system wherein many futures hang on the goodwill of an elite few. As Latrobe and his traveling companions studied the gruesome scene, he again connected the past and present. As a British subject, Latrobe may have had mixed feelings in examining Revolutionary War sites. Too young to have fought, his childhood would nonetheless have been touched by these events. While he pursued a life of the mind in Central Europe, battles raged in North America. Since his mother was Pennsylvania-born and the family had relatives in Pennsylvania, these a∑airs were personal as well as sociopolitical. The Moravian Church took an o≈cial stance of neutrality and pacifism and Latrobe may have heard of pressures applied to the Church by both sides.⁄⁄ Though no longer Moravian, Latrobe’s Virginian texts and images reveal his ongoing pacifist commitment. Latrobe produced no glorious scenes of the American Revolution à la John Trumbull. He highlighted ambivalence and the scars of violence. While he supported Republicanism, his renderings of ruins from Revolutionary America coupled themes of civil war and revolution, reflecting the double-edged sword of combat. The conflicted allusions of these ruined sites may have resonated with Latrobe. In their focus on wartime scars and irrevocable changes to the landscape, his studies guide viewers to see the residue of war on the American landscape. Moreover, the images’ depicted journeys allowed Latrobe to continue exploring the relevance of past events to current society and to speculate on the interpretation and manipulation of history.

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Epic Reflections on Revolution Even rather mundane views of the natural landscape inspired Latrobe and his companions with Revolutionary War memories. As he records, “The scenes which we traversed on our Journey reminded those who had carried arms during the American war of the past dangers and labors, and almost every tree and valley had its anecdote. There are few stones in the country or I should have said, Nullum [est] sine nomine saxum. [No stone is without a name.]”⁄¤ Here Latrobe uses a quote from Lucan’s Bellum Civile (Civil War), an epic poem that addresses the collapse of the Roman Republic and Rome’s Civil War, in which Julius Caesar and Pompey clashed for power.⁄‹ With the citation, Latrobe facilely connects the American Revolution with the Roman Civil War. In so doing, he draws on a tradition to which he had first been exposed in Germany. In a landscape vignette of the area surrounding Königshayn, Count Carl von Schachmann cited the same line from Lucan [Fig. 4.2] to introduce philosophical contemplation into a scene of contemporary nature. As with his other uses of ancient texts, here Latrobe’s selection is not generic, but rather refers to an important literary context. In the text, Julius Caesar futilely pursues Pompey, who has already died. During his travels, Caesar happens upon the ruins of Troy. The Julians had claimed Trojan descent from Aeneas. Thus, for Caesar, adoptive father of Octavian (later Augustus), visiting the ruins of Troy means

discovering his ancestral homeland. However, he struggles to understand what he finds. Troy has been completely overtaken by nature—rocks, trees, and roots grow where the city once stood. Latrobe selects a line from an evocative passage of Bellum Civile, tying his own experiences in Virginia to those of Caesar: [Caesar] walked around the burnt city of Troy, now only a famous name, and searched for the mighty remains of the wall that Apollo raised. Now barren woods and rotting tree-trunks grow over the palace of Assaracus, and their worn-out roots clutch the temples of the gods, and Pergama is covered over with thorn-brakes: the very ruins have been destroyed. He sees Hesione’s rock and the secret marriage-chamber of Anchises in the wood; the cave in which Paris sat as umpire, and the spot from which the boy was carried o∑ to the sky; he sees the peak on which the Naiad Oenone lamented. A legend clings to every stone. The stream trickling through the dry dust, which he crossed without knowing it, was the Xanthus. When he stepped carelessly over the rank grass, the native bade him not to walk over the body of Hector. When scattered stones, preserving no appearance of sanctity lay before them, the guide asked: “Do you mean to pass over the altar of Zeus . . . ?”⁄›

Lucan conjures a vision of ruined Troy, crumbling into oblivion, rotting back into land reclaimed by nature. Caesar (mis)identifies sites, while treading, unaware, upon other sacred monuments. Furthermore, Troy’s history is now legible only through remnants in nature. Lucan refers to “Hesione’s rock,” Anchises’s chamber “in the woods,” “the cave,” and

Fig. 4.2: C.S., Nullum est Sine Nomine Saxum, [1780]. From: Karl von Schachmann, Beobachtungen Überdas Gebirge bey Königshain (Dresden: 1780).

Learning to Read the Stones ·

“the peak.” What appear to be natural features are actually significant markers of Caesar’s ill-fated ancestral city. Even Caesar unwittingly treads on Hector’s grave, requiring the admonishment of a “local guide.”⁄fi In citing this stanza, Latrobe identifies a moment wherein a hero pursues history, but falters in decoding its details. Like Latrobe’s association of the American Revolution and the Roman Civil War, Caesar’s ancestry associates the Trojan War with his current conflict, highlighting the intertwined cycles of history and human su∑ering. Though this account focuses on a heroic protagonist, it also allows Latrobe to select a hero’s encounter with evidence that even the most grandiose actions, such as those recorded in the Iliad, eventually are erased from the landscape. Latrobe toured no Virginian sites as famous as Troy or Rome, yet he found significance in the places he encountered, continuing to intermix ancient and modern history. Beginning with his first Norfolk images in 1796 and through his final Virginian studies in 1798, Latrobe represented Virginia as permeated by history. He cultivated an understanding of the history of the young national landscape that was epic in significance and ripe with historical parallels. Thus, leaders like Cornwallis and Washington could be understood through the historical lens of Caesar or Pompey. In traveling through Virginia and seeking out historic sites—literally learning to read the stones, in Lucan’s terms— Latrobe contextualized his own journey in epic narratives. He worked constantly to assess human society through his own moral convictions. Latrobe’s viewer can clearly intuit his aversion to war through his focus on scarred and decaying landscapes in the place of fallen heroes of glorious battles. Indeed, as considered later in this chapter, the only heroic bodies in Latrobe’s watercolors are of those dead and/or dismembered without having achieved any perceptible good for humanity. Further, Latrobe’s texts and images are both invested in history and reliant on a sense of history as an ongoing interpretive construction. He focused on telling his version of revolutionary history within a larger continuity of human civilization—ancient and modern, British and American. He invited his viewer to experience historic sites through divergent perspectives. By producing multiple views of revolutionary landscapes, which individually o∑er di∑ering

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perspectives and collectively suggest more unified experiences and concepts, he visually recreated his attempts to decode Virginian life. Ultimately, Latrobe’s sketchbook images allowed him to participate in making and interpreting American history, thereby shifting his role from unfamiliar stranger to local guide. The compelling experiences provided by historical landscapes allowed Latrobe’s viewer to understand Virginian scenes through his eyes. Like Lucan’s Julius Caesar in ruined Troy, Latrobe selected the perspectives he believed to be significant. He was not actively performing great historical work as he guided his viewer through these scenes; nonetheless, he interpreted American history. Using the speaking stones of these ruins, he laid a solid foundation for interpreting his American present. History in Ruins Latrobe began sketching ruins in the United States almost as soon as he landed there. Three views of Norfolk, Virginia are his earliest images on American shores: View on the Elizabeth River, Norfolk Virginia; View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk (with which this chapter opened); and View of Norfolk from [Smith’s] Point. This series of spatially interrelated views interprets the landscape as a space of the past, present, and future, while meditating on Revolutionary War ruins. Ultimately, Norfolk, Yorktown, and Williamsburg all furnished Latrobe with inspirational ruins. Neighboring one another, these images of Norfolk immediately follow the Atlantic crossing watercolors. View on the Elizabeth River, Norfolk Virginia, henceforth View on the Elizabeth River, is the first American study [Fig. 4.3]. The view o∑ers a majestic scene of water, trees, sky, and five sailing vessels, the only evidence of nearby civilization. Trees frame the left and right margins, spreading lush greenery across the sky. The sailing vessels vary in shapes and sizes from a small dingy to two large ships, their masts exceeding the height of the surrounding trees. The river flows calmly, its shimmering reflection cutting from the foreground through the middleground. Although the river looks quite wide, Latrobe’s caption emphasizes it is only poorly visualized and is, in fact, substantially broader.⁄fl Latrobe employs quick, sketchy brush strokes for foreground trees and foliage. These free the eye to focus on the detailed rendering of the largest boat and to wander

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down river toward the other ships. This technique simulates the selectivity of live vision, which blurs some objects to focus on others. View on the Elizabeth River seems to capture the dawn of colonial contact, as no human hand is evident on the shore, but the numerous boats approach. Hold this image in mind, for the next sheet, View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk, is dramatically di∑erent [Fig. 4.1]. As already noted, it displays a landscape in ruins. With both images labeled as located in Norfolk, the contrast between them is particularly striking. This point will be explored more fully below. View of Norfolk from Point, a detailed city view of the thriving port, comes last [Fig. 4.4]. Analyzed by itself, it is a straightforward topographical study, showing Latrobe’s skill in this convention. In the foreground, a grassy finger of land juts into the water, its sides eroded by the lapping river. A sandy

beach skirts the edges of the promontory and marshy plants fill the shallow waters. The river cuts across the middleground. As in View on the Elizabeth River, the water is calm and grey, and it reflects both the structures on its banks and the shadows of the clouds above. The city occupies nearly the entire horizon with a thin ribbon of buildings. It appears prosperous and vibrant. The right-hand corner bristles with the masts of ships in the harbor, sails down, resting while they disgorge their cargo. Uniform warehouses fill the water’s edge. To the left of the harbor, the city spreads out with large, solid Georgian houses, and a prominent courthouse spire rises. To guide his viewer, Latrobe includes a key along the margins and a detailed caption below. As far as the eye can see, the land has been developed. A clear blue sky with thin, decorative white clouds fills the image’s upper half. A clearer image of prosperity, civilization, and thriving commerce could not exist.

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These three views might represent completely di∑erent locations. Their stark di∑erences become even more puzzling when Latrobe’s annotations reveal that all three render the city from the exact same location, with the perspective only slightly altered. In View on the Elizabeth River, three trees are shown at right. Latrobe’s text provides the clue: “The trees on the right hand are those behind which the brig appears in the next Landscape.”⁄‡ Accordingly, in View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk, the viewer can recognize those trees as the cluster abutting two ruined chimneys along the riverbank. Now it becomes apparent that the same three ships are in both images. With View of Norfolk from Point, Latrobe’s caption again connects his images: “This View is taken from the point near the 4 Trees behind which the Brig appears in the foregoing sketch.”⁄° Latrobe’s reader/viewer may reconstruct a more complete understanding of the images by following the clues that anchor

and orient the series around the cluster of trees and other recurring elements, details that serve as visual signposts for the viewer on a spatiotemporal journey. These images, like those in the Mount Vernon series, are di∑erentiated based on shifting perspective. View on the Elizabeth River situates its viewer close to the river, back toward the ruins, thus selecting a natural scene. View of Norfolk from Point shifts the view only a few steps from that initial perspective—and transforms the scene. In front of the trees, turned slightly left, the viewer now faces prosperous civilization, not untouched nature. Between these two scenes, Latrobe walks his viewer farther from the riverbank. Facing the same direction, the viewer sees both majestic sailboats and a hint of the thriving seaport as the backdrop to a dramatic view of the ruined city toward which his or her back was formerly turned. For the informed viewer, moving from one image to the next is a

Fig. 4.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View on the Elizabeth River, Norfolk Virginia, 1796.

Fig. 4.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Norfolk from [Smith’s] Point, 1796.

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bodily experience, akin to knowing what is behind one’s back while facing another scene. The viewer must be aware of previous scenes, which maintain meaningful connections across the sketchbook sheets. Latrobe’s deadpan explanation of the relationships between the images does not reflect on the extreme contrast among them. When these images are read as metaphorical scenes across time, not across space alone, their logic becomes apparent. Rather than conveying a panoramic sensibility,

Latrobe creates a sense of the landscape encompassing past, present, and future. View on the Elizabeth River shows the landscape in its natural state, suggesting the first appearance of imperial ships. View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk occupies two historic periods. It is primarily tied to Norfolk’s destruction during the American Revolution, an example of war’s devastation. Secondarily, though, this scene also evokes Old World ruins for viewers more accustomed to ruins in the European landscape. The image implicitly connects

Fig. 4.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of York town, from the beach, looking to the West, 1796.

Learning to Read the Stones ·

American to European history, blurring their boundaries. In the last scene, the viewer encounters a small, thriving city in the present, vibrant with progress and civilization, promising growth and prosperity. The large ocean-faring vessels symbolize Norfolk’s ties to trade networks across the globe. Perusing the three images, viewers travel between past and present, Old World and New World, encountering nature, destruction, and civilization, all readily intermixed and contrasted. These images are not transparently related. They puzzle us with conflicting renderings of one city, moving fluidly through time and space. Voyaging among these images, pausing to read the text, then moving back among the scenes to puzzle out their correspondence is an experience analogous to Latrobe’s immigrant struggle to decipher the Virginian landscape. Unable to categorize what he sees discretely and rationally, his images collectively render confusion. If the viewer is initially discomfited by the contrasts across the images, it is exceptionally rewarding to successfully reassemble three views into one scene, even one that continues to slip back and forth between di∑erent places and times. Latrobe accompanies his watercolors of Norfolk with textual reflections. As his port of entry, Norfolk receives his concentrated attention. He comments, “the ruins of the old houses in this town (which was burnt down in 1776) are almost as numerous as the inhabited houses. [They] are intermixed in every street, and the former give way very [slow]ly to the latter. One cause of this is the di≈culty in pulling down the old walls, cemented together by Shell lime [torn page] [and] a strong mortar.”⁄· He describes a city that coexists with the past; Norfolk’s residents live among the ruins, like centuries of Europeans have. The United States is, perhaps, not as di∑erent as it first appears. Latrobe’s studies of Yorktown, divided between Sketchbook IV and his An Essay on Landscape, likewise show a city scarred during the Revolutionary War. As Yorktown was the location at which the war dramatically shifted in favor of the Americans, this focus on ruins seems particularly notable. The devastation is not immediately evident on first consideration of Sketch of York town, from the beach, looking to the West, henceforth Sketch of York town [Fig. 4.5]. An expansive sky dominates the scene, with the horizon in the bottom

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quarter of the image. The foreground sandy shoreline, bay, and background hill all occupy a thin, low strip. A rocky hill overgrown with shrubbery frames the image at left. A tallmasted ship counterbalances it at the right. Above the view, Latrobe annotates: The first house that appears on the hill to the West, is that of Secretary Nelson. Along the top of the bank appear other houses of the upper town, and the ruins of the British works commanding the river, the embrasures of which are almost filled up. The work on the last hill to the right is seen en profil. The foreground exhibits a work thrown up, upon the beach, which commanded the lower town, (under the third hill) and the whole river. The bank consists of sandy loam, upon a hard red shell-rock.¤‚

The description focuses on British military structures lining the water’s edge. In addition, the house of Thomas Nelson, formerly a Colonial o≈cial, is highlighted. This house features elsewhere in Latrobe’s diaries and images; here, only its chimneys are visible behind the steep slope at left. At Yorktown (a.k.a., “Little York”), Latrobe completed several additional views. Nelson House and Fortifications, Yorktown, a pencil study featuring the historic house and fortifications above the mouth of the bay, is located in his sketchbooks, and was redrawn in the watercolor View at Little York in Virginia within An Essay on Landscape. As the two views contain the same scene, but View at Little York in Virginia is also part of a more elaborate set of images within the manuscript, only the latter is illustrated here [Fig. 4.6]. An untitled vignette that features “Cornwallis’ Cave” is also included in An Essay on Landscape [Fig. 4.7].¤⁄ Though Latrobe does not indicate the location of this vignette with respect to the other views, architectural and topographical similarities suggest the diminutive cabin in front of the cave may reappear beside the cove immediately beneath the hillside on which Lord Nelson’s House and the British fortifications are indicated in Sketch of York town. View at Little York in Virginia contrasts a beautiful summer sky, calm waters, and sailing vessels with a moldering fortress and a large house ruined by cannonballs. The injured building dominates the image. Large holes in its walls stare back at the viewer. A number of smaller structures are located within the fortress walls, but there is no sign of life. The fortifications fill the remainder of the view to the left.

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A rocky embankment, still river, and thin ribbon of land along the horizon fill the right-hand side, all beneath an expansive blue sky. The “Cornwallis’ cave” vignette occupies nearly half a manuscript page. This scene looks out from the front of a small cabin toward the river beyond. Distant sailboats are sketchily rendered against a picturesque massing of cumulus clouds. The small log cabin surrounded by a wooden fence is shown in careful detail, as is the stone surface of the cli∑, rendered

with a reddish hue and rough texture. Cornwallis’s cave, the so-called subject of this vignette, is carved into the cli∑ at the cabin’s left, though at first glance, it appears to be just a shadow, not an aperture. At Yorktown, as at Norfolk, Latrobe o∑ers three distinct images of one site fit together to better explicate its character. Here again the scenes are spatially related, though they do not maintain the clear exchange of glances and tight spatial movement evident in his Mount Vernon and Norfolk

Fig. 4.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View at Little York in Virginia, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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views. The images’ content focuses on the city as a ruined relic of its own history. Yorktown, Latrobe comments, “is half deserted. Trade has almost entirely left this once flourishing place, and none of the ravages of the War have been repaired.”¤¤ His watercolors reflect this neglected state. Sketch of York town presents the city bathed in gentle light and arranged across rolling hillsides, yet this positive setting displays a harbor whose idled ships are without sails. The ships must find a purpose again or slowly, steadily decay into the water. The absolute stillness and peace of this panorama is foreboding. Sketch of York town is a beautiful scene, even though it is pessimistic. The same cannot be said for View at Little York in Virginia and the “Cornwallis’ cave” vignette, which both lack aesthetic beauty. Moreover, Latrobe deliberately makes them unappealing. About View at Little York in Virginia, he comments that the image is “wholly destitute of merit. All that can be said for it, is that it is an accurate representation of a scene of great political importance.”¤‹ This scene’s ugliness reflects Latrobe’s own brutal accuracy in landscape rendering. He could easily have shifted the view to enhance the composition, but chose instead to select a scene that would highlight desolation and the ravages of war. Lord Nelson’s house was at the center of the American bombardment of Yorktown. Logically, this building would feature prominently in any rendering attempting to capture the historical significance of the siege, and Latrobe selected it to focus his viewer on war’s destruction. As if to avoid celebrating the ruins, Latrobe rendered both scenes in slightly murky watercolor, unlike the crisp and brilliant treatment in most of his landscape views, as if such lighting would have been inappropriate for these scenes. Both views likewise seem incomplete. In View at Little York in Virginia, the right half o∑ers only a jumble of ships on indistinct waters, while the cli∑ behind the central cabin fades out behind a vaguely indicated fog. In The Nelson House and Fortifications, Yorktown, we see a fragmented scene, dominated by a war-ravaged foreground landscape. The steep

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drop-o∑ of a cli∑ and partial contours of a fort leave the viewer little possibility of exploring this landscape cohesively. These views are melancholy memorials rather than monumental celebrations. In this way, they resemble the Revolutionary War narratives from Latrobe’s journal, stories more poignant or pitiful than glorious or heroic. Thus, Latrobe’s badly damaged Nelson House, its walls indelibly scarred by cannonballs, stares out from the watercolor, commemorating a shabby structure certain to disappear into oblivion, rather than a permanent landmark.¤› The series progresses with Latrobe’s image of Cornwallis’s cave, which depicts an insignificant cave and diminutive cabin at the battle site, pitiful physical markers to commemorate significant events. The artist was skeptical about all aspects of the site, beginning with its name, “commonly called Lord Cornwallis’ cave.” He asserted, “Lord Cornwallis never inhabited it.”¤fi The site gained notoriety under false pretenses, and history fared no better with local guides. Out of curiosity, Bushrod Washington, who accompanied Latrobe to the site, asked when the cave was dug: “‘During the war,’ said the boy, about sixteen years old ‘And pray,’ said Mr. Washington, ‘didn’t a General, or somebody of the Kind live in it?’ ‘O yes,’ replied he, ‘it was General Washington, or

Fig. 4.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, “Cornwallis’ Cave,” from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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some such Man!’”¤fl Latrobe complained, “Of such materials is traditionary [sic] history made up.”¤‡ The three Yorktown images reflect on present and past with greater pessimism than the scenes at Norfolk display. They correspond to the deep skepticism about historical truth evident in Latrobe’s narrative. At Yorktown, the present is suspended and the past is either ugly or humbug. A final untitled vignette within An Essay on Landscape concludes Latrobe’s assessment of Yorktown [Fig. 4.8]. The mysterious scene is unaccompanied by written explanation. Two figures appear against a slate grey sky and drab, sandy soil. One, a dead man, lies on the ground. A woman has collapsed over his body, perhaps mourning, injured, or deceased. The man’s torso is exposed, but he wears tight beige britches and shoes. His head is shown in profile, his facial features visible, including a distinctly pointed chin and nose and dark, curly hair. His body is laid out in a strained and elongated fashion, arms extended above his head and hands clasped, as if once tied together. It is apparent this man has met a violent death. A smear of watercolor underneath the vignette renders a pool of watery blood: this dignified man has been shot or stabbed. The woman’s identity is completely shielded. Her head hangs down over the man’s body, leaving only the back of it, with dark shoulder-length tousled curls, visible. Her right arm stretches along the man’s legs;

her hand, which hangs limp by his knee, was once curled in a final caress. Her left hand is bent around the top of her head and along his hip. Her fist is clenched. Her pose may once have muΩed anguished tears or shielded her face from violence. Her hunched body is draped in light yellow robes, perhaps of a Classicized style. What is the meaning of this haunting scene? Latrobe’s text o∑ers no hints, merely coupling the vignette with a brief, foreboding statement: “York town is going very fast to decay. It has an excellent harbor, safe from every Wind, but the East. But of what use is an harbor without a trade. The town is now famous only for the best fish and oysters, and the best tavern in Virginia, and for the hospitality and friendliness of its inhabitants.”¤° Once more seeing decay and ruin in Virginia, he predicted imminent collapse, due not to revolution or ideology, but to business. Latrobe saw this future as unmerited, since the city’s inhabitants were good people. Nonetheless, the tide of civilization and the cool eye of business has abandoned Yorktown. Taken in this context, the anecdote of the ill-prepared adolescent guide accompnaying Latrobe’s vignette bodes ill for attempts at building a new industry via tourism. The vignette locates a scene of mourning and violent death in jarring juxtaposition. Latrobe’s silence about the image indicates his wish for it to speak for itself. Two obvious interpretations arise. First, the scene elicits raw emotion. Here, human death echoes the ruin and decay of Yorktown. The association seems appropriate for Latrobe, who similarly meditated on nature and his own body in these terms. Further, one must consider the decaying body. Yorktown was once the scene of heroic action, in which this now dead man may have participated. The death of the hero and the death of the heroic city are thus associated. Second, and more complex an interpretation, is that here again Latrobe models his figures on a thinly disguised work from John Flaxman, which he hopes the viewer will identify. This time he associates, via Flaxman, with Greek tragedy, namely the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s trilogy of plays. This point requires further consideration.

Fig. 4.8: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, untitled vignette at Yorktown, from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

Learning to Read the Stones ·

Latrobe’s allusion is to plate twenty-six of Flaxman’s Aeschylus: Orestes over the Dead Bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus [Fig. 4.9]. Flaxman presents four outlined figures against a virtually blank background. The two figures now familiar from Latrobe’s scene are positioned at the center. Their poses are identical to those of Latrobe’s figures, but the man’s appearance is significantly altered. Here, the prostrate body of Aegisthos wears the thin, banded crown of Greek nobility, which holds back his mop of curly hair. He also has a cropped beard. Aegisthos wears a single wrap of cloth, with a dark band close to its fringe, and a boot or house slipper on his feet. Comparing the two men, it is evident that Flaxman’s Aegisthos is much older than Latrobe’s unidentified figure. Further, Latrobe has updated his figure to the Virginian context by giving him Anglo-American features. Flaxman’s Clytemnestra is nearly identical to Latrobe’s woman, except her shorter hair is less curly and has fallen tidily behind the protective shield of her arm. Latrobe’s adaptations suggest his woman is younger, while also following the Romantic tradition with her tousled mop of long hair. Two standing figures flank the prostrate bodies in Flaxman’s print. A nude man on the left looms over the dead bodies. This is Orestes. He stands with one leg stepping forward toward the bodies, his arms gesture in a sharp diagonal toward Clytemnestra and Aegisthos, and his head slightly inclines toward them. His right hand holds a dagger

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above Clytemnestra’s back. Shown in profile, Orestes’s brow is furrowed, his eye is narrowed in a glare, and his nose is aquiline. Orestes has a robe draped over his left arm and shoulder, endowing him with the dramatic presence of an orator in a heated monologue. Orestes has just avenged the death of his father Agamemnon, killed in a plot by Clytemnestra and Aegisthos on his return from leading the Greeks in the Trojan War. The second standing figure is not identified by Flaxman, but may represent Pylades, Orestes’s childhood friend and lifelong companion. Alternatively, the figure may represent Electra, Orestes’s sister. This second figure surveys the two bodies, with shoulders slightly inclined and head bowed. Fully draped in flowing robes, the figure conveys poetic stillness and mourning. Flaxman’s image does not represent one single line of text, but rather the opening moment of the final act of The Libation Bearers (Choephoroi), the second play of the Oresteia. The story across the trilogy considers complex family relationships, the obligations of husband and wife, public versus private ties, and, most pressingly, the ambiguities of justice and retribution. The Oresteia likely appealed to Latrobe because it plays on the interconnections and fatalistic aspects of history. Indeed, in the scene he reproduces, the tragedy seems about to conclude when, in reality, a next tragic chapter is beginning, for Orestes has gone mad immediately after killing his mother. Further consideration of the relevant scene from the Choephoroi reveals deeper meanings. The third and final act opens as the Chorus presents the bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthos. The Chorus asserts that their deaths erase a blight on their household. Still, the impact of Orestes’s action is not complete. Although he sought closure through ven geance, the Chorus points toward a di∑erent result. The tone starts to shift from ebullient victory to something darker with line 973. Orestes is revealed standing beside the dead bodies accompanied by Pylades and a group of attendants who present Agamemnon’s robe. With its fading bloodstains, the robe bears witness to the king’s murder. Agamemnon was

Fig. 4.9: John Flaxman, Aeschylus 26: Orestes over the Dead Bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, 1793.

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trapped within it, allowing him to be easily stabbed. The dead body of Aegisthos in Flaxman’s image, echoed in the identical pose of Latrobe’s dead man, refers to the earlier death of Agamemnon. After declaring the killings of Clytemnestra and Aegisthos justified, both Orestes and the Chorus consider his fate. In line 1005, the Chorus exclaims: “Alas! Alas! Sorrowful work! You were done in by a wretched death. Alas! Alas! And for the survivor also su∑ering blossoms.”¤· Orestes replies, “Now at last I am present to lament him, as I address this web that wrought my father’s death. Yet I grieve for the deed and the punishment and for my whole clan. My victory is an unenviable pollution.”‹‚ The Chorus sympathizes and reminds Orestes that his tribulations are not unlike those su∑ered by every living human, as life presents a revolving cycle of trials: “No mortal being shall pass his life unscathed, free from all su∑ering to the end. Alas! Alas! One tribulation comes today, another tomorrow.”‹⁄ As Orestes begins to feel the onset of insanity, he exclaims: I think I am a charioteer driving my team far beyond the course. For my ungoverned wits are whirling me away overmastered, and at my heart fear wishes to sing and dance to a tune of wrath. But while I am still in my senses, I proclaim to those who hold me dear and declare that not without justice did I slay my mother, the unclean murderess of my father, and a thing loathed by the gods.‹¤

Orestes’s destiny is unclear, its path uncharted and out of control. He calls on his audience to witness his justified actions along with the onslaught of his insanity. In his journals, Latrobe similarly laments his own powerlessness to fate and asks his reader to witness his growing insanity. The theme of an individual “whirled away” by overpowering forces is also one explored by Latrobe. Beyond the sympathy Latrobe may have felt for Orestes’s personal struggles, he certainly also dwelled on the lessons about history and justice inherent in this narrative. Orestes is encouraged to avenge his father. Arguably, he has no choice, since gods compel him to act. Yet, in killing Clytemnestra, Orestes commits matricide, an unforgivable act. He pays by su∑ering divinely induced insanity and, later, by standing trial. The Oresteia guides its audience to consider opposing forces of evil and heroism. The web of independent action, divine will, and justice introduced here is presented as inevitable.

The audience is unlikely to find it just that Orestes, who is led on, baited, and encouraged by gods and Chorus alike, is burdened with such su∑ering. His victory is an “unenviable pollution.” Instead of receiving a hero’s accolades and sympathy for the required murder of his mother, Orestes meets the hand of unsympathetic justice. Similarly, Agamemnon, who should have earned peace and rest after ten years of war, is killed immediately upon his homecoming. Other heroes whose travels Latrobe followed met with unexpectedly harsh turns of fate as thanks for their heroic services. A twofold lesson thus develops. First, fate and justice are capricious. No clear reward is given for virtuous actions—nor is there absolute certainty about what is virtuous. Second, victory, and especially victory achieved through violence, is never final. Indeed, closure itself is impossible. Tribulation and injustice are built into human civilization. Latrobe’s vignette allows him to o∑er a subtle, but potent philosophical reflection on the melancholy ideas inspired by the ruined city. These reflections rely on the embedded references to Flaxman and to Aeschylus. Yorktown speaks to Latrobe about the clash of human civilizations. As justified as the American Revolution may have been, and as much as he sympathizes with its ideals, Latrobe looks back at this battleground and sees it as the catalyst for other sad events. For example, the loss of life at Yorktown and eventual Colonial victory were precursors of the French Revolution and, thus, of the Terror. The allusions in this vignette are not limited to the web of cause and e∑ect, of action and reaction, to be drawn from the minutiae of this specific battlefield. By omitting all text, yet making a clear visual reference to Flaxman, Latrobe o∑ers an ageless image with the potential to speak timeless truth. He renders an unspecific scene of mourning and death that connects the present to the past, linking Europe and America, and utilizing a diminutive watercolor as a monument to the endless tragedy of human civilization. The figures remind the viewer that ruins of human action do not lie in crumbling stones alone, but also in bones and sinew. Glorious deaths are well remembered, but they do not always create the familiar idealized scenes. Here, the figures lie in their blood, unremarked and unidentified, splayed across the pages of Latrobe’s manuscript.

Fig. 4.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of Lord Botetourt’s mutilated Statue Wmsburg, undated [probably 1796].

Learning to Read the Stones ·

Against Heroism Latrobe makes his ambivalence toward both heroism and ideological action further evident in describing his encounter with Williamsburg, the colonial capital of Virginia. Here he saw one of the few monumental sculptures in the young United States, now in ruins, but having once stood in grandeur at the Capitol. Latrobe visited Williamsburg directly after seeing Yorktown. The city perfectly complemented his melancholy frame of mind: “the capitol is a heavy brick pile with a two story-portico towards the street the wooden pillars of which are stripped of their Mouldings and are twisted and forced out of their places in all directions. They seem to be perfectly rotten, and I am astonished that the pediment and roof still stands.”‹‹ Once one of the

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grandest buildings in the British Colonies of North America, the Capitol now had good company in its collapse: “This is not the only proof of the decay of Williamsburg. The Court house, which stands on the North side of the street, has lost all the Columns of its Portico, and the Pediment sticks out like a Penthouse carried only by timbers that bind into the roof. Many ruined and uninhabited houses disgrace the street.”‹› To add to the drama, Latrobe encountered the first beggar he had seen since his arrival in America. Though he first rebu∑ed the man, suspecting he lacked a “usual and legal licence to beg,” Latrobe learned the impoverished Frenchman was especially down on his luck, because Williamsburg was itself bankrupt and he had gone for nine months without the city paying him poor relief.‹fi

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Burdened with a sick mother and a large family, the man, a barber, now begged on the streets of the decaying city. Latrobe, faced with this tale from a once-hopeful immigrant, gave the man an o∑ering and resumed his tour, closing his day with a fine dinner and “many civilities.” The city, however, had made its impression. At Williamsburg, Latrobe concentrated on documenting a ruined public statue, which he visited in “Mrs. Hunt’s garden,” where he found it “in a very mutilated state.”‹fl An undated watercolor sketch, View of Lord Botetourt’s mutilated Statue Wmsburg, probably created in July 1796, presents the violent iconoclasm of revolutionary fervor as displayed in the statue, which is represented inside a ruined chamber [Fig. 4.10].‹‡ The room was partially open to the elements and damaged plaster exposed brickwork and supporting panels. The ground was scattered with debris, including irregular piles of bricks. Although Latrobe mentions having seen the statue within “Mrs. Hunt’s Garden,” he seems to show it within the ruins of Williamsburg’s Capitol.‹° He may have repositioned the sculpture to juxtapose it with its original location, but reflect the current ruined condition of the structure. Most striking is the subject of the image, the statue representing “Lord Boutetourt,” which stands just o∑-center, positioned on a highly ornamented pedestal that Latrobe also studied separately in another, more detailed pencil sketch.‹· The full-length marble sculpture poses proudly, with one arm jauntily pulling back a robe to reveal a weapon hanging at its waist. One leg strides forward and the torso leans dynamically forward. Fashionable shoes, tights, and britches are finished o∑ with a lace-fronted shirt and prominent buttons. All is not right, though. Between the hero’s legs, a pile of displaced bricks threatens to trip him. His right hand is missing. Most troublesome: he is headless. Decapitated, the sculpted body loses its original purpose—to represent the likeness of an illustrious governor. Instead, it becomes a graphic suggestion of the violence with which politics can be visited on bodies. Latrobe’s written commentary, unfortunately, has been damaged, but he accompanies the sketch with transcriptions from the statue’s pedestal. The most e∑usive passage on the pedestal justifies the State Assembly’s commission of the statue, thus: “America! Behold your friend, who leaving his

native Country, declined the additional honors which were there in store for him, that he might heal your wounds, and restore tranquility and happiness to this extensive Continent: with what zeal and anxiety he pursued these glorious objects, Virginia, thus bears her grateful Testimony.”›‚ The text emphasizes the sacrifices made by this British aristocrat for the good of the Colonies. Ambitiously, it suggests that Virginia’s governor could “restore tranquility and happiness to this extensive Continent.” Botetourt is a hero on par with Augustus, promising widespread peace and prosperity. Further, this statue exposes the public to “those many public and social Virtues which so eminently adorned his illustrious Character,” allowing them to emulate Botetourt’s model.›⁄ The inscription optimistically concludes: “Let Wisdom and Justice preside in any country the people will rejoice and must be happy.”›¤ The pedestal also features a sculptural relief, which Latrobe describes as “a very clumsy Brittania, and an illmade America [who] unite the Olive and the laurel over the altar of Concord.”›‹ Unconvinced by the inscription, Latrobe comments that it “remained the libel of the country and age,” force-feeding its audience deceptive propaganda.›› Latrobe may have expressed himself so vehemently due to the political inclinations of his correspondent Robert Goodloe Harper, but his statements also reflected his dislike for government attempts at suppressing political discourse.›fi Praise for Botetourt equated to denying the injustices inherent in the British Colonial system. Given this preamble, a viewer may assume that the mutilation of Botetourt’s statue occurred during the Revolutionary War. Instances of such iconoclasm have been recorded and the inscription’s pompous rhetoric would surely have had incendiary potential. Furthermore, as Joan Coutu notes, the commission for Botetourt’s monument was repressive and backward from the outset and it only succeeded because a group of moderates sought to perform an end-run around a proposal from a more radical faction.›fl The statue reinforced an idea of American liberty as a subset within British liberty and was meant to silence opposition to the commission and its politics.›‡ The vote of artificial unity to commission the statue, fabricated by an assembly composed of British aristocrats, would certainly have been unpalatable to Virginia’s revolutionaries and made the statue a target.

Learning to Read the Stones ·

However, the statue survived the Revolution unscathed. It remained in the old Capitol at Williamsburg when Virginia named Richmond its new capital and abandoned its colonial center. The statue might have remained intact if not for the excitement of students at the College of William and Mary over news of the French Revolution. Bemused, Latrobe commented to Harper, “Lord Boutetourts statue had remained untouched during the whole war, was mutilated, and decapitated by the young collegians, in the first frenzy of French revolutionary maxims, because it was the statue of a Lord.”›° Reflecting further on the actions of these vandals, Latrobe elaborated: “[Damage?; Outrage?] upon the Statue of Lord Bottetourt was com[mitted by] students of the College whose names deserve recording infamiae causa [for infamy’s sake], as it was a deliberate act of Barbarism. It was done about the time the French disease had its largest scope, and a Lord, a harmless thing in America became the detestation of a few puppies.”›· Latrobe’s commentaries reflect some degree of internal conflict. On the one hand, he was not particularly interested in celebrating aristocracy. His statement that a Lord is “a harmless thing in America” does not seem entirely genuine. First, it recognizes that an aristocrat is a threat (rather than a benevolent force). Second, it presents such a powerful man as dangerous in the face of an immature populace (a few puppies), which would naturally belie the safety of a nobleman’s presence within the immature nation. Further, the characterization of collegians as “puppies” presents these young Americans as irrational and prone to an aggressive pack mentality. If Latrobe balks at heroic representations of aristocracy, he also feels little sympathy for the ebullient sympathizers of the “French disease.” Latrobe pushes his criticism further, condemning the masses and politicians alike. Reflecting on minor damage done to Jean-Antoine Houdon’s statue of George Washington, Latrobe writes: “General Washington’s statue in Richmond has already lost a spur. We know that his virtues are hated, by fools and rogues, and unfortunately that sort of animals crawl much about in public buildings.”fi‚ The Botetourt statue is not at fault for the violence done against it. As captured in mutilated form by Latrobe, it becomes another marker for melancholy reflection, symbolizing violence, irrational justice, and unpredictable webs of history in which human civilization is enmeshed.

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Preserving History A few months later, Latrobe traveled to another specimen of ruined Virginia history, Greenspring, the former estate of Governor Sir William Berkeley (1606–1677), owned in Latrobe’s time by William Ludwell Lee (1775–1803).fi⁄ Here, Latrobe found another civically significant Virginian building and more Revolutionary War memories. His sepia-toned view of Greenspring is haunting [Fig. 4.11]. The large, ungainly structure recedes across the middle of the page, with small outlying wooden cabins beyond. A faded blue wash provides an anemic backdrop. Light bathes the front wall of the house and a fence separates the foreground yard (where the viewer is positioned) from the rest of the estate. The numerous windows, asymmetrical porch, and odd second-story entrance all indicate that the building grew over the course of time, with little forethought. Two cracks on the exterior wall indicate its current delicate state. In the upper right-hand corner, Latrobe writes only “built 1620.” In his journal, Latrobe devotes an extended discussion to the building and its historical context. Not surprisingly, his principal interest lies in reflection on its ruined state, which he vividly describes: Greenspring is well known in the history of the American war having been the Scene of an action between part of the American army under General Waine [Anthony Wayne] and the British under Lord Cornwallis in which the Americans were defeated. The British did no great damage to the building. They destroyed however a quantity of Tobacco which had been housed in a large . . . barn, and having hauled out a boat which was also secured in the same place they set fire to it. . . . The massive ruins of the barn remain a proof of the superior value of this plantation and former days when Jamestown was the Capital of Virginia. The principal part of Greenspring house was erected by Sir William Berkeley . . . It is a brick building of great solidity, but no attempt at grandeur. The lower story was covered by an arcade which is falled [sic] down. The porch has some clumsy ornamental brickwork about it of the stile of James the 1st.fi¤

Latrobe characterizes the building as vernacular in form and outmoded in style. Though solid, it is in severe disrepair. The new owner of the house, a young man “born in England, but came to Virginia very young,” who had inherited the property through matrilineal descent, seems ready to reverse the property’s progressive decline. Latrobe’s journals assess some positive aspects of the estate (especially its excellent spring) and

some negative attributes (its state of decline and large mosquito population). After Latrobe converses at length with the young owner, he reflects unhappily on the likely demolition of the mansion. Though probably the most rational action economically, he wonders if demolition is nevertheless misguided, noting: It is Mr. Lee’s intention to pull down the present mansion and to erect a modest Gentleman’s house near the spot. The antiquity of the old house, if in any case, ought to plead in the [project?], but its inconvenience and deformity are more powerful advocates for its destruction. In it the oldest inhabited house in North America will disappear . . . Many of the first Virginian assemblies were held in the very room in which I was plotting the death of Muskitoes.fi‹

Latrobe communicates his experience of how a structure could hold on to historic memory. Although his current actions in the house are trivial, the room in which he writes reminds him of more significant events. Further, the building

may communicate with visitors about the lifestyles and activities of earlier inhabitants. He does not make explicit comparisons to Europe, but Latrobe may well have felt this tour of Greenspring resonated with his earlier life experiences, learning history and culture through the examination of landscape and architecture. On this property, even the massive ruined barn documents the history of the encounter between Cornwallis and American troops. The mansion house witnessed both public and private Virginian history. It interwove events of Colonial history with those of the Revolution. Latrobe juxtaposes histories of the Colonies and the Revolution, reminding his reader that if Governor Berkeley had not held his successful assemblies in the statehouse and managed to keep the colony afloat, then the events of Revolutionary American history would never have occurred decades later, some of them on the Greenspring property. Here is a site, like the ruined stones of Troy, which communicates with Latrobe

Fig. 4.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Greenspring, home of William Ludwell Lee, James City County, Virginia, 1796.

Learning to Read the Stones ·

through layered and diverse historical associations, accentuating the reactive and causal nature of historical progression. Despite the weight of history at Greenspring, the mansion was demolished. Latrobe collaborated briefly with Lee concerning designs for the new home, a joint endeavor of a few days. Concerning Lee, Latrobe comments, “as his meanness seemed to grow upon him daily, I found it impossible for me to bend my ideas, to a compliance with his mode of procedure with his workmen. I therefore declined any further connection with him.”fi› On the historic site, Latrobe watched a harsh man oversee slaves in the construction of a new house. And so Greenspring receives its final sendo∑ in Latrobe’s journals. This site of Colonial and Revolutionary history is now reduced to a harsh new reality, which forces Latrobe to confront ongoing injustice and maltreatment. If history is humbug, and heroism suspect, then the realities of the young United States are evidence of the failures of its own egalitarian ideals. History’s Residue in the Landscape As he traveled around Virginia, Latrobe soon realized that it holds a landscape with deep history. Here, as in Europe, “even the stones” could speak, though they found a small audience. Latrobe’s renderings of ruins in Virginia, and his journal descriptions and meditations about these sites, reflect his indulgence in melancholy during his first immigrant years. By considering the decomposition, ruin, and collapse of historic sites, Latrobe rendered a history for the United States that was neither heroic nor idealized. Instead, his images narrate the Revolutionary War as yet another sad stage on the continuum of history. The war—considered by Latrobe as both a revolutionary and a civil war—was not a glorious moment for humanity, but another violent instance of the shattering of places and people. Latrobe’s are pacifist images. Yet, they also recognize such violence and recurring injustice as inherent in civilization; ruin, decomposition, and death are inevitable and perpetual. Only on such foundations can a new civilization begin to grow, but its novelty will be mitigated by the residue of the old. Latrobe likened his reveries on Virginia’s ruins to the passions, disappointments, and struggles reflected in ancient literature. Although his melancholy views depicted the young United States, Latrobe’s references to Classical literature and

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personages allowed him to draw further conclusions about the significance of his encounters with its places, interpreting them within a new and enriched context. Beyond communicating lessons about one individual site, or one historic figure, his scenes convey general, di≈cult concepts. If his Atlantic views seek positive associations in the epic mode, and his landscapes help consider the ideal of the justum vir [“virtuous man”] in a promising new land, then Latrobe’s views of ruins assess the nature of tragedy. Here, the result of victory is unenviable pollution. The reward for heroism is decapitation. The New World is by no means fresh. It is tangled in the same struggles as the Old World. As Latrobe learned to read the stones of Virginia, he found social and moral continuities between his old and new homelands. This discovery was not a happy revelation. It may have contributed to his overall state of frustration and depression. In his realization that the United States could not possibly live up to the idealistic tenets on which it was founded, Latrobe testified to both bodily revulsion and near-complete mental and physical paralysis. His creation of views such as his studies of ruins responded to, indulged in, and may have helped resolve these reactions. Unswayed by idealistic rhetoric and promises of a new social compact, Latrobe found in Virginia the residue of violence, war, and self-serving politics. Instead of a new and thriving landscape, he found indelibly scarred cities. Attempting to renew themselves in the wake of revolution, the Virginian cities as Latrobe represented them are haunting ghosts. In this battered land, he sought refuge for his own damaged self, but he believed that he detected his own further decline. Indulging in a melancholy reverie, his scenes o∑er his own astute, selective study of Virginia in ruins. These are sympathetic and therapeutic views on his own sorry state. As he guides his viewer into these works to meditate on the sad underbelly of history, he also opens a window into his own sadness. In some fashion, then, these scenes of Virginian ruins represent Latrobe’s first attempts to render his earliest connections to the landscape. In these places, unlike the aspirational interiors of Virginia’s would-be British country gentlemen, Latrobe found sites that complemented his fractured sense of self. Like Lucan’s Julius Caesar returning to find the ruined remnants of his ancestral citadel, Latrobe found a home in the ruins of America. 

Chapter Five

Stage Tricks for Landscape

When I see in every part of our earth, such a confused and disordered state of its materials as is every where exhibited, such a jumble of finished workmanship as appears in all our chrystalyzed [sic] rocks, mingled with the wreck of ancient forests, and the petrified remains of sea and land animals, I could fancy myself imprisoned within the Walls of an old Cathedral . . . the fretted roof of which is broken down, the columns fallen, and the shattered pavement covered with rubbish. Every attempt to clear a way through the ruin, bares the bones of some being that had once life like myself . . . The World indeed, is a great Cemetery; every thing is composed, and is upheld by the decomposition, and destruction of something else; and the gay tapestry of every spring, veils the murders of all the preceding seasons! What a glorious subject for melancholy! How delightfully miserable might not a philosopher make himself by indulging such a cogitation. It is well that you Ladies are not often philosophers of this sort; but if you were, you would soon discover, that in the succession of being, to which our short sighted language has a≈xed the terms death and destruction, consists the perpetual renovation of youth, and the eternal round of the pleasures of varied sensation.⁄

Latrobe’s exclamation on the cycles of nature in An Essay on Landscape, explained in tinted Drawings, henceforth An Essay on Landscape, was inspired by an unassuming rock formation perhaps discarded by workmen alongside the James River, which he also rendered in an untitled vignette, henceforth Rocks on the James River [Fig. 5.1]. In the image, two rectangular stone slabs emerge from a grassy embankment. Long, straight cracks scar them, reflecting either natural or human-inflicted breakage. The formation’s appearance is subtly pleasing, with translucent ochre, plum, and spots of blue, all set o∑ to advantage by a brilliant blue sky and faint flu∑y clouds. Latrobe captures the likeness of these stones, although they are not remarkable. His words clarify that this small vignette is intended to launch a viewer into introspective fancy. Humble in scale and subject, this image links Virginian rocks with philosophical reflective content of global relevance. Here, watercolor techniques Latrobe refers to as “knacks,” consisting of formal and technical manipulations, are employed to elevate a prosaic object to grander associations.¤ Latrobe explains that these knacks could perform manipulations and deceptions akin to magicians’ stage tricks, achieving profound reactions from an audience. The text and vignette together open a window into Latrobe’s thoughts concerning watercolor practice. An Essay on Landscape, in which Latrobe delivers his grim view of the world characterized by bones and decomposition and captured in the “glorious melancholy” of watercolor, o∑ers his personal insights into his own watercolor theory and praxis. A two-volume illustrated manuscript, the first volume was completed and signed in Virginia on September 1, 1798, and the second on April 1799, after Latrobe’s relocation to Philadelphia.‹ He penned the manuscript as a remote instructional tool for his student Susan Catherine Spotswood

Fig. 5.16 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Venus Flycatcher vignette from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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140 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

(1774–1853). It contains information about producing landscape watercolors, selecting and developing an artistic style, and reflecting on and shaping the meaning of landscapes. The circumstances under which Latrobe came to write this manuscript for Spotswood remain a mystery, but some background information assists in interpretation of the text. Spotswood hailed from one of the most elite Virginian families; her father was lieutenant governor.› No archival sources have been uncovered to explain Latrobe’s relationship with the family, but he clearly served as Spotswood’s tutor in watercolor while living in Virginia. He may have worked on this project for money, out of friendship with the family, or possibly due to a romantic interest in Spotswood.fi When he left the state, he completed his commitment with the production of the manuscript. Although the manuscript is missing a few pages, it was carefully preserved, and Spotswood may have used it for ongoing reference. A memoir noted that Spotswood (then Mrs. Susan Catharine Bott) was appreciated later in life for her artistic skills, which “she turned to very valuable account.”fl The author left a tantalizing testimony to an extant body of her work in Southern collections, noting: “Her exquisite taste has been carefully cultivated; and in drawing, painting and fancy work, in which her mother also excelled, she has left mementoes in many a household of Virginia: frail, but beautiful monuments, at once of her skill, industry, and benevolence.”‡ In requesting that Latrobe tutor Spotswood in landscapes, her family may have sought to o∑er their daughter an education on par with that of elite women in Britain. Latrobe is not known to have taught other students, but it is reasonable that he could have supplemented his income in this fashion on other occasions. There is no indication that the two had further contact beyond the completion of the essay, nor is there any known correspondence between Latrobe and other members of her family. Latrobe’s vignette and passage, which are found in the second volume of An Essay on Landscape, conform to this larger project. He comments that Spotswood should understand the vignette as an example of “negative instruction,” since it

“has many faults, of which the principal is a total want of ease and lightness in the foliage.”° Yet, the image has positive instructional value, since the “management of light has succeeded better, and it is chiefly owing to that, that a single tree, a spout of Water, and a few Rocks yield a not quite uninteresting picture.”· The knack that Latrobe employs here is the manipulation of light, by means of which the viewer’s attention is captured and brought directly to the avowed intellectual heart of the image—the reflective fancy this specimen should trigger, as the mind travels through the spheres of natural creation. Latrobe’s pedagogical purpose and his intellectual artistic interests are incompatible due to his opposite gender expectations for male teacher and female pupil. Commenting that women rarely have deep philosophical abilities, Latrobe reveals that his modest study of rocks will only fully achieve its purpose if scrutinized by a melancholy philosopher, a figure coded male and aligned with Latrobe rather than with his female pupil. As this example suggests, An Essay on Landscape is an instructional text but, more profoundly, also a record of Latrobe’s aesthetic and philosophical principles. It introduces his thoughts on the making and meaning of art from his earliest student experiences and observations. It builds on his travels and observations, moving easily among Germany, England, and the United States. Most significantly, it o∑ers reflective passages, such as the discussion of Rocks on the James River, revealing Latrobe’s emotional, psychological, and intellectual relationships with his watercolors. Indeed,

Fig. 5.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Rocks on the James River from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

Stage Tricks for Landscape ·

An Essay on Landscape is his most significant account of the making and meaning of watercolor. This chapter o∑ers the first extended analysis of Latrobe’s watercolor theory and methodology in An Essay on Landscape, which closely associates the images it contains with theoretical ideas about watercolor. Once understood through this manual, these concepts can reveal deeper meanings in many of Latrobe’s watercolors. Further probing of the opening passage and its accompanying vignette can give a sense of the sweeping significance of this manuscript to understanding Latrobe’s images. Here, he describes his modest vignette as a perceptual and intellectual trigger for reflection. A seemingly insignificant natural detail from Virginia guides his reflection on European ruins. His vignette o∑ers a memento mori, a landscape filled with the bones and residue of past life. As Caesar unwittingly trampled the sacred remains of his ancestors in Troy, Latrobe characterizes his sensitive landscape viewer as locked in an ongoing, unexpected encounter with a chain of being, juxtaposing the animate (human, animal, plant) and inanimate (stones, water), as well as the living and dead. If such profundities can derive from viewing a few rocks, then a reflective artist rendering nature in any genre has essentially limitless power to guide his or her viewer toward significant content. Through his collection of comparisons, discussion of artistic knacks, and wide-ranging reflections on history, nature, and humanity, Latrobe composes a text in which many of his preoccupations between 1795 and 1799 are brought together. In discussing the creation of landscapes, Latrobe articulates his own artistic philosophy. The arc of An Essay on Landscape is shaped by personal experiences and in it Latrobe’s narrative voice is cast as that of a melancholy philosopher-artist. Indeed, throughout An Essay on Landscape, Latrobe maintains a modest and self-deprecating voice, highlighting his amateur status and limited artistic ability.⁄‚ He conceals his concerns with substantive theoretical and aesthetic content by framing them with biographical examples. The form of the manuscript belies his modesty. It is an ambitious, illustrated text, with a significant theoretical platform. It reveals deeply personal motivations for practicing watercolor, including the psychological and intellectual value Latrobe found in artistic creation. Conversational in tone and personal in its anecdotes,

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the manuscript opens a window into his mind. Elsewhere, Latrobe rarely wrote about his watercolors, and only occasionally elaborated on the intellectual themes built into his works. In An Essay on Landscape, he creates multiple opportunities to glimpse the workings of his artistic mind. Both author and illustrator of the text, he acts as guide throughout, leading the reader through the inner logic of his mind and the images it produced. Latrobe seizes the opportunity to work through his own situation, using intellectual and philosophical models. Ostensibly a pedagogical tract, this manuscript is also a prose epic. Through its contours, the artist-hero weaves a semi-autobiographical account, shaping an argument around his aesthetic, moral, and philosophical ideals. An Essay on Landscape is one of three significant illustrated manuscripts Latrobe penned at the end of his Virginian residence.⁄⁄ Collectively, these manuscripts bring closure to his immigrant transition, framing his observations, experiences, and artistic practice so as to launch him into his new life in Philadelphia. All three manuscripts illustrate ambitious aesthetic programs in which their images sometimes work in concert with their text and sometimes explore content beyond the scope of their written narrative. These documents also unite many of Latrobe’s observations, experiences, and creative endeavors from his immigrant years into a coherent conceptual and artistic project. Latrobe produced all of these manuscripts during the months in which he contemplated, and finally executed, a move from Virginia to Pennsylvania. If his studies of Virginia’s houses and ruins allowed him to think through his first transitions to the country, then these three texts were completed during a period when his thoughts on the American landscape had matured and during which time he sought to adapt his creative and professional ideas for the American scene. The particular intellectual stakes of An Essay on Landscape center on watercolor’s unique artistic potential, and on the artist-architect’s personal theories about, and emotional investment in, his own watercolors. Through the illustrated prose epic form, Latrobe lays out in this work the dramas, struggles, and aspirations behind his artistic practice. Certainly intended for his student’s edification, Latrobe’s manuscript nevertheless centers principally on its creator’s needs.

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In laying out a roadmap for the value of the “stage tricks of landscape,” Latrobe evaluates his artistic endeavors. Like his watercolors, this text is an experiment for considering the nature of vision and identity in the American landscape. Importantly, it enabled Latrobe to practice an authoritative, theoretical voice regarding aesthetics in his adopted land. Almost a manifesto, this work may be most significant in that it helped Latrobe think through the value and form of landscape in an American context. He aimed toward a theoretical structure in which Virginian landscapes could coexist with European sites and European landscape theory and practice could evolve within the American context. This manuscript represents Latrobe’s first explicit adaptation of his intellectual and aesthetic paradigms to the young United States. To construct this creative platform, he exploited his experiences from his self-perceived epic journey of immigration. It has been observed that in his fluent use of American landscape scenes and adaptation of European landscape theory to the American context, Latrobe “anticipated the possibilities of such adaptation well before the commercial drawing books could transmit them.”⁄¤ Even though many ideas in the manuscript are derivative or adapted from preexisting European texts, the work is innovative for its close attention to the American context. Here, An Essay on Landscape will be assessed in two parts: first, introducing its overarching organization, textual stakes, and formal concerns, and the accompanying watercolor images; and second, tracing its philosophical and autobiographical themes. Finally, these two strains of the text will be united to consider the theoretical and personal content of the text. The Knacks of Landscape Latrobe wrote An Essay on Landscape in a disjointed fashion, sending the first volume to his pupil before initiating the second, thus risking repetition and discontinuity.⁄‹ He completed the text without having access to many basic source texts available in Europe. The only surviving copy of the manuscript lacks its first page(s), and a third intended volume was never written.⁄› Since the text is addressed to a young American female pupil, Latrobe may have felt safe writing informally, certain his audience would not have the sophistication and resources of a European patron. These limitations

make the logic of the text di≈cult to follow and challenge its enduring intellectual impact. Latrobe used his manuscript as an opportunity to emphasize his amateur status vis-à-vis watercolor painting. The document, as an a∑ectionate labor between tutor and pupil, lacks the professional expectations and profile of a publication. As with many of his visual and literary conceits, this framework allowed him to write boldly and broadly about ideas arguably outside his personal and professional purview.⁄fi Further challenges have contributed to the relative obscurity of the manuscript. Long published only within the Latrobe archival publications, its audience has been limited. The manuscript deviates from standard categories, combining elements of a watercolor instruction manual, landscape treatise, and travelogue. Latrobe borrowed at will from di∑erent familiar textual forms to shape a manuscript flouting not only period conventions, but now also crossing academic disciplines, a reality that may explain the incomplete scholarly consideration it has received.⁄fl Finally, the watercolors in Latrobe’s manuscript also deviate from standard instructional models. He used few schematic images and focused instead on landscape studies drawn from his own observations. Further, the watercolors lack a single, coherent visual narrative. Within the manuscript, Latrobe reproduces scenes from his European life, his immigrant journey, and his Virginian years. The images are not chronological and move between European and American subject matter, often inspired by seeming discursive tangents. The text narrates Latrobe’s observations at particular sites, dissects his artistic technique, and reflects on his watercolors’ content and the philosophy behind them. In guiding the young Spotswood, Latrobe also recounts his artistic journey. Across the two volumes, he traces his journey to adapt his European watercolor techniques into an appropriate form for the American landscape. In his second volume, Latrobe first articulates elements of an artistic philosophy for the young United States, and these are accompanied by his first watercolors of the American scene, which adapt European techniques to Virginian places. Just as in his discussion of an immigrant’s need to learn the local vernacular, here Latrobe focuses on teaching a watercolor syntax appropriate for the United States. He positions the landscape watercolor, a medium

Stage Tricks for Landscape ·

closely associated with the British avant-garde at this time, as a type of art with exceptional potential for American artists and viewers. As in conventional drawing manuals, Latrobe includes watercolors and ink sketches devised as tools for teaching technical and formal “knacks.” He strings together a lesson series on the production of watercolor landscapes, in counterpoint to personal anecdotes peppered throughout the text. The ideas in these passages allow him to foreground the medium’s virtues alongside the special significance of the landscape genre. Latrobe’s ambitions for landscape watercolor are elevated; he even asserts that it should supplant history in the hierarchy of the genres. Within landscapes, he argues, viewers encounter the hand of God. They also are o∑ered a sensory space to inhabit in ways both familiar and fulfilling. For these reasons, Latrobe considers “the representation of the Beauty of Nature” worthier than capturing “the actions of Man.”⁄‡ Among the long European tradition of landscape painters, Latrobe names Claude Lorrain as the ultimate model: “words cannot describe his pictures. They live. The spectator can travel in them. They contain the Geography of Kingdoms. His canvass seems inspired. You almost feel the warmth of the sun.”⁄° Following Lorrain, Latrobe challenges Spotswood to use his manuscript to acquire su≈cient “knacks” to communicate observations of nature to viewers in a satisfying fashion. These knacks are “originally drawn from hints which [nature] furnishes,” though they can be overused “in violation of Nature.”⁄· Spotswood’s goal should be to implement composition, light and shadow, and other techniques set out for her, but to rein in her tricks to avoid “an unnatural appearance.”¤‚ The formal elements addressed in the first volume are: composition, light and shadow, and tinting. In the second volume, Latrobe turns to approaches for rendering di∑erent features, such as single trees, clusters of trees, natural history specimens, rock formations, etc. While the first volume focuses on formal art conventions and techniques, the second holds only loosely to its themes. By the end of the first volume, Latrobe digresses to discuss his travels in Europe and the United States and o∑ers anecdotes to accompany his vignettes. In the second volume, the discussion of natural

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elements seems merely a thematic conceit over which he drapes his observations. An Essay on Landscape begins with an in-depth discussion of composition, under the heading of which Latrobe includes such important concepts as contrast versus harmony and imagination versus realism. He explains that these principles of composition drive the entire e∑ect of landscapes and are central to the genre’s rules. He notes that consensus has been established after much trial and error that “the di∑erent parts of a Landscape should be divided into distinct Masses, and so lighted, tinted and arranged, as to produce that comparison which impresses upon the mind their similarities, or di∑erences, and produces the pleasure arising from contrast and harmony.”¤⁄ This rule parallels the direct experience of nature. Its greatest pitfall lies with artists who deviate from nature, producing landscapes in which “it is impossible to recognize the character of the countries they represent in their pictures.”¤¤ Latrobe illustrates positive and negative examples through two evocative passages. First, he describes the authentic experience of the American landscape in a passage inspired by Spotswood’s familiar Virginian countryside. He sets out to make the experience of Virginian landscapes exemplary of the ideal mode of landscape representation. Without an existing oeuvre of esteemed Virginian landscapes on which to draw, Latrobe instead o∑ers a verbal illustration to his student. He guides the reader to wander freely on Virginia’s majestic riverbanks, evoking a living landscape similar to his description of a Lorrain painting: When you stand upon the summit of a hill, and see an extensive country of woods and fields without interruption spread before you, you look at it with pleasure. On the Virginia rivers there are a thousand such positions. But this pleasure is perhaps very much derived from a sort of consciousness of superiority of position to all the monotony below you. But turn yourself so as to include in your view a wide expanse of Water, contrasting by its cool blue surface, the waving, and many colored carpet of the Earth, your pleasure is immediately doubled, or rather a new and much greater pleasure arises. An historical e∑ect is produced. The trade and the cultivation of the country croud [sic] into the mind, the imagination runs up the invisible creeks, and visits the half seen inhabitations. A thousand circumstances are fancied which are not beheld, and the indications of what probably exists, give the pleasure which its view would a∑ord. Having satiated your eye with this prospect, retire within the Grove,

Figs. 5.2–3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Bay of Naples, 1 and 2 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

so that the foreground shall consist of trees, and shadow earth. The landscape is immediately lightened up with a thousand new beauties, arising from the novelty of the Contrast. This particular e∑ect, of seeing a distant view glittering among near objects is familiar to every observer. The Landscape is now become a perfect composition.¤‹

Latrobe describes picturesque experience as he guides the reader through the landscape as if across the surface of a canvas. In addition to itemizing a variety of significant formal landscape attributes, he includes several key pedagogical themes. He introduces the discovery of human history within the natural landscape, using a broad river to prompt thoughts on trade, cultivation, and the impact of human civilization— decisions that trace the “historical e∑ect” within the landscape. He highlights the healthy relationship between realism and imagination; the landscape inspires the mind through suggestion and curiosity. Fancy leads the viewer into barely indicated distances, a source of pleasure. The natural landscape of Virginia is thus interpreted as a fertile source for the mind’s travels through history and fantasy.

Latrobe contrasts this narrative with a European counterexample, drawn from his travels, recounting a tourist trip to the Bay of Naples with an unnamed artist, “whose talent for Landscape was of the first class, whose genius was universal, but who labored under that common disease of men of superior abilities, indolence.”¤› The artist was welcomed in part because his companions expected to enjoy “the delightful representations he would make of the enchanting scenery of this favored country,” but the irascible artist refused to perform.¤fi Later, in private conversation with Latrobe, the artist asserted that he had refused to share his work with the “motley crew” because they would not have been su≈ciently appreciative. To Latrobe alone he showed the twenty penand-ink sketches he had completed on site, which the selfaggrandizing artist called “the most enchanting scenes in the world.”¤fl Latrobe o∑ers three sketches imitating these scenes [Figs. 5.2–4]. They contain only the vaguest signs of landscape features, emphasizing instead larger ideas not present in the

Fig. 5.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Bay of Naples, 3 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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landscape, indicated by Latrobe’s humorous annotations. In the first scene, stick figures at left are labeled “lazaroni at their tricks,” referring to Italian beggars. A boat sailing in the bay becomes “Charon’s boat,” transporting souls into the Greco-Roman underworld. A smoking volcano is indicated, bearing little resemblance to Vesuvius and associated with the underworld by the label “The devil smoking his pipe to a north wind” [Fig. 5.2]. Scenes numbered 2 and 3 include the same volcano motif, with additional humorous labels referring to the mountain, respectively, as “old Nick as usual” and “smokibus” [Figs. 5.3–4]. In the second view, a church labeled “Ave Maria Kyrie Eleison” pits the Roman Catholic faith against the threatening volcano. These sketches o∑er a fanciful, rather than a naturalistic, study of the Bay of Naples. They allude to common artistic tropes, while relating only loosely to the place they purport to represent. Although the originals were sketched on site, they might just as easily have been dreamed up from afar. Though demonstrating “strong Character of bold composition,” the artist’s studies were nevertheless landscape failures in Latrobe’s estimation. A week later, Latrobe returned to study the artist’s finished watercolors. The views were beautiful, but troubling. Latrobe recounted that the artist

Figs. 5.5–6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Landscape 1 and Landscape 2 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

had produced Landscapes, such, as for composition, light, coloring, richness of detail, and correctness of drawing, I never saw surpassed in Water colors. But as soon as my first emotions of admiration had subsided, I discovered the grossest errors in the Geography of his pictures. Islands, mountains, and palaces were shifted about by his magic pencil at random, and the productions of his luxuriant fancy were sold at high prices for ‘View in the bay of Naples taken on the Spot.’ This is not fair.¤‡

The injustice that concerns Latrobe is not the views’ high price, but their dishonest billing as accurate views. The paintings merited admiration as capriccios, not as landscapes. They transgressed imaginative license by becoming complete deceptions. Landscape studies, Latrobe asserts, should help viewers understand the world, not retreat into fantasy. If they deceive, then he believes they produce an unpleasant result. For this reason, he asserts that his pupil should follow him in adhering to accuracy, not ambition, in landscape painting, commenting: “It is to me, I think, a considerable advantage to be a very indi∑erent painter. I shall never be an eminent one, but I hope always to be correct, and I advise you to follow the same rule.”¤° Latrobe includes four additional sketches to explain di∑erent concepts of composition [Figs. 5.5–8]. These, he states, are “not Views of any particular scenes in Nature” and are “successively imagined and sketched as I was writing upon the subject.”¤· They all maintain virtually monochromatic palettes, and readily display their origins in the artist’s mind, rather than his eyes. Latrobe di∑erentiates these first, instructional watercolors from the manuscript’s other views, noting “those that follow were scrupulously copied from views taken upon the spot” to underline that his rules of landscape painting are generated by nature.‹‚ These four sketches illustrate key aspects of the concepts of contrast and harmony. In one pairing, Latrobe o∑ers two negative examples, which he calls “Car icaturas.” They show, respectively, “Contrast perfectly without Harmony, and harmony without contrast” [Figs. 5.5–6].‹⁄ A second pair provides “not unpleasing compositions”

Figs. 5.7–8: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Landscape 3 and Landscape 4 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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through the way “contrast and harmony operate” in the scenes [Figs. 5.7–8].‹¤ Landscape 1 [Fig. 5.5] embodies contrast without harmony, with a thin watercolor wash representing a lighthouse on a rocky cli∑. Latrobe focuses not only on compositional elements such as contrasts (like warm earth versus cool sky), but also on conceptual contrasts of subject: “the Contrast of the danger and roughness of the Cli∑, with the safety and regularity of the building.”‹‹ Latrobe expects the viewer to readily see these contrasts since, for example, observation reveals the lighthouse as smooth, adhering to the beautiful, whereas the jagged cli∑ evokes the sublime. The contrast of beauty and sublimity is jarring for the viewer. Excessive harmony is captured in Landscape 2 [Fig. 5.6], a realistic study of a castle on a cli∑. To explain his process, Latrobe discusses the concepts of “keeping” (defined as the “mode of placing and coloring the di∑erent objects of a picture, that persuades the eye that they are at their proper distances from each other”) and perspective (defined as the science of representing “correctness of position”).‹› Yet, realism is insu≈cient. The artist must consider the full e∑ect on the eye in terms of harmony and contrast, encompassing individual features and overall composition. Thus, in planning the relationship of light and shadow, Latrobe assures his reader, “The imagination will easily suppose objects out of the picture, as trees, or a passing cloud, to occasion a shadow, wherever a painter finds it his interest to have it.”‹fi Such adaptations are not o∑ensive fictions, since they increase the pleasing counterpoint of contrast and harmony. Two fanciful European scenes, Landscape 3 and Landscape 4, fulfill Latrobe’s examples of works with the ideal balance of harmony and contrast [Figs. 5.7–8]. Landscape 3, produced primarily in washes of greys and blacks, moves the eye through the contrasting foreground, middleground, and background. The subjects in each layer progress from a peaceful scene of trees to a fortress’s and a volcanic eruption, designed to demonstrate that contrasting elements can produce a pleasing whole. Landscape 4, produced in sepia-tone washes, is unified in its subject matter, which consists of ruins overrun by nature, while sharp contrasts of form and composition entertain the eye. Latrobe describes a method wherein the painter anticipates what the viewer will see,

associate with, and imagine concerning a work. To convey pleasure through harmony and contrast, the artist must anticipate the formal analysis used by the educated eye to identify content. Having laid out this extensive discussion of composition, Latrobe’s treatment of other formal elements is more cursory. He addresses “Light and Shadow” and “Tinting,” then tires of technical assessments. The first volume of An Essay on Landscape finishes with a whirlwind tour of his own views, paired with personal anecdotes and technical tips. Latrobe’s narratives are considered in the second section of this chapter. At this juncture, he begins to integrate his American landscape views into the academic and pedagogical tradition he introduced to Spotswood. Latrobe discusses Kirkstall Abbey as having been originally composed on the spot in England, and recopied into the manuscript [Fig. 2.31]. He describes the knacks employed: The view . . . was taken looking to the South. The intricacies of the foreground, and the trees are omitted. In other respects it is scrupulously correct. It furnishes an instance of the composition of a Landscape of three Distances or Grounds, lighted obliquely from the back of the Picture. All the surfaces therefore that are towards the Spectator will be in shadow, the light falling obliquely upon those that look towards the West or right hand, and upon the upper surface of the Earth. The whole Landscape therefore excepting these surfaces will be demitone, or reflected light. I have endeavored to give the whole drawing a rich purple cast, as the sun must be low in the West to shine thus upon the building.‹fl

Latrobe clarifies the logic justifying alterations to the scene and the lighting. Eliminating details to focus on the ruins to greater e∑ect, enhancing the composition, he arranges the work around “three grounds,” leading the eye in a seemingly natural progression. The light, shadow, and tone of the work are altered from that which he originally observed, suggesting a di∑erent time of day and other changed conditions. Latrobe claims fidelity to realism, but alters the view to inspire the imagination. He observes that the ruins inspire “a solemn melancholy, that is almost painful,” an e∑ect he complements with a purple sunset, ensuring melancholy reflection.‹‡ In View of the Coast of England at Hastings [Fig. 1.5], Latrobe uses similar formal manipulation to delight the eye while intriguing the mind. He explains:

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This drawing is a specimen of a Landscape consisting of a Scene, which forming the foreground, gradually retires from the Eye into the more distant part of the Landscape. The e∑ect of Keeping is produced by the gradual diminution, of the apparent higth of the Cli∑, and of the depth of shadow and brilliancy of coloring. To assist the Keeping, I have used the Licence of a Painter, in throwing a broad Shadow over the nearest part of the Coast, leaving a brilliant Sunshine upon the more distant. The second Scene, the Hill with Windmills, is kept at its proper distance by being brought down still lower to the horizon, while the line of the straight coast (beach), is made to range, with that of the front scene in the same rising line. This e∑ect is assisted by the contrast of its general shadow.‹°

Latrobe describes altering light and shadow, contrasts, and the location of the horizon. He organizes the view around the push and pull of land and sea, and the eye’s sinuous route from the foreground’s cove to the ocean in the background. As these examples make clear, Latrobe believed that artistic license is compatible with realism and that a judicious balance between is possible. There are, nevertheless, certain landscapes that he felt could never be made visually appealing, though they could still be represented. One such example is in his View at Little York [Fig. 4.6]. Concerning its technical merits, Latrobe comments: As a composition this View of York town is wholly destitute of merit. All that can be said for it is, that it is an accurate representation of a scene of great political importance. But the exclusion of Trees, and of Works of fancy, which is the law of this collection, has rendered the admission of some objectionable Landscapes necessary. I have attempted to make the most of the subject, by collecting the Light in a Mass upon the Ravelin and the opposite river; but though this produces stillness, the piece wants contrast both in coloring and composition. It is too green, and too much made up of parallel lines. It has nothing of what the painters call, pittoresque [sic].‹·

Latrobe again takes liberties with light and shadow to improve the scene’s appearance. In his assessment, these succeed by setting an appropriate tone of stillness and focusing the eye on the broad expanse of the battlements, yet the view fails to rouse the desirable visual excitement of a significant historical scene. Nevertheless, historical significance justifies the view, despite its shortfalls. Latrobe frequently connects a landscape’s appearance and its social implications, and in that sense, the relative benefits of Kirkstall Abbey and View at Little York in Virginia are opposite. The first site inspires picturesque reverie about the

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distant past. The second is tied to recent conflict and the landscape has not yet healed. As an artist, Latrobe could mature and soften his view to give it successful picturesque form. In the interests of truth, however, at Yorktown he elects not to do so. In the second volume of An Essay on Landscape, Latrobe shifts to concerns of style and content, focusing on ways to transmute the watercolor medium to support American identity rather than British sensibilities. Latrobe turns to these concerns immediately, grappling with an example of the conflict of natural identity with deceptive or artificial identity. A sketch captioned “Taste Anno 1620” humorously portrays human traditions of artificiality and deception through a fivefigure group [Fig. 5.9]. Three ostentatious women pose, respectively with face, profile, and back to the viewer. One wears a tall, pointed, triangular hat, symmetrically matched by her unnaturally-triangular torso, with broad shoulders and a tiny corseted waist. The next woman, showing her back to the viewer, displays two elaborate vertical columns of hair. At right, the third woman turns coyly away, flaunting the broad expanse of a wide, ruΩed skirt, a slender waist, and high-piled hair. At left, a man grins a cartoonish smile. Absurdly dressed in a long coat with impractical hanging sleeves and numerous buttons, he wears a broad, curly wig decorated with feathers. He stands with legs splayed, flaunting a fashionable cane and heavy boots. With his left hand, he grabs the arm of a young child of uncertain gender. Latrobe probably intends to represent a young boy made e∑eminate by unfortunate clothing, including a long skirt and an elaborate jacket, and perhaps wearing an elaborate wig, only gesturally rendered. The child’s left hand pulls a wooden horse on wheels. To a viewer familiar with Latrobe’s interest in epic references, this diminutive toy recalls the Trojan Horse. In the sheet’s upper right corner, another vignette shows two elaborately wigged men. One is seated in profile, with an exaggerated, vaguely threatening beak-like nose, reminiscent of Hogarth’s satires. The other faces the viewer, hands beneath his chin in a pose given a sinister edge by the crooked curve of a sly smile. To emphasize the broad implications of absurd fashion trends, Latrobe links these figures’ clothing selections to that period’s artificial manipulation of nature. Along the edge of Taste Anno 1620, he includes a line of seven trees, pruned into triangular peaks. Nearly hidden in the distance are four

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smaller trees that retain their natural crowns. This juxtaposition contrasts authenticity with the flagrant, artificial hand of fashion. These contrasting trees are not simple ornaments, but symbolic accents for Latrobe’s ideas concerning landscape representation. In the representation of trees, he explains, the artist is revealed readily to the observer, since everyone is familiar with trees. An error committed in representing a tree “is immediately felt, when it is perhaps impossible to point out wherein it exactly lies. For, in fact, our perception of it is the result of ten thousand observations made from our infancy.”›‚ If an artist fails to represent trees well, he automatically transforms the viewer into a critic: “We can in a moment therefore feel if the representation of a tree be unnatural, we can hardly ever tell why: for in the infinite variety of forms created by nature, it is highly probable that an original might be found. But having found it, I believe,

that we should be very apt to cut down or trim so ugly a tree.”›⁄ Skeptical of the artist’s truthfulness, the critical viewer reaches for the axe to expose a humbug. Latrobe expands this theme by introducing his philosophical approach toward trees, pairing social judgments with aesthetic decisions. Taste Anno 1620 judges Europe’s fashion history, but is also concerned with future decisions to be made in the United States: It was the fashion in England, and indeed all over Europe less than a century ago—a fashion which our ancestors transplanted hither to admire nature in every shape but her own. In an age, in which the elegant forms of the Ladies were cooped up in Whalebone stays and fenced in by the vast circumference of a hoop, when the Men were confined by ten dozen of Buttons, and smothered by enormous wigs; it would be unreasonable in the trees to have complained of being cut into Cones and Pyramids, twisted into spires, and clipped into Lions and Elephants.›¤

Fig. 5.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Taste Anno 1620 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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In stepping away from natural order, seventeenth-century Europe produced an artificial lifestyle. The young United States, by contrast, stands to benefit from shifting aesthetic values. Reflecting on the possibilities, Latrobe comments: Modern Philosophy, as much as she has been abused for her innovating spirit in politics and religion, has done this good—to banish, wherever she has appeared, that arrogance, which exalting the arbitrary fancy of man above the simplicity of nature, taught us to set a higher value on that which it is di≈cult to obtain, than on what it is useful to possess. In America we have been, in our taste in Gardening, a little behind our scale of improvement in other respects. Till very lately we still loved straight Walks, and called them a Garden, and the few trees about our dwellings which escaped the axe, we robbed of their best property-that of shading us from the scorching Sun. . . . It appears as if the War waged by Agriculture against our forests, had been a War of extermination, and that, while we combated the Nation of trees in our Woods, we had ungenerously extended our enmity to the individuals about our houses.›‹

Latrobe links landscape design with politics, arguing that the nation’s founding principles align with the natural landscape, rather than with artificial gardening styles. However, he cautions against a wholesale preference for modernity over historic traditions. Indeed, he stresses that not all modern political and religious trends end well, alluding to the association of radical aesthetics with political change in the French Revolution. A discerning student must be judicious in applying trendy styles; full knowledge of their social and political basis is vital. Latrobe further explores the correspondence between trees and society in his Studies of Trees, which juxtapose “the benevolence of nature” (a “spreading Oak”) and the “ingenuity of Man” (in “the old arrangement of a Virginian plantation”) [Figs. 5.10–11]. Beneath the oak, a young couple sits comfortably, content in natural surroundings that reveal no human artifice. By contrast, in “the ingenuity of Man,” a well-dressed

man stands under a tree that has been aggressively pruned, leaving a tuft of leaves and no shade. The uncomfortable man holds a parasol and blots sweat from his face. Little is left of nature in his cultivated environment—an expansive lawn has yellowed and even the large plantation house is threatened by unbearable sunlight. So compared, nature bests the “ingenuity of man.” In these examples, Latrobe considers manipulation of the real environment, yet his examples also capture his philosophy toward landscapes. Absent good reasons for doing otherwise, the artist should find inspiration in nature. Stylization and a∑ect lead to absurdity.

Fig. 5.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Studies of Trees 1 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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In his comments on landscape technique, Latrobe avoids close a≈liation with the bravura of ambitious artists, directing his student to take a humbler approach. Truthful art may not meet with equal acclaim, but its products can provide viewers with an accurate sense of place. Latrobe hopes Spotswood will learn to create living landscapes, and be empowered to capture the essence of life in Virginia. The subtle manipulations his technique permits enable landscapes to convey moods and values. Moving from technique to philosophy, the autobiographical and conceptual narrative within Latrobe’s manuscript allows deeper understanding of his thoughts about landscape representation.

Throughout An Essay on Landscape, Latrobe associates watercolor techniques with clear content implications. In his first volume, he addresses elements of formal analysis. In the second, he approaches landscapes as representing whole, interwoven, and living environments. He assesses the treatment of style on this basis. While he upholds realism as a chief goal, he moderates this by encouraging his student to adjust her landscapes in hopes of increasing their visual appeal and psychological impact. However, he cautions against the wholesale embrace of flashy technique; landscapes should always stay true to the character of the places represented.

Thinking, Feeling, and Sketching In An Essay on Landscape, Latrobe o∑ers his most personal accounts of his watercolors. These autobiographical remarks enter the text alongside philosophical reflections on landscape and the emotional relationship with the natural world. Collectively, this narrative allows Latrobe to craft an account of watercolor linked to his own life. Adopting epic prose elements, he gives his manuscript drama and social relevance through detailing his actual and emotional journeys. He links them to rendering the world in watercolor, as well as to establishing a larger philosophy for understanding nature. Latrobe’s ostensible aim is to activate his personal experiences as learning tools for Spotswood. Still, these narratives constitute the most explicit record of his reflections on watercolor practice, revealing a great deal about the ideas and intentions underlying his imagery. Bolstered by his watercolors’ visual narrative, these personal reflections enable the pedagogical text to double as personal testimony on the making and meaning of landscapes. The personal and philosophical journey through An Essay on Landscape is not orderly in its chronology or themes. Instead, personal anecdotes appear primarily as they are appropriate to

Fig. 5.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Studies of Trees 2 from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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Latrobe’s theoretical or topical material, and related to the selection of images. Similarly, this discussion of Latrobe’s personal interjections follows conceptual groupings rather than the manuscript’s order. A small circular vignette on the title page establishes a tone of philosophical reflection. This frontispiece was probably accompanied by a textual discussion on missing pages. The frontispiece shows a young woman seated beneath a tree, observing a waterfall [Fig. 5.12]. A radiant rainbow of mist casts pink and blue hues across a rocky backdrop. The young observer holds her left hand against her chest, an outward sign of inner emotion. She is carefully rendered with distinctive curly, shoulder-length brown hair, a fine porcelain complexion and delicate features, perhaps in an idealized portrait of Spotswood. Her flowing white dress, trimmed with blue, is neoclassical in style.›› Latrobe may nod here to contemporary British portraits, fusing likeness with Classicized motifs and built-in allegories.›fi An accompanying poem, “Spring strewing the Earth with Flowers. Winter flees at her approach” is on the verso: Chill winter, clad in robe of Snow, The dripping fields forsakes The modest Crocus dares to blow, And slumbring Flora wakes: By Zephyrs magic breath unbound Each nymph her fountain fills, And, glitt’ring through the pansied ground, Hasten th’impatient rills: Each love-struck songster tries his wing, And hails the warm approach of Spring!›fl

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(whether artistic or internalized), and the natural environment. In what survives of his introduction, Latrobe argues for the supremacy of landscape over history painting, claiming the contemplation of nature as the highest form of moral learning. Latrobe’s frontispiece embodies this concept, positioning the vignette within the highest order of art, meant to inspire its viewer to turn to nature for instruction. Accordingly, Latrobe’s introduction concludes with an address to his student: “With your talents you may easily acquire the ability to record any striking scene in Nature, so as to renew the pleasure you felt in beholding it, and to communicate it in some degree to your friends. And this is indeed the whole of your object.”›‡ In capturing a natural view appropriately to convey experience, Spotswood will achieve the highest goal of art. As the products of a female artist, Spotswood’s pieces will do their “work” through quiet influence at home among friends and family, not in exhibition. Yet, as becomes evident, the role Latrobe ascribed to his landscapes di∑ers little from his goals for Spotswood’s images. Although writing from a position of authority, he nevertheless questions his fitness to teach and second guesses himself,

Iconographically, the vignette has little to do with this verse. The contemplative young woman di∑ers from the active personages of Spring and Winter. However, both image and verse highlight the contemplation of nature. The image’s natural surroundings reflect those in the poem, working together to conjure a place resounding with birdsong and murmuring water, cooled by winter’s final breezes, and warmed by approaching spring. Experienced together, poem and image are mutually reinforcing. The painted vignette o∑ers a complementary meditation on communion with nature as the young woman experiences the changing seasons. Together, poem and vignette consider the intersection of human experience, fantasy

Fig. 5.12: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Frontispiece from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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lamenting, “in the task I now undertake, I feel myself particularly deficient.”›° Similarly, we recall, vis-a-vis his superlative but mendacious watercolorist acquaintance in Naples, Latrobe found reassurance in his own “indi∑erent” abilities, which protected him from committing serious transgressions. He reflects: My want of skill to teach, has become very evident to myself from the discovery, that I have improved even in making the few drawings, upon which I have bestowed more care than usual, in order that they might not be wholly unfit of your imitation. But I have devoted so small a portion of my time to Landscape, as not to have acquired that command of hand in pourtraying the easy exuberance of foliage, which is in nature, and which is so well exhibited in the works of a skillfull artist. All that I have learnt indeed, has been to sketch, and to give to what I draw a correct outline. To do more, requires not only great practice, but a peculiar native talent, possessed by few, and without which, even practice never arrives at excellence. I believe, if I possess this talent, that it is in a very small degree, but I have never had su≈cient practice to ascertain it.›·

As Latrobe hints, he is unlikely to ever fully develop his potential for artistic genius because of the diligent practice needed to excel. He comments that he has only achieved mastery of the sketch, not of the polished, exhibition-ready view. Thus, he can only o∑er his student a similar modest level of achievement. Of course, he downplays his abilities, distancing his works from the virtuosity of more “skilled” artists. This strategy of self-e∑acement allows Latrobe to remain an amateur, rather than a professional watercolorist, despite his engagement as a tutor. The distinction is important to him.

Elsewhere he asserts: “My profession, though one of the arts to which painting is nearly related, does not depend upon a practical knowledge in either Landscape or figures, and besides, occupies the time in which it might have been acquired.”fi‚ Latrobe strategically neglects to mention the integral role that mastery of watercolor plays for any architectural renderer. Such an admission would remove him from the elite amateur persona cultivated in these asides. Indeed, he blames his profession for his lack of skill in watercolor, as the precision of architectural drawing is technically opposite to the loose strokes of landscape, noting, “Nothing appears so aukward [sic] to a hand accustomed to the sober movement of writing or portrait painting than the quick eccentric motions required in drawing trees; but practice soon renders them familiar, it is however a true remark, that in very few instances, can either portrait painters, or architects paint tolerably in Landscape.”fi⁄ As Latrobe mentions elsewhere, even the apparent spontaneity of rendering landscapes is a learned skill.fi¤ Typical of drawing manuals of his day, he describes specific trained motions of the hand by which the aspiring landscape painter may render leaves and branches to e∑ect.fi‹ The architectural renderer, though utilizing drafting conventions, often also adopts looser gestures to complete a scene. Again Latrobe downplays his strengths. Latrobe’s travel narratives further characterize his artistic persona. Though most contain nuggets of technical or pedagogical information about watercolor, they primarily o∑er amusing anecdotes, historical facts, or natural history observations. They follow Latrobe from his student life in Silesia to Britain, his Grand Tour of Italy, and, ultimately, Virginia. Most of these accounts, accompanied by his repainting of a view he “took on the spot,” are somewhere related to autobiographical anecdotes. Latrobe’s images are almost exclusively landscapes, used to stage his accounts, rather than to play a narrative role. Latrobe generally omits detailed descriptions of the represented sites, instead filling his text with other matter. In some instances, as at Yorktown and Kirkstall, his anecdotes reveal details concerning his watercolor practice— which a few examples can permit us to understand further. Accompanying one small vignette of a rocky outcropping, Latrobe briefly recounts a story from his carefree youth: his visit to the Ravenstones at Saddleworth in 1787 [Fig. 5.13].

Fig. 5.13: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Ravenstones at Saddleworth vignette from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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He and his friends took a hunting expedition on the moors, during which they wagered as to whether the stones could be blown up with the gunpowder they had brought along. Latrobe bet he could set up a successful explosion. Another member of the party, Lees, bet against him, upping the ante by “o∑ering to stand upon the top while the explosion took place.”fi› The group restrained Lees and lit the lead on the explosives. However, Lees broke free and nearly scaled the rocks when the explosion set o∑, and “the whole Mass tottered, and a stone of many Tons was thrown into the Valley.”fifi Lees survived, but with his courage greatly diminished. In this narrative, Latrobe and his friends enjoyed activities common to upper-class British men. He played up his own savviness at the expense of foolhardy Lees. Since nobody was seriously injured, he can tell the story and laugh, despite the incident’s catastrophic potential. This account positions Latrobe within a genteel lifestyle of male friendship. The personality and lifestyle traits Latrobe embraces are further emphasized by his unassuming vignette, showing merely the outcropping of rocks from the story, rendered in strong contrast of light and shadow. This watercolor is grouped among other repainted images, originally sketched on site by Latrobe. A reader should imagine Latrobe pausing in his youthful adventure to sketch the rock formation he is about to explode. There are no large lessons for the reader here, yet he captures a carefree moment when he wandered the British countryside, sketching and traveling as a sociable young picturesque tourist—credentials enough to serve as a Virginian woman’s watercolor tutor. Latrobe’s account at Saddleworth can be grouped with his narrative of travel to the Tollenstein region, another example in which Latrobe characterizes himself as an elite tourist, now in the companionship of a young aristocrat, and seeking out sublime e∑ect in nature. Paired with the Saddleworth account, Latrobe presents a small vignette of two peasants relaxing near or on the estate of Wilke, located near the border of Poland and Germany [Fig. 5.14]. Again, he uses a vignette to position himself advantageously. He tells of friendship with several sons of Count Pfeil, who recount their family’s experiences with the local peasant population.fifl Latrobe casually mentions attending school with nobility, failing to note the Moravian a≈liation of his schooling. Ostensibly representing a scene

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from life, Latrobe’s vignette shows both figures turned from the viewer. One turns his back to the viewer while reposing, and the second sits, his back partially turned, and smoking. Latrobe characterizes “the barbarous peasants of Silesia” as uninterested in rational self-development or scientific agriculture, motivated rather by primitive drives like curiosity.fi‡ For his American audience, Latrobe asserts that the oddest thing about these peasants is their indi∑erence to greater freedom. Indeed, when awarded greater freedoms by Count Pfeil, “they considered the additional liberty granted them, as an oppressive infringement upon their former priviledges, as they called their customs.”fi° In text and image, Latrobe plays the part of rational observer, critiquing an inferior social class. He also seizes the opportunity to emphasize values of appeal to his American audience. In Volume 2 of An Essay on Landscape, Latrobe shifts his digressions to natural history, including several watercolors that link individual landscape elements with larger ideas about the Chain of Being and the integrated experience of place. Latrobe’s discussion of rocks, which opens this chapter, belongs to this larger context. Launching from his discussion of trees, described as “beings endowed with sensation,” Latrobe expresses a desire to spare “as many [trees] as possible from pain, mutilation, and death.”fi· Acknowledging that his student may not readily agree, he initiates a lengthy discussion of the Chain of Being to convince her of the di≈culty involved in distinguishing between rational, sensate

Fig. 5. 14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Niemsch Peasants at Rest vignette from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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beings and those lacking these attributes. He recounts studying a “Mason” insect in Virginia, which he also illustrates [Fig. 5.15]. His observations led him to conclude the mason was weighing its options and necessities. So passionate is Latrobe about this conclusion, he swears that if others prove the insect’s work not to be the result of consideration, “I give up all claim to reason, and am content that all my works, great and small, shall be ascribed to Instinct.”fl‚ Latrobe’s large illustration and description of the Venus Flytrap is one of the most evocative descriptions accompanying his discussion of sensation in the animal and plant kingdoms [Fig. 5.16]. The Venus Flytrap of Latrobe’s description, an “animated” and “treacherous” plant, is a ferocious killer, with spikes and teeth engineered “like the teeth of a foxtrap.”fl⁄ Although the plant is indigenous to the marshes of the American South, Latrobe has not yet found a Virginian specimen, and comments, “Perhaps you have seen it. I met with it in a botanical Garden at Paris, but have not yet found it here.”fl¤ Here again, his cosmopolitan pedigree appears, as he inserts another European capital into his travels, highlighting his diligence when visiting the distinguished Parisian garden. Latrobe’s image is repainted from an earlier published botanical source.fl‹ The study shows a natural world buzzing with life, yet simultaneously redolent with death. Set against a light blue wash of sky and posed in front of a hacked tree stump, the plant climbs proudly up the center of the page. A tall green stalk shoots up, with an abundance of white flowers rising from its head in various stages from bud to

bloom. Bright green tongue-shaped leaves circle its base. The watercolor’s primary visual allure and conceptual drama center on the stunning appendages at the leaftips. Latrobe renders these mouth-like traps in various states, from beckoning and wide open to snapped shut. On the right, one trap has sprung on a butterfly or moth with bright blue wings. Two other open mouths pose temptingly, red interiors exposed and “sweet clammy juice” attracting insects. Rendered with painstaking care, two flying insects descend rapidly toward their doom. Latrobe embellishes the botanical rendering he copied with these insects, visually focusing his watercolor on the dramatic moment before these insects are trapped. His text sympathizes with them, “the unfortunate fly that is tempted to taste it, is inevitably lost. The treacherous plant shuts up the trap, and crushes or pierces its victim to death.”fl› He accompanies description and image with a stanza from Erasmus Darwin’s epic Botanic Garden, setting the scene’s natural tensions into verse, though he cautions that Darwin describes not a Venus Flytrap, but a similar plant. The stanza reads: The fell Silene, and her Sisters fair, Skill’d in destruction spread the vicious snare The harlot band ten lofty bravoes screen, And Frowning, guard the magic nets unseen. Fly! Glittering nations, tenants of the air, Ah! Steer from hence your viewless course afar! If with soft words, sweet blushes, nods and smiles The three dread Syrens lure you to their toils, Limed by their art, in vain you point your stings, In vain the e∑orts of your whirring wings! Go! Seek your gilded mates, and infant hives, Nor taste the honey purchased with your lives.flfi

Darwin’s passage likens the plant’s alluring traps to the Sirens of Greek myth, who famously tempted Odysseus and his men. Like the fierce warriors, the insects are cautioned against the plant’s spell. Only self-control and reason can protect them from a violent fate. Through these discussions, Latrobe challenges Spotswood to see her world di∑erently. Her watercolors will capture nature, and he believes they should render this world as a vibrant, interconnected space of sensate life. He explains

Fig. 5.15: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Mason vignette from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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that he has designed his digressions to bring his student’s rational thought “to the limit, where animal life ends, and vegetable life begins, and there to ask you, whether you can discern the line that separates them,” helping Spotswood to regard plants as sensitive landscape components, like animals.flfl Ultimately, he hopes reasoned questioning will lead her to conclude that some plants have functional reason. He challenges her with a series of critical examples and perplexing questions: All plants extend themselves towards the light and air, twisting their stalks and raising their branches to accomplish their object. All Climbers act with great judgement in finding their way up a Wall, or over a grating. Trees growing upon rocky ground, know how to scramble after nourishment, by directing their root over bare stones in quest of the earth that is hid in the cracks and cranies of the stones. How is all this performed? By chance and accident? Or are plants machines, like Clocks, wound up, and going on by the force of their mechanism, untill [sic] they are run down? If so, how come they to adapt their growth, and their exertions to their situation, though it should change to the weather, to the light and to the air? Have they not rather some degree, let it be ever so small, of sensation and will, su≈cient to their wants, and to self preservation.fl‡

With such a conception of plants and animals, Latrobe lays a foundation for understanding watercolor as a medium to capture the complex interrelationships of Earth’s lifeforms. If plants and insects make reasoned decisions, then these smallest of landscape’s lifeforms o∑er food for the viewer’s rational thought, inspiring profound lessons, and perhaps even epic verse with the tension of life and death at its core. Further, since soil and rocks are formed from many centuries’ decomposing life, the world is built on a repeating Chain of Being, visible in both animate and inanimate materials. Across the breadth of the manuscript, Latrobe traces a personal aesthetic for landscape watercolors. Integrated with his autobiographical narrative, his philosophy presents watercolor as a means toward a holistic understanding of the natural world, and as a medium for capturing elements of personal experience concerning sites and landscapes. He seeks to train his student to understand watercolor, properly created, as a guide to the viewer’s philosophical enlightenment. Latrobe’s two volumes draw images from his travels, but their impact is focused on the American context. Throughout

the text he codes himself as American and even more specifically as Virginian. He emphasizes that landscapes must convey the true character of sites. Although every landscape’s core elements are universal—“water, trees, and ground” as he reminds his reader—the character of a New World location di∑ers fundamentally from that of the Old World. Unlike other early authors of drawing manuals for an American audience, Latrobe includes views of American sites as examples, and he challenges Spotswood to remain true to the character of the landscapes she experiences. This allows landscape watercolors to communicate social and moral ideas to their audiences. Although these values are

Fig. 5.16: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Venus Flycatcher vignette from An Essay on Landscape, 1798–99.

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traditionally associated with history painting, Latrobe finds similar social value in landscapes. Further, while most contemporary landscape representations relied on ruins or other artifacts to aspire to resonant content, Latrobe identifies the natural landscape as a source of profound e∑ects. A Venus Flytrap in Southern American marshes or a striated stone in the James River may produce as great an impact on a sensitive audience as the ruins of the Flavian Amphitheater can. In a living, breathing world of sentient beings, the landscape painter’s raw material is limitless. A Journey in Watercolor Weaving together pedagogy, theory, and personal narrative, Latrobe composed a manuscript challenging literary tropes. In its original form and use of watercolor imagery, it probably served a purpose for him beyond its known pedagogical context. Thus, this chapter’s final question is: what did An Essay on Landscape mean for its artist-author? The personal information this manuscript contains, including some of the only accounts of Latrobe’s early life, is privileged and unavailable elsewhere. It contains anecdotes from his student life in Silesia, rare mentions of his travels in Italy and France, and at least one narrative from his early life in Britain after leaving the Moravian community. Accompanying these accounts are watercolors copied from images created during his travels, o∑ering a glimpse at what was likely once a large collection of travel sketches. Concerning his own instruction in watercolor, this manuscript o∑ers the only testimony of his experiences with the medium as a child and student. This material transforms An Essay on Landscape into a highly personal document, divulging much about Latrobe’s life and mind. Unlike Latrobe’s Virginia journals, which he testifies were written for his children, this manuscript was intended for an unrelated Virginian woman, with whom there is no evidence Latrobe had an intimate relationship, save his postscript, wishing he could “know the heart of the friend to whom it [the manuscript] was sent.”fl° Although it is possible that Latrobe kept a copy for himself, this is uncorroborated and somewhat unlikely, since he mentions not having a copy of the first volume at hand while writing the second. Perhaps he hoped the manuscript might eventually have a

broader impact, circulating among upper-class Virginian friends and acquaintances of the Spotswood family. Even this seems relatively unlikely for a manuscript he began while considering leaving the state and completed after his relocation to Philadelphia. One reasonable hypothesis is that Latrobe used his opportunity to compose this manuscript to grapple with pressing concerns. Recording travel memories and images allowed him to contemplate his immigrant condition. Writing the manuscript and painting its illustrations a∑orded a means of intellectual exertion and an emotional release. As with his trompe l’oeil studies and two other Virginian manuscripts, all discussed in subsequent chapters, this manuscript helped him to reposition himself as an artist and professional during his relocation to Philadelphia. By advancing a philosophy of American landscape watercolor, Latrobe could organize his thoughts about the country’s unique landscape and mull over its integral philosophical connections to the Old World. His thoughts on watercolor, although coded as those of an amateur whose background in the medium was less than his expertise in architecture, nonetheless produced a practical platform for the construction of views and of buildings. In a postscript to the second volume, Latrobe confides that he will miss the manuscript after sending it o∑. He has composed it mostly late at night, struggling with insomnia, during the stressful months in which he eventually abandoned his work on the Virginia State Penitentiary—a period discussed further in Chapter 6. “This little Volume,” he testifies, “has travelled with me in all my excursions from hence [Philadelphia] to New York and the Jerseys, on business; and has been my favorite, and consoling, companion in solitude. . . . The badness of the Pens sometimes betray the Inn, or lodging-house on a journey, at which it was written.”fl· Readily admitting that his ad hoc working conditions contributed to the manuscript’s various faults, and that extensive travel marred its exterior, Latrobe nonetheless insists on the profound meaning the manuscript has for him, likening it to an o∑spring: “I shall miss it, as I should a Child whom I loved for kind dispositions and pure intentions, but for whose reception I feared on account of numberless involuntary faults, which time alone could have corrected.”‡‚

Stage Tricks for Landscape ·

If the manuscript was dear to Latrobe, then the watercolors within it may also have occupied a special place in his a∑ections. Although he wrote little elsewhere about what his watercolors meant to him, in the first volume of An Essay on Landscape, Latrobe opened up. Speaking of his limited abilities in watercolor, he explains, “I have however found the moderate skill I may possess so useful and amusing, and during a life of much vexation and disappointment, I have derived such solid relief from it, that I perhaps overrate the value of the accomplishment.”‡⁄ The “solid relief ” Latrobe finds in watercolor derives from his mind’s diversion from “its cares and distresses” while working on them, suggesting a therapeutic and meditative quality in the art, giving further depth to his interest in connecting with the contemplative viewer’s mind. In hoping that Spotswood will experience no equivalent miseries, Latrobe specifies that watercolor can still be a real asset to her, providing “a new mode of rendering your genius productive of pleasure to your friends, and of agreeable employment to yourself.”‡¤ Painting in watercolor will give Spotswood the opportunity to channel her intellect productively and communicate valuable experiences. Finally, with regard to the art of watercolor, Latrobe concludes, “besides the habit of copying the beauties of nature, strengthens the talent and the pleasure of observing them, and, of course, renders this world, which is so full of them, a more delightful habitation while we stay in it.”‡‹ Painting landscape watercolors, he assures Spotswood, will help her see the world in a more refined and pleasurable fashion. These closing remarks reveal the significance Latrobe found in the creation of landscape views. His watercolors provided him “solid relief ” during his life’s many trials. Within the scope of An Essay on Landscape, he rehearses some of these recent trials for his attentive viewer/reader. These scenes follow him across the Atlantic, starkly examine both ancient and modern ruins, and move, eventually, to the beauties of Virginia’s landscapes. The journey of views progressing across the manuscript o∑ers the account of Latrobe’s attempt to rationalize his life’s course and documents the relief and reflection he found in his art. Beyond these autobiographical connections, Latrobe highlights how art allows communication and pleasure between friends, distilling an understanding of the world. Landscape views can

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increase the pleasure and intellect of an audience. Through art, he indicates, Spotswood can contribute to Virginian society. Furthermore, as he teaches Spotswood how to manipulate the viewer by decoding his own images to construct his lessons, Latrobe clarifies how his watercolors are constructed glimpses of the world. These images are designed to give pleasure and guide visual interpretation. Over the course of the manuscript, he plays the knowledgeable guide on a journey through memories and experiences, and then o∑ers a vision toward the future. An Essay on Landscape, despite its modest language and the humble subject matter of its imagery, is Latrobe’s recounting of his own epic immigrant journey through art, which lays bare the techniques and philosophical logic of his practice. Subtly, but with consistency, the manuscript speaks to the personal process of gathering, repainting, and reflecting on each scene within the text. Building on his literary and philosophical knowledge, Latrobe o∑ers his own soft-spoken account of art’s purpose and value. He apologizes for the firstperson reflections, yet, in reality, these passages are key to the significance of this text for his creative practice. Combining personal testimony with eyewitness views, Latrobe transforms his manuscript from a dry instructional manual into a contemplation of the role art has played in shaping his experiences. Interpreting what he has seen during his travels, Latrobe sketches a roadmap for the future by considering art’s value, both within his own life and for the greater good, and by explaining the knacks through which art can realize this value. An Essay on Landscape allows Latrobe to bring closure to his past experiences and to understand his present condition. For the first time, he exercises his voice as an American artist, looking to the future. In so doing, he performs his own American identity. Across the journey of the text, Latrobe “casts o∑ ” the dialect, habits, and associations of European art, and begins to construct a vision for artistic practice in Virginia. Carefully shielded by his modest claims and self-deprecation, he sets the stage for the significance of his artistic practice. In An Essay on Landscape, the reluctant teacher-narrator tentatively lays the foundation for the more self-confident voice of the epic hero-artist, which he explored further through the playful and imaginative ambition demonstrated in other textual and trompe l’oeil works at the end of his Virginian period. 

Chapter Six

Performing Spaces

Latrobe’s Front of the Stage from his Designs of a Building proposed to be erected at Richmond in Virginia, to contain A Theatre, Assembley-Rooms, and an Hotel, henceforth Designs of a Theatre, presents a thin sepia wash section cut into the building’s planned bulk [Fig. 6.1].⁄ This dramatic perspective entices the eye toward ghostly moonlight and shadowy figures frozen on the stage. The spellbound viewer becomes theatergoer, drawn by skillful rendering toward the minute stage. A bald eagle spreads its wings triumphantly on an axis with the stage. The bird pulls the theater’s curtain up in a swag with its talons and the tensed cloth bursts diagonally toward the edges of the stage. Unlit and silhouetted against the background sky, a large candelabrum hangs beneath the eagle, above a man and woman who face one another, hands tenderly joined while stepping onto center stage. At right, a pair of men enter, one bent under the weight of a large ovular packet on his shoulder, the other erect, still, and poised as an Attic kuoros. The figures are bathed in silvery light, rendered in thin watercolor wash. The stage is framed in Classical details and Doric columns in antis define its perimeter while contributing to its solemn and timeless e∑ect.¤ The full moon rendered on the backdrop appears so real, that it convincingly bathes the stage in silver light and cool shadows. Latrobe creates a blurred e∑ect on stage simulating atmospheric perspective. The backdrop presents a nature scene of trees and a cumulus cloud, the edges of which are trimmed in the striking bright moonlight. Painterly brushstrokes on the stage contrast with the precise drafted lines of surrounding architectural details, allowing the viewer to experience a theatrical e∑ect while distinguishing architectural frame from stage prop. The moonlight stages a dramatic mystery around the figures, who appear ghostly, casting dark shadows with their left profiles traced in thin silver. The two pairs of figures are distinct. The couple at center stage appear Caucasian and are elegantly dressed, signaling elevated status. Both have indistinct faces, the man because of spare graphic markings, the woman because shadows and a black veil conceal her face. Both have dramatic plumes on their hats and stylish attire. The two men at right, who are rendered with less detail, are clearly lower class. They have bare torsos and clean-shaven heads, perhaps indicating they are slaves. There is no perceptible di∑erence in skin tone between the two pairs, but Latrobe may have intended the contour of the men’s heads to indicate African ancestry. Notably, the man at the farthest right is the only figure to exchange glances with the viewer, from a single dark eye that stares directly forward. Although his face is barely discernible, his bald head is prominent, reflecting the strong moonlight. In attempting to reconcile this section with the accompanying floor plan, Charles Brownell and Je∑rey Cohen conclude that the Front of the Stage shows an architecturally improbable space: “this fictive portal makes sense neither as a set nor as a drop curtain, and it seems to have been intended as an evocative

Fig. 6.1 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Front of the Stage from Designs of a Theatre, 1797–98.

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162 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

embellishment for the drawing rather than as a plausible arrangement of scenery.”‹ Though the details of the scene are di≈cult to reconcile with structural reality, the visual power of the moonlit stage brings the theater to life, seeming more real than the drafted walls, beams, and apertures, which use a paler palette. If the mysterious figures seem dream-like, the building itself is still inchoate. A web of thin, drafted lines spreads

across the stage. Though pencil underdrawing is sometimes visible in Latrobe’s watercolors, these drafted lines are above the watercolor. The hands of the lovers at center stage meet at the juncture of two perpendicular drafted lines. Above them, a chandelier hangs from bulky chains and also from two thin lines springing diagonally o∑ to define the four corners of the stage aperture. From this drafted framework, the building takes form around the central watercolor. Through visual

Fig. 6.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Front of the Stage from Designs of a Theatre, 1797–98.

Performing Spaces ·

interweaving, architectural space becomes structurally inseparable from the rendered illusion within. The combination of drafted lines with watercolor image lays bare the artistic contrivances structuring the scene, and contributes to the mystique of the central feature of the grand theater. Both the scene and the building grow together in Latrobe’s imagination and are united as one here; the sheet captures a dream space within Latrobe’s head and delights in his expansive vision. The stage scene mesmerizes the viewer and acts as a portal into Latrobe’s creative mind, pro∑ering a tour of his visionary, unbuilt structure. The viewer is synchronously entranced, informed, and perplexed by the contents of the sheet. Understanding the building’s proposed form requires knowing how to interpret architectural drawings. Here, the viewer needs to recognize this enlivened section as providing a privileged peek at the stage within the structure. Drafted lines and spaces blocked out with wash indicate all other surrounding areas. Focused on the central scene, the viewer may imagine those remaining spaces, but possesses few indicators about their planned appearance. Furthermore, no explanation appears about the dramatis personae, leaving a great deal to the viewer’s imagination, though guided by melancholy moonlight and the implicit tensions surrounding the tryst or flight of the central lovers. Perhaps inspired by John Flaxman’s line drawings, which leave much to the viewer’s mind, Latrobe’s Front of the Stage is powerful because it activates the viewer’s imagination. Setting aside judgments about the theater’s design, this image independently preoccupies the mind, forcing forward its own questions: What does Latrobe hope his viewer will gain from this scene, which o∑ers such limited architectural detail? How does he expect the image to contribute to his proposed Richmond theater? What is the scene intended to communicate about the building, or is the building possibly secondary in importance to what is happening in the scene? If this image merges techniques from Latrobe’s skills of drafting and watercolor, then what does it communicate about how he used these graphic forms? Finally, and most pressing for this study, what can this compelling scene and its counterparts contribute to our growing picture of Latrobe’s creative practice in Virginia?

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This chapter explores watercolors Latrobe prepared for two major public architectural projects in Virginia. First, a bound set of presentation drawings for the Virginia State Penitentiary, likely created between January and June 1797, which constitutes the first example of Latrobe using watercolor to market and stage his designs in Virginia. Second, the works in Designs of a Theatre, which was begun on December 1, 1797, and completed around January 31, 1798.› These two booklets, along with a third (the subject of Chapter 7), Designs of Buildings Erected or Proposed to be Built in Virginia, henceforth Designs of Buildings, o∑er the most substantive record of Latrobe’s architectural productivity while in Virginia. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, most scholarly analysis to date has focused on them as resources concerning his architecture. Absent from these considerations has been an analysis of his booklets as visual and material objects, communicating significant content beyond architectural data. By neglecting the intrinsic value of these manuscripts, including the watercolors they contain, many central ideas of the projects they detail remain unexplored. Watercolor imagery plays a substantial role in each of these manuscripts. These watercolors are some of Latrobe’s most visually compelling works. When studied, they reveal an ambitious architectural program. Rendered with painstaking detail and aimed at interacting with and manipulating viewers, they reveal the skill of their maker. Individually the watercolors are interesting, but considered together they o∑er compelling evidence of Latrobe’s use of watercolor to think through his experiences, dreams, and ambitions. This fresh appraisal of these manuscripts also allows a more charitable analysis of Latrobe’s architecture from his Virginian years. Cohen and Brownell comment that these booklets reveal Latrobe’s inferior architectural achievements in Virginia, with the partial exception of the Penitentiary.fi But, Cohen and Brownell nevertheless observe that these designs attempt to adapt from the Old World to the New, and are products of an architectural vision. They reveal the immigrant, partially isolated, sensibilities of their designer. Accordingly, Cohen and Brownell conclude: “To a significant degree Latrobe’s few years in Virginia were a period of adjusting architectural imaginings to new realities. His surviving papers for these years present the reveries and observations of

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a man apart and the initial, acclimatizing experiences of a man engaged. Generally . . . the kind of architectural commissions to which he aspired would be more satisfyingly realized only after he relocated to Philadelphia.”fl This assessment is skewed from the perspective of Latrobe’s later career. In 1797, Latrobe had no way to foresee that he would have a thriving architectural career after a few short years in Pennsylvania, or the future opportunity to oversee the construction of the federal buildings in Washington, D.C. Instead, as he created these booklets, he used them as tools for defining and advancing his professional identity, crafting a new image for his career in the United States. In place of the anxious, displaced, wandering immigrant, these booklets present Latrobe’s most highly polished professional persona, in calculating, strategic presentations for a public audience. They reflect on his Virginian architectural projects, but they also use visual rhetoric, form, and allegory to present a case for his professional ability. Though he did not emphasize an immigrant theme, a melancholy, dreamy tone connects the immigrant-artist with the vision of the confidant, prominent American architect he hoped to become. To understand the trio of booklets, we must approach them from the perspective of their artist-architect. Latrobe’s professional status at the time was uncertain, and he had no secure income. Further, the very profession of architecture was not recognized in the United States. Recognizing the dearth of qualified professional architects in the new nation, Latrobe argued for the value of his profession, in part through the visual persuasion of these presentation booklets. In them, he also claimed a level of professional authority to which he could not aspire in London. All of these indicators help to clarify the point that the professional identity Latrobe sought to promote may not have been that of an architect in a traditional sense, but that of a cosmopolitan artist-intellectual, marketing equally his watercolor skills. Both Designs of a Theatre and Designs of Buildings feature an ambitious watercolor frontispiece and finely rendered watercolor views dispersed throughout. In both booklets, the text discusses these watercolor scenes. The presentation booklet prepared for the penitentiary di∑ers strikingly, exclusively containing architectural renderings. In it, Latrobe capitalizes

on his skills in watercolor rendering, but avoids the more ambitious tone of his other booklets. Perhaps the missing first pages of the book contained edifying text. Alternatively, the o≈cial public function of the booklet—to solidify Latrobe’s commission via the state legislature—may have prompted him to focus primarily on the required information for a bureaucratic context. Nevertheless, he continued to use watercolor skills to excite his audience about the project, while avoiding the ambitious content raised by the watercolors in his other two booklets. My analysis concerning Latrobe’s three illustrated architectural manuscripts assesses his multiple professional skills, as his academic training and watercolor skills are on display as much as his design ability is. Using a technique from his Moravian training, Latrobe may have expected his watercolors to communicate more successfully than his drafted images did, due to his audience’s limited capacity to understand architectural images. Verisimilitude, color, form, and symbolism speak to a wider audience than plans and sections do. However, these scenes are not fully transparent to the uninitiated. They withhold information from the average viewer, subtly communicating a deeper layer of intellectual content that is only accessible to the highly educated, elite viewer. The obvious visual appeal paired with the exclusivity of deeper content allowed Latrobe to speak to multiple audiences and to demonstrate his skills both as a designer and as an ambitious watercolorist. Disciplining Views Latrobe’s ability to communicate through drawings and genteel interaction won him the Virginia State Penitentiary commission. Following the passage of legislation in 1796 instituting detention as a form of punishment, the state legislature decided to build a prison with “due provision for light, air, and security from fire” to accommodate the “imprisonment, labor, and partial solitary confinement” for most criminal o∑enses.‡ No o≈cial design competition was held. Instead, architects and their associates approached the governor. In addition to Latrobe, the competition included two well-known figures: Thomas Je∑erson and George Hadfield. Samuel Dobie, the builder hired to complete Je∑erson’s State Capitol in Richmond, also vied for the commission.°

Fig. 6.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sheet IV, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 1797.

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Unfortunately, only Latrobe’s proposal drawings survive, making it impossible to compare his materials to those of his competitors. Some textual information about Je∑erson’s proposal survives. His interest in the project began in 1786. While resident in Paris, he sent drawings for an octagonal prison for Virginia modeled on a contemporary French prison, designed by Pierre Gabriel Bugniet.· In 1796, he revised and resubmitted this plan. In his Autobiography, Je∑erson tells of his involvement, highlighting his concern that the prison treat prisoners benevolently and stipulating that architectural form should support social reform. Je∑erson sought to apply European precedents to the needs of the state, including reducing the facility’s scale. His primary considerations regarded the principles of reformed confinement, not stylistic details. After the building was constructed, Je∑erson remarked that his design was substantially put into e∑ect, commenting, “Its principle accordingly, but not its exact form, was adopted by Latrobe in carrying the

plan into execution, by the erection of what is now called the Penitentiary, built under his direction.”⁄‚ At first reading, Je∑erson would seem to be accusing Latrobe of plagiarism, but Je∑erson’s distinction between “principle” and “form” should be noted. He probably recognized Latrobe’s plan, like his own, as being founded on au courant European ideas for reformed prisons—namely the “principle” shaping the building. Unlike the Virginia Capitol, in which Je∑erson adopted neoclassical style for social and ideological reasons, style was subordinate to principle here. Je∑erson’s suggestion that Latrobe’s plan followed the same “principle” as his plan acknowledges Latrobe’s competence and professionalism rather than accusing him of derivative design.⁄⁄ Whatever Je∑erson’s intentions, significant di∑erences existed between the penitentiary as proposed and partially constructed by Latrobe and the designs originally proposed by Je∑erson.⁄¤ Unlike Je∑erson’s plan, which was copied from one or two sources, Latrobe’s prison relied on no single

Fig. 6.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View in Perspective of the Gate of the Penitentiary House, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 1797.

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precedent, but drew on a range of sources. Professional experience in London provided some direct expertise on both reform principles and prison form.⁄‹ Cohen and Brownell conclude that Latrobe sought “models vividly endowed with a character particular to their purpose,” pursuing a monumental form while avoiding ecclesiastical and palatial sources.⁄› Further, they identify that, within the individual parts of the building itself, Latrobe employed specific design details to articulate di∑erences in purpose, such as the contrast between the “severe, utilitarian” interior courtyard and the “somber but formal” exterior facade.⁄fi This observation allows Cohen and Brownell to conclude that Latrobe’s “di∑erentiation of parts reflects a corollary of this notion of character.”⁄fl Cohen and Brownell’s discussion of Latrobe’s design concludes with several significant points concerning the surviving booklet. First, that Latrobe thought strategically about the building’s stylistic elements, thus he prepared a comprehensive vision of what the building should communicate through its form; this plan was modeled on European prisons, but was an original composite by his own hand. Second, that this booklet o∑ers the best opportunity to understand the intended building, since the structure’s design was significantly altered after Latrobe abandoned work on the project. Here, I will build on these points by exploring Latrobe’s use of the watercolor medium to invoke the power, dignity, and civic purpose of the Commonwealth’s proposed reform prison and argue for his receipt of the commission. Unfortunately, the presentation booklet is not intact. Seven drawings remain. Of these, five seem to be numbered as an original set, with discrepancies in numeration for the remaining two. Existing correspondence confirms that Latrobe compiled the booklet in haste and added to it over several months, which may explain the lack of cohesion. The numbered drawings run from I to IV, then skip to VI. The set may have been incomplete when sent to Governor James Wood, or disassembled at a later date, perhaps during construction. The remnants of the booklet o∑er substantial, if incomplete, evidence of Latrobe’s use of watercolor to support an architectural vision. Latrobe’s work on the penitentiary began when he had the good fortune to discuss ideas with a “Mr. Jones”—tentatively

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identified as Meriwether Jones (1766–1806), the editor of the Richmond Examiner—who in turn communicated Latrobe’s vision to Governor James Wood.⁄‡ As Latrobe recounted to Wood: . . . as Mr. Jones has anticipated much of what I should have submitted to your Excellency and the Council of State, by laying before You a very rough drawing, intended only to elucidate my private conversations with him, I have now only to express my extreme gratification in the indulgence shown by the Executive to that plan; and to beg permission that whenever the steps taken by Government shall have su≈ciently ripened the business, I may be allowed to lay before them for consideration whatever former experience, or the particular demands of the plans proposed for this State, may suggest.⁄°

Latrobe takes no credit for his design reaching the governor via back channels, but he certainly sought out this result, sharing his drawing, along with some accompanying verbal explanation, with the intent of having it reach the governor. This first proposal does not survive, eliminating the possibility of examining this building sketch that was created to be shared informally and accompanied with oral explanation. Unfortunately for Latrobe, the informal commission system was a sign of the unprofessional project management to come. On May 12, Latrobe wrote to Governor Wood and his council thanking them for approving his designs. He had received one hundred dollars for his drawings, which, it seems, were to remain in the government’s possession. Latrobe now seemed confident that this payment confirmed the state would proceed with his design. He accepted the money, “as a gratuity,” for which he had no expectations “unless you had thought the plan worthy of being executed,” and furthermore claimed, “had you therefore found any other design more eligible and returned mine, I could not have complained.”⁄· Latrobe also commented on his desire “to be permitted to add to the drawings contained in the book,” specifically with “the detail of the square part of the building, and such other designs as I omitted on account of their not being perfectly necessary to the explanation of my ideas.”¤‚ This is the only extant reference to an entire book of drawings and clarifies that the booklet was prepared in order to obtain the commission. This statement also o∑ers some sense of Latrobe’s method in assembling the booklet. In lieu of detailed construction drawings, he provided plans, sections, and renderings conveying his “ideas”

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about the building. Having secured the commission, he now intended to flesh out its details. This sequence clarifies that there was a multistage process to obtaining the commission. Latrobe’s role throughout is not clear-cut. His booklet, which was created early in the process, was designed to appeal to the commissioners and secure the work, but it does not contain the details requisite for construction. Although Latrobe was originally pleased to receive funds for his drawings, he soon sparred with o≈cials about his proper pay and about his role in the construction process. Latrobe was torn between professional expectations and personal integrity as he struggled to work on the commission without su≈cient compensation.¤⁄ He lost money while working on the building, but in considering cutting ties, faced a di≈cult decision, lamenting: My reputation was engaged, and after much most degrading negotiation, I was persuaded by several of my friends, not to ruin the work and my own character by quitting it, but at all events to carry it on so far as to leave a proof of my talents and knowledge of the subject to my successors. I therefore continued in the service of the state, to my infinite detriment for another season, when I finally quitted it, disgusted and irritated at the treatment I received.¤¤

Both his personal and professional reputation hung in the balance, yet Latrobe was hamstrung, unable to realize the vision he believed the commissioners had approved.¤‹ During the prison’s construction, Latrobe clashed with government o≈cials, seeing their decisions about style and form as ethical choices corrupting his design. One humorous example from his journal entry of August 17, 1797, considers whether the cornerstone inscription should be in English or Latin: When I wrote the inscription . . . and sent it to the Executive for approbation, I accompanied it with an inscription in Latin to the same e∑ect, proposing that it should be engraved on the other Side of the Plate, or perhaps be the only Inscription adopted.The Council however voted that the Inscription should be in English only. I think this is a very inhuman, and barbarous vote. They had their choice of burying a dead or a living language, and they chose to inter that which was living.¤›

Presumably the politicians found Latrobe’s Latin elitist, but he in turn condemns the o≈cials as barbarians for rejecting the language. Below ground level, the words could not intimidate

or confuse the inmates, nor o∑er erudite or inscrutable advice to passersby. Latrobe’s disgust is a response on academic and moral fronts tied to his commitments to the Classical tradition. The legislators had distanced themselves from this tradition, establishing a utilitarian design for the present. It is fitting, perhaps, given the scope of this dispute, that a builder stepped in after Latrobe’s departure, completing a vernacularized response to Latrobe’s design, in lieu of Latrobe’s avant-garde structure. Ultimately, Virginia’s public servants eschewed the elite aesthetic skills that initially attracted them to Latrobe, preferring a structure more aligned with their ideologies and budget. As Latrobe completed his booklet, he clearly did not foresee the commission’s failure. Instead, he sought to attract his audience with the representation of the building’s form and symbolism. He solicited their support for his design based on their interest in its social value. Two sheets are representative of the marketing purpose of Latrobe’s watercolors in this booklet. Sheet IV includes two renderings of the penitentiary’s south facade and a third of the “west flank” [Fig. 6.2]. A second sheet, not included in the original set, features View in Perspective of the Gate of the Penitentiary House, of the south facade, beneath two elevations of the internal courtyard [Fig. 6.3]. The renderings on Sheet IV represent the penitentiary in two di∑erent phases of construction. The first phase (related to Plan No. I, Fig. 6.4) would include the functional hemicycle of cells, workrooms, and supporting spaces for the inmates. A horizontal band of rooms, spanning the diameter of the hemicycle, would accommodate the jailkeeper’s house and other necessary facilities. In the second phase, this narrow band of rooms would be subsumed within a larger, rectangular block (laid out in Latrobe’s Plan No. II, Fig. 6.5). Phase I allows for barebones functionality. Phase II improves the facility, adding separate areas for female inmates, an imposing entrance gate, and domestic and work spaces for employees. At the top of Sheet IV, in “Elevation of the South Front of that Part of the Building which is Proposed to be First Erected, as Shown in No. II,” Latrobe renders the south facade as it will appear in Phase I, encompassing a view toward the hemicycle. The curve of the hemicycle, seen in front elevation, is indicated by shading along the left half of its receding facade

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and the oblique doorway angles. In the foreground, the south facade’s public significance is evident in the greater articulation of architectural style and details. An arcade, including two blind arches and a central portal is indicated on the ground floor. Fully filled in with black ink, this central portal, has an air of foreboding. The remainder of the facade is punctuated by lunette windows to which bars have been added on the ground story. Towers define both ends of the facade and both feature nine blacked-in lunette windows. The upper two window tiers are set within the outlines of ornamental blind arches. The hemicycle cellblock looms

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behind this public face, blocking any views toward the horizon and creating a claustrophobic glimpse into the interior court’s regulated space. This public facade o∑ers a dignified visual surface without concealing the structure’s serious purpose. Some surrounding landscape accompanies the Phase I elevation. The building sits within a large open lawn, presumably intended to deter escape. Using a “knack” discussed in An Essay on Landscape, Latrobe dapples the lawn with cloud shadows and the viewer easily accepts this visual conceit because of the flu∑y white clouds added along the horizon. A pathway leads to the central portal, while a thick line

Fig. 6.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, First Phase, Plan II, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 1797.

Fig. 6.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Second Phase, Plan I, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 1797.

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of trees bounds the property, concealing the penitentiary from distant prying eyes. Directly underneath the Phase I elevation is the same view, now after completion of Phase II. For both aesthetic and practical reasons, Latrobe squeezes this elevation into a thinner strip toward the page bottom, thus eliminating the hemicycle from view. Taking this liberty allowed Latrobe to improve the visual appeal of Phase II, but substantially reduces the architectural information given. The planned additions involved adding a large open courtyard, closed o∑ across the south by single-story construction. Notably, this would distance the hemicycle from the south elevation, the perspective taken here. This rendering claims increased access to light and air, emphasizing a large expanse of sky, bracketed by trees along the horizon, and greenery along the prison’s foundation. The access road is indicated as a straight diagonal, leading the viewer directly to the building’s interior portal. The elevation is unchanged except for the central block, but similarities between the two elevations are not initially apparent given the extreme visual di∑erence e∑ected by omitting the hemicycle from view. At the center, a wide Romanesque portal leads into a darkened, covered exterior entrance court. Beyond this court lurks the dark, inked-in doorway of the prison complex. Flanking the portal are single arched windows set into a larger doorway. An abbreviated frieze panel tops the portal with an inscription framed by a bold chain pattern. Bright sunlight contrasts dramatically with the deeply shaded entrance courtyard, and the chains contribute drama. The use of a streamlined neoclassical style and spare ornamentation accentuate the governmental power to mete out punishment for o∑enses. A final rendering at the page bottom, “Elevation of the West Flank,” shows the west facade spanning the extension from the first-phase southern facade to the second-phase addition. This elevation rises three stories. Decorative vertical protrusions correspond with the towers visible on the south front. The second and third stories present a decorative arcade motif, to which inked-in semicircular windows add a dark counterpoint. Along the ground story, within the elevations of the towers, smaller inset lunette windows are slightly more decorative. Latrobe again emphasizes dark green foliage in the foreground. The ground story also features three arcade

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sections, opened and lined with grilles, which provide ventilation while also preserving the secure enclosure of the imposing walls. Finally, along the horizon at right, Latrobe includes what appears to be a prosperous plantation’s mansion. The prison’s entrance road arcs gradually toward this structure. These watercolors only gesture toward the facade’s articulation, focusing instead on the watercolor concerns of pattern and variety. Cohen and Brownell review the evidence that Latrobe used both ashlar masonry and brick on the exterior facade, while arranging the building around a striking composition of colors.¤fi This color variation would manipulate the views and vistas encountered in visiting an actual building in a manner consonant with the impact of the play of color, light, and shadow in watercolor rendering. The third and final watercolor rendering of Latrobe’s penitentiary, View in Perspective of the Gate of the Penitentiary House, henceforth View in Perspective, occupies the bottom of a sheet, overpowering the two upper and much smaller elevations of interior courts on the same page [Fig. 6.3]. In addition to signing this sheet of drawings on the lower right, Latrobe includes a carefully printed title, signature, and date beneath this rendering, and positions View in Perspective within a thick, black border. These actions set View in Perspective o∑ as independently significant; its promotional value is evident in its striking visual success. The image has become one of Latrobe’s better-known architectural renderings and it receiving lengthy analysis from Cohen and Brownell, who states: Rather than to envision the e∑ects of the architecture as seen by a moving spectator, the rendering seems intended to o∑er the client and the architect a glimpse of its scenic qualities. It projects the geometry on paper one step closer to realization by its virtuosity and attraction subtly enlisting the admirer to imagine it as carried out. . . . the view also illustrates Latrobe’s conscious and developing concern for giving the prison an appropriate expression of purpose rather than treating it as a more generalized exercise in geometric neoclassical forms. Somber rubble masonry has replaced the bright smooth surface seen in [the elevations], just as the stormy sky has replaced the cheerful blue heavens in the earlier drawings.¤fl

It is noteworthy that Latrobe would alter significant structural features to enhance the quality of his rendering. His elevation of the completed south facade emphasizes its smooth texture and shining surface, but View in Perspective

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features a roughcast facade, rendered in mottled tints, ranging from light beige to blues and russets. Gaps and cracks are clearly visible between irregular stones, which interlock in a meandering pattern. While the changes are most blatant here, in each rendering of this structure Latrobe alters or compromises architectural details to enhance the visual qualities of his watercolors. View in Perspective invites the viewer to understand the structure through a sublime viewing experience. Standing on the prison access road, the viewer is overpowered by dramatic light raking the building facade, contrasted against distant dark clouds. A man standing just in the entrance portal’s shadow returns the viewer’s gaze. This man, likely a guard, seems to assess the innocence or guilt of the viewer. All aspects of visual form unite to convey a frisson of danger, stern foreboding, and power. A reform prison should help convicts improve themselves, while discouraging crime. View in Perspective stages just such a concept for the building. The approaching viewer feels threatened by the imposing structure and nervous under the guard’s scrutiny. The light that shoots powerfully through an opening in the storm clouds and bathes the prison conveys a second message: that earthly justice is connected to the powerful hand of divine justice. In Latrobe’s other elevations, the building is shown with the classic markers of the beautiful, signaled by its crisp lines and smooth surface treatment. Here, a strategic shift is made toward the sublime, and moral weight added via divine authority. Within the scope of this booklet, Latrobe uses the aesthetic qualities associated with beauty to convey the building’s e≈ciency, utility, and fitness for its purpose. In seeking to finalize support, Latrobe shifts to triggering the sublime’s emotional excitement in his viewers. View in Perspective pulls the viewer irresistibly toward the penitentiary, while awing with its imposing appearance. Had Latrobe maintained a beautiful aesthetic, the building might have projected a greater sense of refinement or more elite social aspirations, but these qualities would not have communicated its true purpose— namely disciplining, threatening, and judging. Though this rendering may more e∑ectively convey the impact of Latrobe’s design, it does not correspond with the building’s eventual construction, which used brick vaulting,

as portrayed in the original elevations, for the cellblock hemicycle.¤‡ Assessing the limited evidence, Cohen and Brownell conclude that Latrobe’s inconsistencies in design reveal him to have been, with regard to its architecture, “immature, dedicated to advanced ideas, and capable of combining them from an impressive range of sources.”¤° Perhaps more significant, though, is that these drawings indicate Latrobe’s maturity as an architectural renderer. Though lacking a clear and consistent architectural concept, these images e∑ectively choreograph the viewer’s imagination about the penitentiary, its value, and its impact. To fulfill the visual imperatives of his watercolors, Latrobe sacrificed consistency in capturing the building’s architecture. At this early stage, many decisions about materials and style were pending and construction negotiations distant. Thus, focusing on a clear, compelling watercolor narrative was a savvy professional decision. The watercolors acted as both a communicative and persuasive medium. Presented alongside additional sheets of straightforward architectural drawings, the renderings aimed to capture his audience’s interest. Few contemporary viewers would have noticed the inconsistencies and impracticalities so evident to subsequent generations of architectural historians, scrutinizing the booklet for hard evidence of Latrobe’s early architectural abilities and finding them somewhat lacking. Instead, Latrobe’s successful receipt of the commission indicates the success of his imagery. Whether or not his penitentiary design was successful, his booklet certainly was. Although it does not survive fully intact, the booklet has also outlasted the structure it depicted, leaving powerful glimpses into Latrobe’s architectural imagination and visual skill. Staging Architecture Later in 1797, Latrobe collaborated with several Richmond residents to propose a new theater for the city. Since 1790, the British actor and entrepreneur Thomas Wade West (d. 1799) had grown a theatrical empire in several Southern states. West’s troupe, known as the Virginia Company in Richmond, performed under di∑erent titles depending on the state. Richmond was its first site of operations, though the troupe constructed its first purpose-built theater in Norfolk, where West and his family lived.¤· He next built a theater in Charleston, South Carolina, then initiated the Richmond Theater project.

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The circumstances for financing construction of the Norfolk Theater give some context for the Richmond project. West first intended to self-finance the theater’s construction, but late in 1794 he lacked the 1,250 pounds needed to secure the investment and ten local leaders intervened on short notice, financing the mortgage so construction could progress.‹‚ No doubt the Richmond Theater project would have required similar community support beyond its initial investors. West was more than fifteen years Latrobe’s senior, but the two likely were friendly, though their mutual semi-itinerant lifestyles probably limited their in-person contact. Still, the two likely shared a network of acquaintances and allies.‹⁄ Both were experienced members of an international artistic community. More so than Latrobe, West maintained a transatlantic professional network, supporting his business. He and his family members, all actors, arrived in the United States with letters of introduction to the best-known theater troupe in the country—New York City’s Old American Company, run by Lewis Hallam, Jr.‹¤ After launching out on his own in the South, West continued to travel periodically to Philadelphia and New York City and monitored national and international theater trends. Further, West traveled to the United States with intimate knowledge of avant-garde theatrical practices and put these ideas immediately to use. In 1790, during their first season in Richmond and in their very year after emigration, West and his son-in-law, the actor John Bignall, put on a performance of John O’Keefe’s The Farmer. As Susanne K. Sherman comments, O’Keefe’s play had not yet been published, so, “it would appear that West and Bignall had brought an actor’s script from England with them and were thus giving the piece its first American presentation.”‹‹ While living in London, Latrobe had closely followed the theater, in particular opera and other musical productions.‹› Though he may not have always found West and Bignall’s American productions up to London standards, he likely appreciated them as a tie to his former life. It is even possible that he had seen West perform in London prior to 1790. Latrobe attended productions in the existing theater before joining the building project. The Richmond Theater, which West dubbed the “New Theater,” was located on Shockoe Hill, and had originally been the school Quesnay’s Academy.‹fi The facilities were not lavish, but relative to

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national standards, West and Bignall’s productions there were elaborate. While most American theater featured a “stock foliage set, wings, and a backdrop or double back-flats, painted to represent a forest,” West elevated professional standards, maintaining a “particular interest in the artistic mounting of his productions” and commissioning a new scenery backdrop “designed, built, painted and rigged to produce the illusion of movement.”‹fl By the time of Latrobe’s Richmond residency, the troupe has benefited from the expertise of a well-known French set designer and artist, “M. Audin,” who arrived in Virginia with other Haitian refugees in July 1794.‹‡ Although Audin was no longer with West in 1797, his elaborate sets were likely still in use. For Latrobe, who opined about the inferior cultural life of Virginia, West’s troupe must have o∑ered a refreshing sense of home. Latrobe’s drawings of the new theater complex for Richmond present a mesmerizing dream-space. It is tempting to imagine that the qualities of West’s productions may have contributed to Latrobe’s vision. In the company of West and his associates, Latrobe may have found a community with similar experiences, goals, and aspirations to his own, possibly with shared values concerning the social potential of art. The exact circumstances that brought Latrobe to the Virginia Theater project are not entirely clear. He is known to have been involved by December 1797. Sherman asserts that West “commissioned” Latrobe to “design a new theatre to be built on the property where the old one then stood.”‹° This implies that Latrobe was paid for his services and that West may have owned the rights to construct the building at a later date, even without Latrobe as supervising architect. By January 22, 1798, an advertisement was issued for stock subscriptions to support construction. Notably, Latrobe issued this ad along with his then-landlord Major Alexander Quarrier (ca. 1746–1827).‹· The projected expense for the building was a substantial $27,000, including construction but not interior finishing. West apparently committed to financing the interior decor himself.›‚ The project was advertised at least through June 1798. Funding had not materialized when Latrobe left for Philadelphia, and West died in a sudden, tragic accident in July 1799, ending all chances of construction.›⁄ The divided structure for financing the building was somewhat unusual, but perhaps devised to distribute

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risk, as well as profit, across Richmond’s polite society. One advertisement for subscribers contains a few tidbits of information. It indicates the investment was structured in shares that would finance the construction of the main structure and that in perpetuity promised to yield substantial income, noting: “the whole proceeds, or rents of the Building shall be divided half yearly, among the subscribers.”›¤ Latrobe composed his Designs of a Theatre to accompany the call for subscriptions. He dated its beginning to December 1, 1797, and its completion to January 8, 1798. As with the Virginia State Penitentiary, Latrobe continued to ponder aspects of the project after completing the booklet. However, this manuscript remains the only visual source of information about his design. In it, Latrobe describes working on these images intensely over a matter of weeks: “Every moment of the day and half the night was unremittingly employed upon this one object. I have not once attended even the sittings of the Assembly, and very seldom the Theatre.”›‹ Quarrier and Latrobe promise that the construction will be held to “a specific contract for the completion . . . in conformity to the design” in order to avoid “the usual disappointment in Building by subscription.”›› A June 1798 ad referred to the Designs of a Theatre booklet, noting that, “All the Designs are finished, and Mr. Latrobe, the Architect, will attend every morning from 10 to 12 at Major Quarrier’s to exhibit, and explain them.”›fi This record emphasizes that potential subscribers would not only be able to study the booklet, but would also benefit from Latrobe’s elaboration. Designs of a Theatre has been scrutinized for structural details, and its contents have led to the design being criticized as unsuccessful. Though the stakes of this discussion concern the visual and intellectual content of the imagery, to fully understand the content of the images it is necessary to give some further consideration to the design with respect to the priorities of the Virginia Company. Some key structural attributes, such as the fusion of the theater with a hotel, responded to struggles faced by the troupe. Although no record remains of West’s assessment, Sherman asserts, “Latrobe’s plans were the dreams of Thomas Wade West solidified. In them were the answers to all his problems.”›fl The building paired a hotel and tavern with the theater, and Sherman allows us to understand this combination: “There was an

answer to the problem of the vandals and thieves who had periodically wrought havoc in the old building . . . whether the players were in town or not, someone would always be in the building. It would mean a place close at hand for the actors to live while they were in Richmond, and it would mean a potential audience of transients housed under the same roof . . .”›‡ As an immigrant on the margins of Virginian society, often enjoying the company of other transient European intellectuals, Latrobe may also have seen advantages to this tavern-hotel-theater model. The presence of a sophisticated theater troupe could turn society toward intellectual life and away from less savory pastimes. The multipurpose complex would also promote the growth and refinement of Virginia’s capital city, providing the seasonal influx of legislators with a convenient space in which to live and socialize. The Richmond Theater project has long been considered exemplary of the frustrations and immaturity associated with Latrobe’s Virginian career. If success in architecture is only based on bringing designs to fruition, then the project’s ultimate failure is undeniable. Further, significant doubts exist about the feasibility of a sound structure resulting from this booklet’s designs. Evaluating the manuscript, Cohen and Brownell state, “it includes drawings of exceptional richness and vivacity. But the drawings, which at no point lay out a fully workable design, reveal that Latrobe’s reach exceeded his grasp a great deal.”›° Praising the images, though without analyzing their visual form, Cohen and Brownell conclude that Latrobe “devised a remarkable building,” “exceptional” in its fusion of functions, but they critique its overall structural cohesion and condemn it for its lack of fire safety precautions.›· Similar to the process for the penitentiary drawings, though, it seems likely that Latrobe never intended Designs of a Theatre to include the finalized drawings of a completed design. Rather, this beautiful booklet was meant to attract subscribers by conveying an exciting, and perhaps aspirational, sense of the building’s potential form. The booklet captures the character and social significance of the design, not its structural specifications. If there are practical faults in the design, such critiques are not as easily levied at Latrobe’s watercolors, in which he maximized the powerful and persuasive rhetoric of his medium. The watercolors create a fascinating journey through Latrobe’s

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imagined building. They are rife with symbolism and visual strategy. Through the enticing qualities of watercolor, Latrobe encapsulated the entrancing power of theater, including its potential to contribute to society by conveying intellectual and moral ideals. The sophisticated form of the images reflects Latrobe’s ongoing interest in adopting the voice of the epic artist. When the watercolors are experienced in a structured sequence, they communicate a sense of the powerful spell this theater could cast over an audience in search of entertainment. While mesmerized by the Muses, the audience could meditate on the human condition, advancing Latrobe’s social and moral priorities. Latrobe used his watercolor skills to explore the social, intellectual, and psychological significance of theater. Importantly, in doing so, he also displayed his belief in the similar power of watercolor. Latrobe’s visual rhetoric responded to prevailing concerns about theaters in the United States. Contemporary critics feared theater might corrupt rather than edify its audiences. Latrobe’s manuscript had to convince potential donors not just of his design’s merit, but also of the project’s social benefit. Accordingly, Latrobe made drawings that are entrancing and enticing, while socially and morally serious. For Latrobe, the completion of such an architectural and artistic vision, perhaps informed by theatrical or poetic texts important to him, must have been an exceptionally rewarding challenge. Although the booklet has been disassembled, Cohen and Brownell record that the drawings were donated in “their original binding in 1945” to the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Even so, the set may consist of two series joined by Latrobe within a single volume.fi‚ The existence of two series may be explained by Latrobe’s workflow: an initial energetic spurt of work, followed by his return to ideas over time. Cohen and Brownell conclude that the booklet was assembled to emphasize visual appeal while sacrificing architectural form, and that, further, the structure as represented in the booklet was incompletely digested and full of discrepancies.fi⁄ Watercolor, more than architecture, drives the form of the manuscript, and through it Latrobe was successful in communicating the core values of his project. Close reading of text and image in the manuscript can reveal the ideas central to Latrobe’s design and supplement the current understanding of the building project.

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Performing the Republic Latrobe sets an ambitious tone from the title page. Beneath his byline, here styled “B. Henry Latrobe Boneval, Architect & Engineer,” he includes an inscription, drawn from the first three lines of Horace, Ode I, 37, sometimes known as the “Cleopatra Ode”: “nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero, pulsanda tellus” [Now there must be drinking; now the ground must be struck with free foot].fi¤ These lines set the conceptual tone for the booklet. At face value, Horace o∑ers a song of celebration for Octavian’s victory in the Roman Civil War, glorying in this happy event for the Roman Empire. The ode focuses on the defeat and death of Egypt’s Cleopatra. In it, two figures—Octavian and Cleopatra—appear in opposition. She is proud of her own power, but Octavian is the stronger force. The Egyptian queen reaches a new height of heroic dignity in the final lines, choosing to die from an asp bite rather than be captured. In the crumbled residue of her power, she is no longer a queen, but her dignified death saves her from being enslaved in Rome. The poem adopts a complex stance toward heroism and victory. Although Horace is sympathetic to Octavian, the poem closes with words to praise Cleopatra’s heroic death. As Henry Steele Commager observes, a “paean for the conqueror subsides into elegy for the fallen.”fi‹ In its ambivalence toward nationalism and heroism, Horace’s ode aligns closely with Latrobe’s many reflections on heroism. Here, Horace addresses events of the Roman Civil War, recalling Latrobe’s prior association of Lucan’s Bellum Civile with Virginia’s Revolutionary War ruins. Similarly, Horace creates doubt about the nature of heroism in his juxtaposition of Cleopatra’s death and Octavian’s victory, which raises philosophical concerns akin to those at play in Latrobe’s near-contemporary visual reference to the Oresteia. In Designs of a Theatre, as we will see, the textual citation is paired with visual references that bring these ideas about heroism and its failures into direct dialogue with contemporaneous themes of revolution and violence, amplified by the current events of the French Revolution. Latrobe’s contemporary journals and correspondence o∑er compelling evidence of his intellectual and emotional concerns over these social and political themes while he worked on Designs of a Theatre. Latrobe confided in Giambattista

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Scandella his concerns over the “vices and corruption “of their young federal government,” while providing updates on the Richmond Theater project.fi› He conjured a visionary, better world, recounting his dreams for a successful Republican Venice, inspired by the brief 1797 Republican experiment ushered in by Bonaparte. Latrobe intertwined personality, politics, reverie, and ideology in a manner closely related to his watercolors’ content: My dear friend . . . you labour under the same disease as myself. A morbid sensibility. I threw down my pen to collect my mind from wandering among the Alps, among the mountains the plains and the Cities of your native country—a country I so much love—in order to think myself into a more pleasant state of mind, and to give my letter a brighter tint. But I rambled into a house I never saw, into a family of whom I know only one individual, and yet I found myself perfectly at home. I saw beauty, sincerity, and kindness in the eyes of the women, the power and the desire to bestow happiness in their looks, in the men, manly grace, polished virtue, independence of soul, and a∑ections untethered by selfish and mean considerations. There was a silent thoughtfulness that seemed to communicate more of sentiment, to ripen and concentrate well digested resolutions better than the most eager debate could have done. I thought I saw the picture of the same heroism the same courageous prudence in every face, ‘in vario sembiante, l’istessa virtú.’ [“the same virtue, in a di∑erent guise”]. Nothing was spoken, but every thing was said. ‘This is not the time, but Venice is our country, and Venice shall be free’ was the translation I gave to the ‘act of Assembly,’ if I may so call the common sentiment. The many imperfect hints, but hints so intelligible and so impressive which you have at various times given me, had introduced me into the midst of your family. I cannot persuade myself that the illusion is much unlike the truth.fifi

Latrobe describes a daydream in which he travels to Venice and meets Scandella’s family. Family and patria intermix, as the familiar imagined faces of Scandella’s relatives soon silently present him with ideas of heroism, virtue, and belief in free government. The Scandella women embody the virtues of “Beauty, sincerity, kindness,” while the men display sentiment, well-digested resolutions, and heroism. The passage continues with a careful allusion to contemporary performance and individual patriotic sacrifice. The Italian phrase in vario sembiante, l’istessa virtú is drawn from the opera Atilius Regulus, with a script written in 1740 by Pietro Metastasio (1698–1792; born Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi) and scored by Johann Adolf Hasse

(1699–1783), a favorite composer of Latrobe.fifl This allusion is typically weighty, adding a layer to our considerations. Marcus Atilius Regulus, the opera’s hero, speaks these words after being captured and enslaved by Carthage. He returns to Rome to represent Carthage in their suit for peace. In this scene, he encounters his son, who fears his father may be a traitor. The words Latrobe cites are part of Regulus’s assurance to his son: “My luck has changed, but I am the same . . . I battle the rigors of inconstant fortune, the same virtue, in a di∑erent guise.” With this, Regulus proves his patriotism, then publicly urges Rome to continue its war with Carthage. He returns, still enslaved, to meet his death in Carthage. Latrobe’s use of the phrase about Regulus’s altered appearance in his casual reference to his dreams of the Scandella family becomes another opportunity to intertwine themes of heroism, nationalism, and sacrifice. Its inclusion in his letter permits the association of reverie and theatrical performance acting together with the purpose of provoking larger social reflections. Having evoked visionary Venetian freedom and tied contemporary Venetians to ancient Roman precedents, Latrobe concludes, reflecting his anxieties about the boundaries between truth and fiction. Referring to his encounter with the Scandellas as an “illusion,” he insists that it seemed like reality to him: the vision remains compelling. This genteel correspondence captures Latrobe’s powerful conception of art and illusion. His reflection focuses on the perception of Republican dignity and moral ethics within the Scandella family. Engulfed in the tumult of social change, the family remains intact and stalwart in its integrity. Atilius Regulus o∑ers a similarly focused concept of family. Regulus can complete his heroic act only because his son trusts that he remains the same virtuous man, though now a slave. Had Regulus’s son instead sounded an alarm, Regulus would have been deemed a traitor, not a hero sacrificed for patria. The story of Atilius Regulus probably seemed personal to both Scandella and Latrobe. The hero returns to his homeland as a stranger—demeaned, disguised, and suspect. Nevertheless, he proves his continued worth through dramatic, public self-sacrifice. The opera considers a father-son relationship, tested and troubled at a distance, especially poignant for Latrobe, given his extended separation from his

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son. His letter reflects on family ties and individual integrity amid disorienting social change. From the relative safety of Virginia, far distant from their European origins, both Latrobe and Scandella observe the transformation of oncefamiliar places amid mounting tensions, uncertainties, and dramatic events. Only in daydream can they imagine ongoing stability for their loved ones. Finally, Latrobe’s vision also alludes to the power of the stage. Theater, so much on his mind, pervades the passage. Metastasio’s text was written for performance. The audience would experience it as riding a fine line between illusion and reality. The performance is real, but builds an artistic illusion into larger, real-world contexts. Reflecting on the space between reality and illusion would have been apt in a building design for the Virginia Company, as the acting troupe was known for its success with illusionistic e∑ects.fi‡ Such illusions can use immersive experience to activate powerful realizations in an audience. Latrobe’s description of Scandella’s family highlights the art of acting via small gestures; slight shifts in expression and appearance can communicate more than the grandest speech. Imagining the mute phantom family gathering as an “act of assembly,” Latrobe believes it asserts a forceful political pronouncement: “This is not the time, but Venice is our country, and Venice shall be free.” He describes a public performance in which appearance and gesture make a passionate social and moral plea. Horace’s “Cleopatra Ode,” Metastasio’s Atilius Regulus, and Latrobe’s dream all address core themes: discernment of moral value versus vice, dedication to country and family, heroism during wartime, and human will facing liberty, enslavement, or Republican aspirations. On the title page of Designs of a Theatre, Latrobe executes one of his most powerful watercolor fantasies beneath his Horace citation. This frontispiece vignette, henceforth A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus,builds complex content related to these same themes [Fig. 6.6]. This beautiful and mysterious image has, as yet, received no scholarly attention.fi° Its haunting appearance seems orchestrated to entice and absorb a viewer in a powerful opening act for this subscription project. The image sets the tone for the dreamscape of the proposed theater, while laying the foundation for the fundraising initiative that will bring it into existence.

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The title page is animated by this frontispiece, a rectangular window in the sheet’s bottom third, but the cramped scene is ominous and devoid of human presence, slowly stilling and absorbing the gaze of the wary viewer. The unfinished Table of Contents states that this vignette represents, “A groupe of theatrical Apparatus, being almost a compleat inventory of the properties of the present Theatre at Richmond [burnt in the night of the 28th of Jany 1798].”fi· Latrobe’s description contrasts with the vignette’s appearance. He describes it as a “compleat inventory,” implying order and itemization. Instead, this array of inanimate objects presents a confused mass, compressed tightly into the space without overriding logic. In both the caption and the confusing, claustrophobic, visual form, this frontispiece recalls Breakfast Equipage [Fig. 1.2]. Close inspection reveals this image to be equally redolent of meaning, conveyed through varying formal techniques and suggestive iconography. This frontispiece relies solely on visual form to convey content, supported with very little text. Within Latrobe’s oeuvre, this scene aligns most closely with his trompe l’oeil, yet it also fits well into the sister genre of still life as one of the few examples, like Breakfast Equipage, of Latrobe exploring this genre. A tall pole at the center of A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus is the first detail to catch the eye. The pole spears a mannequin’s head, its face painted, its eyes dark, capped with a prodigious, awkward white wig that piles hair at a dramatic angle. An unnatural smile twitches uncomfortably on its face, seeming to put a brave face on its predicament. A broad-brimmed black hat hangs on the wall behind. Within the image’s compressed space, the hat and wig intersect awkwardly, highlighting both their detachment and their relationship to each other. Three broad axes lean against the wall, tilted precariously toward the head and hat, ready to slice the mannequin’s head from its pole in a clean chop. The whole scene is poised in perfect stillness. The eye is mesmerized by this central drama; the circular composition of axes, head, and hat pulls the eye in a continuous, swirling motion. The scene’s stillness triggers the eye’s motion, yet each circular pass increases the queasy consciousness of pending threat. Both the implied violence to come and the gruesome allusion of the impaled head rivet the viewer.

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Surrounding this central drama is a display of theatrical costumes and stage sets, consonant with Latrobe’s drab caption. Landscape panels, clothing, props, furniture, and items of interior decoration are all piled together and the image is crammed full. No human figures are present, but two rats run through, contributing to a general air of dishevelment. Unlike in Breakfast Equipage, Latrobe leaves no written inventory. Here he presents his Richmond viewers with an assemblage of items readily understandable to regular theatergoers, many perhaps individually familiar from multiple appearances during

shows. It is tempting to wonder if specific wigs, hats, and props might recall certain characters, actors, and performances, as Latrobe asserts that they are the Virginia Company’s own props. Captured here, these objects are patently lifeless, in contrast to the action and meaning they might have on stage. Though the subjects of the scene, they are discarded into an anonymous interior space, waiting in stillness, as if hoping for revitalization in the new theater. Any such expectations are, of course, dashed by Latrobe’s attestation that this property was “burnt in the night of the

Fig. 6.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus from Designs for a Theatre, 1797–98.

Performing Spaces ·

28th of Jany 1798.” All evidence suggests A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus was completed before the fire.fl‚ Still, the image’s foreboding was borne out by these objects’ later fate. Latrobe’s still life is reconfigured as a vanitas or a memento mori, remembering this community of props, snu∑ed out soon after their depiction. This fire was a very negative event for Latrobe, despite enhancing the need for a new theater. On the night the theater burned, the troupe had recently performed Latrobe’s comedy, The Apology. This was a benefit performance for the actress “Mrs. Greene,” though Latrobe commented he wrote the play out of respect and admiration for her husband, the “excellent comedian and more excellent man,” [ J. W.] Green.fl⁄ The Apology, a satire on Alexander Hamilton, had been in Latrobe’s thoughts for some time, but was written rapidly in January 1798, while Latrobe worked on the theater design.fl¤ Unfortunately, the play proved more controversial than calculated. In addition to spoofing Hamilton, it poked fun at the political journalist William Cobbett, featured as “Skunk, a newspaper Editor.”fl‹ Cobbett, a.k.a. Peter Porcupine, took o∑ense and responded in his Philadelphia paper with scathing commentary. “A Farce and a Fire,” his brief paragraph, attacks Latrobe, the actress Mrs. Greene, and capitalizes on regional rivalries to frame the play as a direct insult to Philadelphians. Notably, it also attributes the fire to divine retribution for the performance. Cobbett’s biting text reads: At Sans-culotte Richmond, the metropolis of Negro-land, alias the Ancient Dominion, alias Virginia, there was, some time ago, a farce acted for the benefit of a girl by the name of Willems, whose awkward gait and gawky voice formerly contributed to the ridicule of the people of Philadelphia. The farce was called the Apology; it was intended to satirize me and Mr. Alexander Hamilton (I am always put in good company), and some other friends of the federal Government. The thing is said to be the most detestably dull that ever was mouthed by strollers. The author is one La Trobe, the son of an old seditious dissenter; and I am informed that he is now employed in the erecting of a Penitentiary House, of which he is very likely to be the first tenant. In short, the farce was acted, and the very next night the playhouse was burnt down! I have not heard whether it was by lighting or not.fl›

Latrobe anonymously countered Peter Porcupine in the press while recording in his journal:

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The paragraph furnished me with a hearty laugh, and I am not a little pleased with the post-humous honor done to my father’s memory, who has been dead about eleven years. Miss Willems is Mrs Green, for whose benefit the apology was acted. She was a very good dancer, and sings very well, though in the style of the English stage, which does not please here. She is a very respectable woman, and a mother. I am sorry to have been the occasion of the abuse thrown upon her, although the abuse of the Porcupine is, in general, a certain proof of merit.flfi

Latrobe was in no position to sustain such damage to his reputation. Later that spring, he solicited support from Je∑erson for a bid to work on the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, acknowledging that without a powerful political endorsement, he would not secure the commission.flfl The Apology performance, fire, and subsequent negative press indicate both how politically involved Latrobe was in this moment and how significant political allusions and allegiances could prove in the pursuit of his architectural career. No copies of Latrobe’s play survive—most may have burned in the fire, though at least one remained in his possession—thus little can be argued about its contents. However, Latrobe dedicated a paragraph to describing both the reception of his play and its inspiration in the same letter to Scandella that contains his dream of the Venetian Republic.fl‡ Latrobe recounts: I have also written a Comedy which has been acted with a mixture of violent Applause and as violent opposition. The Author was not known till the next morning. The subject was Hamilton’s Apology, and the most comic character, Peter Porcupine, under the name of Skunk, who does all the dirty work of the piece. It was written in two days, the idea being started among a few friends and immediately pursued. The fact is, that it ought to have been damned. Not on account of any great demerit in the [play?] but because not one of the performers knew half his part, excepting Green, who acted Skunk most admirably. I believe the loude[st] laughter during the representation was occasioned by 5 performers being on the stage at once, not one of whom knew what to say, and as the Company is not worth a prompter, they walked o∑ and left the scene unfinished. You may guess at my feelings. The house was more crouded than it had ever been before. It was full of Ladies, or we should have had a tournament between the friends of Hamilton and those of liberty and morality. I intended to publish it, and it was advertised, but I believe I shall keep it, ut nonum[que] prematur in annum [to be published in the ninth year]. I will, however, if I can find the time, send you a copy in manuscript.fl°

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At the conclusion of this passage, Latrobe includes a wellknown Latin citation from Horace’s Ars Poetica, a lengthy poem dedicated to the relationship between visual art and poetry. Line 388, which Latrobe imperfectly cites, was often quoted in Latrobe’s time. His citation may indicate his doubt about the quality of his play. Horace warns that a poet should hold back his work from public scrutiny until he has had su≈cient time for reflection, including ensuring it will stand up to divine scrutiny and uphold his ancestral reputation. The reflective poet can edit and revise, but Horace warns that, once distributed, a work cannot be recalled. Latrobe feels his piece is morally correct: in opposing Hamilton, it is on the side of “liberty and morality.” However, the faulty performance may indicate it has some “demerits.” Latrobe continued to contemplate publication of The Apology over several months. Sparring in the Virginia Gazette with a critic, he commented: “By the publication of the Apology alone, would the public be enabled to decide upon my claims as an author. In the mean time . . . my character as a man is brought into controversy in a manner, from which it is di≈cult to rescue it, without its bearing some scars, which though visible only to the eye of prejudice or ignorance, it would be extremely desireable to avoid.”fl· Still, he never published his farce. Eventually, the a∑air blew over. Although he jokes in his journals, he comments to Scandella, “you may guess at my feelings,” a comment heavy with humiliation. On April 30, 1798, Latrobe wrote to Scandella about The Apology while he was still sparring with Cobbett, and still had not sent Scandella the manuscript. Now joking that The Apology is “an apology which very much stands in need of an Apology,” Latrobe promised to send the manuscript in the care of a “Mr. James from Philadelphia.”‡‚ The Richmond Theater fire was an unhappy coincidence with the timing of his play, and it remained seared in his mind for many months, while he dealt with personal, scathing critiques that coupled his name with the catastrophe. The fire was a devastating financial loss for West, whose equipment burned, and for the city of Richmond, which lost a principal public building. Accordingly, it makes sense that Latrobe connected his opening image to the conflagration in his text, even if the image itself was completed prior to the incident.

A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus has the somber hue of ashes after the conflagration, and its jumble of objects is reminiscent of the aftermath of destruction. In its own fashion, this vignette is a scene in ruins. These ruins are choreographed with an underlying logic that is evident after careful study. At left are accoutrements of war and manly dress, spanning European history. Spurs and a helmet lie next to an empty white wig, posed alongside another wig with the distinctive shoulder-length curls of archaic Grecian hairstyles. Behind and around these objects lie an array of additional telling props, including shields, various transit containers, and a prominent sword. A discarded mask is wrapped in red cloth, which pools like blood behind the hilt of the sword. Perhaps most significant among these items is a laurel wreath positioned among the wigs. This wreath signals the glory of the Classical world. Yet, it lies discarded on the floor. A potent symbol of victory, the laurel generally serves as heroic apparel. Here, forgotten and rejected, it mingles among other items on a dirty floor. Consistent with other allusions by Latrobe, these juxtaposed elements speak to big ideas. They evoke the passage of time, confront di∑erent moments of civilization, and question heroic victory. The empty wigs and bodily accessories also are present, highlighting the absence of bodies and ideas of mortality. Even when animated by actors, these objects merely aid illusion, recreating historic figures and epic personages and o∑ering, at best, partial interpretations of heroism. Further to the right, the theme shifts toward the illusions of performance. A multicolored costume—perhaps of a jester—lies contorted on the ground with a discarded eye mask in lieu of a head, replacing comedy with assumed tragedy. The uncomfortable pose of the costume, absent a head, and with a gaping, empty-mouthed mask o∑ers a tortured, haunting form. Further along the floor, assembled brushes, pots, scissors, and an unfurled scroll with squiggled lines on it indicating text lie near several cylindrical forms with small, protruding black ends of uncertain purpose. In the image’s right-hand corner, one such cylinder is in a sconce, suggesting these are large candles for illuminating the stage. Sparked with a flame, these many candles could easily start a conflagration. As a collective, the objects in the middle foreground present texts (the script of theater), along

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with necessary tools to paint, assemble, and manipulate theatrical space. Immediately to the right, a pair of oversized rats scampers across the scene. Behind them, calf-high boots stand erect and empty, posed prominently before a small dressing table that is topped with a gilded mirror. Here again, the absence of bodies is haunting, emphasized by both empty boots and an empty mirror. In the right-hand corner, musical instruments jostle piles of identical empty masks and various receptacles. A horizontal bass fiddle supports a musical still life of instruments, including a French horn and a gilded lyre. A flute and clarinet rise stem-like from an adjacent pot marked “tears.” Interspersed among these instruments are a ceramic vessel, somewhat amphora-like, and a teakettle. Two piles of masks invoke a proliferation of identical masked figures, maybe a chorus or orchestral musicians, supporting communal voices over which solo, heroic voices might sound. An arrangement of cards is tossed face-up on the floor, finishing o∑ this still life with a motif familiar from Breakfast Equipage and prevalent in eighteenth-century trompe l ’oeil. These objects accompany the visual with the aural, making allusions to an orchestra and a chorus, and echoing the rhythm and dance in Horace’s ode. Meanwhile, the kettle, cards, and amphora-like vessel suggest life and leisure as represented in the theater in filler moments between major plot shifts and heroic actions, which are often characterized by anticipation and uncertainty as that which pervades the image. The middleground is filled with larger objects, many leaning against one another or the wall. At left, four portraits are stacked helter-skelter. One is a three-quarter-length portrait of a woman with a bejeweled pile of hair and an ornate dress fit for Rococo France. We see its barest details rendered in monochromatic greys and loose strokes—a technique appropriate to its shadowy background location. A closer look reveals that this portrait is not framed, its support has begun to warp, and it is ripped directly beside the figure’s cheek, revealing a grid pattern of material behind it. A title in block capital letters appears prominently between the painting’s upper border and its support declaring, “my grandmother.” Not quite the direct personal reference it would seem, this painting is also a prop, perhaps inviting reflection on passing generations or familial a∑ection.

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The portrait is reminiscent of Taste Anno 1620, which uses similar style and subject to consider the same themes [Fig 5.9]. The remaining stacked paintings o∑er little information. In one of them, only the upper right-hand corner is visible, showing the barest contours of a large head. Farthest to the back, and tumbling left, a third image is largely obscured; the viewer can make out a single head, shown in profile, with a pointed beard, prominent nose, and hat or helmet with a longbilled visor. This figure is reminiscent of Flaxman’s line-drawn heroes. The fourth painting is slipped upside-down and at an angle between others, its visible portion shows two sets of legs. The angle makes these legs appear to fall in an absurd position, feet raised helplessly in the air, pointed away from the central “grandmother” figure. Due to the di∑erent angles at which these paintings are propped, the wedges of the various visible elements, and the partial overlay of figures, the collective e∑ect produces a pinwheeling motion, spinning across time and the human condition. An ancient hero acts as foil to a more modern aristocratic woman, and partial and anonymous figures are counter balanced by the assumed intimacy of “My Grandmother.” In each case, the painting is damaged, upended, or fragmented. Their jumbled, disembodied limbs and heads further anxieties already evident throughout the image. Adjacent objects delve deeper into these anxieties. A long, stick-like object (perhaps a telescope) rests against the pile of chests and stage props, dangling a man’s wig from its point. Like the “grandmother,” the wig hails from ancestral courtly life and hangs just in front of the “grandmother’s” painted bodice. The faceless contours of the empty wig pose a stark contrast to the prominent portrait head. A lacy cravat hangs from a clip below the wig, further emphasizing the absent male body. Yet another piece of empty masculine headgear—a broad-brimmed black hat with a prominent feather—sits atop a nearby trunk and is paired with a scarf and oversized necktie. The viewer faces damaged or partially visible bodies from both past and present, juxtaposed with fashion accessories, again highlighting the absence of human bodies. Moving back toward the center, the viewer’s eye perceives a stack of four panels of landscape scenery wedged between the portraits and the dressing table. These are the backdrop

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behind the central mannequin head. These panels show nondescript trees and rocks, recalling William Gilpin’s gestural and abstracted landscape style. Similarly, they visually refer to the woods, low-lying boulders, and rivers prevalent throughout Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors and used by him as a visual shorthand for Virginia. Here, these landscape elements are generalized and anonymous, perhaps synchronously alluding to Virginia, and to Latrobe’s trope of “trees, rocks, and water” as commonalities around the globe. To the right, the surface of the dressing table presents a still life. Two large black hats with prominent white plumes sit one at each end. Both flashy and dramatic, they seem fit for Shakespearean productions. One hat is poised on a swag of faded pink fabric with gold trim; perhaps Latrobe’s original pigment was a more prominent scarlet. This robe and plumed hat both convey ideas of male stature and power, again echoing a generalized idea of the absent heroic male body. The two remaining items on the dressing table—a mirror and a furled sheet of paper—add a personalized edge to this theme. The gilt mirror dominates the tabletop, its reflective surface angling backward, supported by a bracing leg, and poised appropriately for a seated actor. This mirror is foldable and portable, as its reflective surface could lie flat on top of a lower drawer. As a visual element, the mirror’s most interesting feature is its empty reflective surface, which glows out at the viewer, reflecting nothing within the cluttered visual space. Its blank surface is especially haunting when considered next to the unworn hats and empty high boots—it begins to seem as if a body has dematerialized. The mirror pins down a long furl of paper, which displays the watercolor’s only substantial text, its resonance heightened by the silent mirror. The first lines read: “Will be opened December 15, 1798 The new theatre,” an aspirational, rather than actual date, approximately one year from the completion of the image.‡⁄ Beneath the comment is a single, significant line of Latin: “Vivat Resp.” Latrobe adds a flourish to the “s” and barely separates it from the “p”; if read rapidly, the text could be misidentified as “Vivat Rex.” The two phrases, equally legible to Latrobe’s contemporary audience, have opposing meanings: Vivat Resp[ublica] (“Long Live the Republic”) or Vivat Rex (“Long Live the King”). Perhaps Latrobe intended the double entendre. Vivat

Respublica was a common phrase in period writings, clearly patriotic in resonance. Here it may inspire readers to do their civic duty by supporting the subscription to the theater project. Further, the phrase is closely associated with theatrical communities in the 1790s in the United States. Latrobe may well have united these associations with his own longstanding reflections on Republicanism, heroism, and art, a hypothesis to which I will return. The phrase Vivat Respublica made frequent appearances on playbills and advertisements for performances, particularly those of New York’s well-known Old American Company in the 1780s and 1790s.‡¤ By 1797/8, the phrase was used by theater companies along the Eastern Seaboard, reflecting the dispersal of actors from the Old American Company to troupes throughout the nation.‡‹ W.W. Pasko questions the patriotic authenticity of the phrase, commenting “not that the actors cared anything more about the Republic than others, but it became a habit to use this phrase among them.”‡› At the least, use of the phrase signaled actors’ belief in the promotional value of Republican allegiance. Furthermore, as Douglas Harvey has explored, there are long transatlantic traditions of political associations with theater before, during, and after the American Revolution. The use of Classical languages, literature, and associations in these productions helped to fine tune political meaning. Classical culture allowed performances to resonate for audiences, whether they were loyal to Britain or to the concept of an independent Republic.‡fi The use of phrases such as Vivat Respublica by the Old American Company and other troupes in the 1790s surely capitalized on this robust tradition. For frequent theatergoers, Latrobe’s phrase o∑ered familiarity, a particular branding, and moral assurance to the theatrical endeavor in Richmond. It was also an inside reference intended for members of the Virginia Company, highlighting that Latrobe recognized the lingo of their profession and represented them well. It is also tempting to suppose that such patriotic references might have been meaningful ideologically to a certain theatrical sector, perhaps including West’s troupe. Since many artists of the era believed their art contributed significantly to shaping Republican political identity, such statements could represent an aspiration for theater to communicate

Performing Spaces ·

Republican ideals to a larger audience. As David Steinberg explores, the debate over the relative value of visual art versus theater was active in the Colonial American context.‡fl Furthermore, portraits of actors and actresses in late eighteenth-century Britain and, subsequently, in the United States often highlighted the moral or ideological value of their art. West and Latrobe might easily have associated their project with this larger conception of theater’s value, including the phrase Vivat Respublica as an ideological marker. The suggestion of such weighty political associations continues as the viewer progresses toward the right margin of A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus. Immediately adjacent to the dressing table is a guillotine, its blade poised in the upward position, ready to strike a neck. The guillotine is one among various potential props biding its time—with gaping jaw open, it waits to spring into action. The obvious and immediate association of the guillotine with the Terror would have been fully apparent to Latrobe’s contemporaries. Behind and to the right of the guillotine are a detached wagon wheel and another wooden structure, perhaps an empty easel. On the wooden wall at the back of the image are the final elements of the watercolor: a series of images, four of them works on paper attached to the wall. Their material is apparent since one has started to peel away. Each is set o∑ with a broad, uniform white margin. Three of the four pieces are square and similar in size, suggesting they are a series of prints. The fourth, a horizontal rectangular print, alters this pattern, hanging alone above the dressing table. The three square prints all contain male heads, rendered only to the neck. In the left-hand image, two heads are shown stacked in profile. A foreground male head has curly hair tied back in a short braid, secured with a bow; a background profile features a long nose and pointed chin. A young man appears in the next print with striking, dark wavy hair and prominent lamb chop whiskers. Unlike the first image, this could be a contemporary figure. The third print is labeled “Comedy and Tragedy,” again featuring two heads. The smaller head, in profile to the left, is thrown back in wide-mouthed laughter. To the right, facing out of the image, lurks a larger, scowling head. Both wear white wigs. In the fourth print, shown tacked on the wall, two figures gallop neck and neck on horseback—the race seems urgent, but no context is provided.

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Barely visible on the right-hand side of the frontispiece are two additional heads, seemingly added like gra≈ti to the wall. These two beaky-nosed heads with shoulder-length hair loom like phantoms above the props. Pasted underneath them are three pieces of paper, two with illegible text and a third that suggests an image. In context, one may speculate that Latrobe intends these three pieces of paper to represent theatrical broadsides, pro∑ering information about a performance. This set of prints and papers is reminiscent of broadsides and related theatrical print culture. A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus o∑ers a rich array of objects and allusions. As a composite, it supports Latrobe’s building project. Moreover, as this careful analytical progression through the “inventory” has revealed, the image resonates well beyond the project’s stylistic and practical elements. Latrobe’s frontispiece meditates on human history and society—including melancholy reflection on revolutionary violence, on a vanitas for “the Republic,” and on what it might mean to “act” the role of a hero. Most significantly, the frontispiece confronts the value of art (whether visual, literary, or theatrical) as catalyst for meaningful thought and reflective action. Finally, it resonates with Latrobe’s attempts to sort out his life amid the upheaval and uncertainty of his historical moment. Another tour through the image can demonstrate how it pulls these themes together. At the center, the mannequin head on a pike of sorts is reminiscent of popular imagery of bodily violence for political purposes, especially imagery circulated during both the American and French Revolutions. Particularly relevant are cartoons about the Terror. Such images routinely feature heads on spikes, the airborne hats of mobs, guillotines, executioners with threatening axes, and noblemen in over-the-top attire, including extravagant wigs. Allegorical figures ride through scenes in chariots, perhaps with laurel in hand—all symbols present, but broken, inert, and discarded in Latrobe’s vignette.‡‡ None of the symbols of political action or revolution are active in the frontispiece. The raised guillotine blade is still. The anonymous central mannequin head wears no known politician’s face. Without political impetus and human action, these haunted items evoke the realities of Latrobe’s time, but in an allusive, generalized fashion, reminiscent of the ambivalence

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of Horace’s Ode. Nunc est bibendum calls for dancing and celebration, while elevating Cleopatra’s suicide. Here, Latrobe employs these same themes, perhaps reflecting over the death of the French king.‡° Like Horace, he shapes an ambivalent celebration. Latrobe’s image is violent by allusion, bodiless, and characterized by the stillness of anticipation, not by whirling action. If the subject matter invokes the ever-rotating cycles of social and political upheaval, then Latrobe furthers the allusions in the image with his two Latin inscriptions. Vivat Resp[ublica] implies a patriotic sensibility and sympathy with the young republics of the Atlantic world, but it also refers to the Roman Republic, gasping its last in Horace’s ode. While pondering the relative heroism of Cleopatra and Octavian, Horace focuses on systems of power and morality tied to autocrats. Yet the combination of “long live the republic” with “nunc est bibendum” begs for reflection on the relationship between these two forms of governance, triggering pressing questions: is “long live the Republic” a viable concept? Is this a transient chant of victory, tinged with an ambivalence equivalent to that which is expressed in Horace’s victory ode? This double message is furthered by the orthographic ambiguity allowing Vivat Resp. to read as Vivat Rex. “Long live the king,” after all, is the traditional salute after a monarch’s death. How did Latrobe intend his Richmond audience, so deeply involved in political intrigue and Republican fervor, to consider this image? Did he intend o∑ense through its focus on decapitations and skeptical references to revolution, along with melancholic, rather than heraldic, reflections on heroism and victory? It seems certain that Latrobe hoped his audience would understand his message through the lens of theater. His image acts in parallel with West’s theatrical productions, where audience and actors alike might assume various identities fitting to current social and political circumstances. As noted, the very objects in the image may have been familiar to his audience through prior performances, even present in their memory as having been worn by known actors. The small, mesmerizing watercolor may pull viewers into a visual puzzle in the same way that stage performance may enchant or entice its audience while, ultimately, also teaching them.

If Latrobe’s work is focused on history’s instability and the crumbling residue of civilizations, it is also motivated by the allure of a socially driven revolution. His letter to Scandella reflects this passion for the Republic alongside his uncertainty about its viability. An essay fragment, written in the second decade of the nineteenth century, o∑ers Latrobe’s later reminiscences about his political fervor in the late 1790s, employing similes drawn from theatrical stage sets: I remember the time when I was over head and ears in love with Man in a State of Nature . . . Social compacts were my hobbies; the American Revolution—I ask its pardon, for it deserves better company—was a sort of dawn of the Golden Age, and the French Revolution the Golden Age itself. I should be ashamed to confess all this if I had not had a thousand companions in my kaleidoscopic amusement, and those generally men of ardent, benevolent, and well-informed minds, and excellent hearts. Alas! Experience has destroyed the illusion, the kaleidoscope is broken, and all the tinsel of scenery that glittered so delightfully is tarnished and turned to raggedness.‡·

Latrobe sees his former preoccupations as an illusion and a “kaleidoscope.” The frontispiece of A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus resonates with these descriptive terms as its tidy still life borders on trompe l’oeil. The strategic chaos of the elements within its frame is akin to the kaleidoscope’s spiraling lines and shifting shapes. The image seems poised between one frenetic moment and a proximate “act,” as one revolution subsides and the next launches, perhaps to outshine earlier attempts, perhaps doomed. This pulsating dance and its transitional pauses echo the rhythm of Horace’s ode, pausing briefly to mourn Cleopatra amid feet pounding in victorious celebration. Yet, this image also gives the lie to Latrobe’s later recollections of youthful idealistic politics, since it already presents a magical spell “tarnished and turned to raggedness.” While Latrobe’s image may appeal to those believing in theater’s social benefit and with strong Republican leanings, it also resonates with those skeptical of ideological enthusiasm that might spark violence. The image takes for granted the decline of social compacts and the ultimate ruination of all glorious human civilizations. While serving these grander social visions, A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus considers Latrobe’s personal circumstances, capturing through the viewing experience the sensations of

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which he complained. If Latrobe felt that his life was out of his own control—carried along by cruel fates and transatlantic political tides—so too does the viewer feel out of control looking at this image. Likewise, Latrobe’s despondency at a world that he saw as being built on a constant cycle of death and ruin is captured here in the degradation of a collection of worldly goods. Pushed up against the picture plane, the mass of objects blocks and contorts the viewer’s passage through a compressed visual space. There is no comfortable resting place, no seat from which to peruse at a safe distance. The unwilling actor surveys varied costumes and props, o∑ering possible personas, but with small hope that any of these disguises will lead to a better future. Haunted by the past, intimidated by the present, with no horizon toward the future, the viewer stares into the mesmerizing image space, caught up in its kaleidoscope of tantalizing, broken illusions.

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Kaleidoscopic Amusement A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus sets the conceptual tone for the Richmond Theater project. Drawn in by it, potential subscribers may have flipped through Designs of a Theatre to further discover the building. Uncertainties about what the completed state of the manuscript might have looked like mean we can only gain a partial sense of the experience Latrobe curated within the manuscript. Nevertheless, the sequence of images and their cumulative e∑ect merit analysis, revealing details about his thought process and intended content.°‚ The sheet “Description of the Drawings and General Observations” immediately follows the title page. On it, Latrobe includes a description of the frontispiece and a brief table of contents. At the top of the page is Head Piece, Study, Tragedy Begging, and Farce Snatching the Mask from Comedy, henceforth Head Piece, a vignette rendered purely in the neoclassical style [Fig. 6.7]. Tragedy, Farce, and Comedy

Fig. 6.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Head Piece, Study, Tragedy Begging, and Farce Snatching the Mask from Comedy from Designs for a Theatre, 1797–98.

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are captured in white and grey, set against a pale blue-green background, strikingly similar to the popular FlaxmanWedgwood neoclassical aesthetic.°⁄ The three female allegorical figures form a pyramid as posed on a platform of two rectangular “marble” steps. Comedy is at the apex, but her place of honor is besieged. Tragedy reaches toward Comedy in supplication, one foot on the elevated podium. Behind Tragedy’s left leg lies a discarded instrument. Farce jumps up slightly, springing gracefully as she snatches at a mask Comedy raises in her left hand, at the center of the scene’s drama. This mask may symbolize the art of theater. Straining to keep possession of the mask, Comedy moves rapidly, her skirt flying and her hair blowing. Her uplifted left arm raises the mask away from Tragedy and counterbalances her flying fabric and hair, but her e∑orts to elude Tragedy put the mask in dangerous proximity to Farce. The three figures appear dressed for di∑erent historical moments. Tragedy comes straight from the ancient world. Comedy wears a flowing gown in eighteenth-century neoclassical style. Farce sports a tall feather in her hat and a mask, as if coming from an overblown masquerade ball or a fête of the French Ancién Regime. Each fashion reference is aptly assigned and each costume also has a counterpoint among the props in A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus. Comedy may be at the apex of the image, but Latrobe enlists a notable model for Tragedy, selecting a figure from Flaxman’s Aeschylus, Plate 16, The Appeal of the Theban Ladies

Fig. 6.8: John Flaxman, Aeschylus Plate 16, The Appeal of the Theban Ladies, 1793.

[Fig. 6.8], a scene from the play Seven Against Thebes. Flaxman’s Theban women act as a tragic chorus, but also as supplicants, begging the gods to protect their besieged city, caught between two sons of Oedipus—Eteocles, who has refused to abdicate the Theban throne, and Polyneices, who is attempting to invade the city. The citation of the Flaxman figure allows Latrobe to elevate the content of his simple allegorical scene. The instrument at Tragedy’s feet may refer to the ancient custom of singing texts accompanied by lyre. As Horace’s sonorous ode accompanies A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus with the rhythms of dance, so this instrument sets the scene to music, while also acknowledging the form of ancient theater. Reworking Flaxman’s tragic Theban women into this lighthearted neoclassical “head piece” introduces reflections on the purpose of theater and acting. Tragedy, Comedy, and Farce are placed in action as figures on a stage. As Latrobe alludes to Flaxman (and Wedgwood), the figures in turn interpret Aeschylus in ceramic form and so too, the Virginia Company o∑ers theatrical interpretations. Supporting the art of theater within this proposed building would permit fresh interpretations of known texts, allowing further deep meditations conveyed on stage. The verso of “Description of the Drawings and General Observations” features a tall vertical goblet on an ornamented wall shelf. Adorned with grapes, vines, and leaves, the goblet resembles a Communion chalice. It casts a dramatic shadow to its right, creating a theatrical aura and making reference to both theatrical tricks of illumination and Latrobe’s “kaleidoscopic illusions.” There is no text. The goblet is an unexplained element, yet raises an array of associations, positive and negative, sacred and secular. It recalls a dinner goblet, wine-filled and uplifted in toasts at celebratory feasts. Ornate goblets were o∑ered as prizes to victorious heroes. However, similar goblets could also tempt a hero to drink a fatal poison or magic draught. During Christian rites, ornate chalices present Communion wine, the blood drawn from Christ’s ultimate su∑ering and the saving promise of su∑ering for humanity. The goblet and its shadow embody the tension

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between positive and negative, between a real object and its phantom twin, and between victory and death, combined in one image. View of the House from the Stage is the first study of the theater structure, o∑ering a section cut directly in front of the stage, facing out toward the semicircular seating [Fig. 6.9]. The cut walls are indicated in white, transforming them into negative space and guiding the eye into the elaborately rendered interior. The structural details are thus e∑ectively deemphasized, favoring the watercolor rendering. Though a remarkable watercolor, it has only been noted in critiques of

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the theater design. Cohen and Brownell’s critique is the most extensive: The theater interior, the raison d’être of the entire building, displays a degree of artistic immaturity relative to his later work. He attempted to make the auditorium as beautiful as possible in his most developed drawing of it, but he had an inadequate command of ornamental design. For parts of the decorative scheme he fell back on light forms from the moribund early phase of neoclassicism. Such elements as thin swags, fan motifs, and rosettes over columns harmonize poorly with each other and with the rest of the ensemble, particularly with the severe co∑ering above and the Greek Doric columns of the lower tier.°¤

Fig. 6.9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the House from the Stage from Designs for a Theatre, 1797–98.

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These stylistic judgments assume a level of finish that Latrobe went to great lengths to avoid in employing a visual form that underlines the design’s unfinished state. Cohen and Brownell focus on various architectural details, some of which appear finalized (including the saucer-shaped dome and the arced lines of its co∑ers, which pay direct homage to the Pantheon). Yet others, such as the decorative swags, are shown in a very preliminary form. While Cohen and Brownell read it as an architectural drawing, View of the House from the Stage must primarily be understood as a watercolor. Indeed, it is a self-referential image, absorbed in matters far afield from building materials and real architectural detail. Cohen and Brownell’s critique is confused on two key points. First is the example of the decorative swags, of which only a few completed panels are shown at left. At the center, the balcony’s surface is blank. Farther to the right, its vertical wooden slats are being covered with fabric. Cohen and Brownell read the swags and garlands as architectural details, but they are actually painted trompe l’oeil motifs—the work of an artist. The second confusion concerns the columns. Does Latrobe indicate an interior colonnade in the Doric style? This would be surprisingly severe for a recreational interior. Instead, he indicates columns in two di∑erent, stacked orders. This convention is, appropriately, more consonant with the varying tiers of orders used in Roman structures, such as the Flavian amphitheater. The lower order, identified by Cohen and Brownell as Greek Doric, appears to be the later “Tuscan” order. The balcony columns above resemble the delicate and slender Composite order. At stage level, the pit also features short, slender pilasters, indicated as ornamented with vaguely neoclassical details. View of the House from the Stage may not represent the building’s final design, but simply o∑ers possibilities. Its “unfinished” visual form invites the viewer to join in envisioning its future built reality. This rendering reveals an ambitious and experimental watercolor, rather than Latrobe’s “artistic immaturity.” The exceptional nature of View of the House from the Stage is signaled by the presence of contemporary figures (a rarity in Latrobe’s work) spread throughout the image and pictured active at work on the construction and decoration of the interior. These individuals both help bring the building into existence and present an imaginative array of potential future

human activity. View of the House from the Stage is rendered in greyscale, contributing to the realization that it is not the real world. The figures stand out as they are outlined against the white paper and their bodies are not filled in. They populate the scene like ghosts or, more accurately, like future visions. Significantly, this technique mimics Flaxman’s line drawings. The resemblance is emphasized because the image has a similar blue-grey background tint to that of Head Piece. In the future moment pictured, construction is complete and the theater is receiving its final interior details. The space buzzes with the activity of eight figures, six paired o∑ into distinct groups. The necessary sca∑olding, tools, and support structures crisscross the interior, distracting from the building’s stylistic and aesthetic attributes. A strong contrast in light and shadow divides the space into two areas. Most of the action unfolds in the shadowy two-thirds of the image, while one figure, a painter, stands in full light. Within the logic of the booklet, this raking light and shadow is that of the moonlit stage captured in Front of the Stage, introduced to open this chapter. The figures are best considered in ascending order from the bottom to the top, following the functional connections between them. However, the viewer does not perceive them in this tidy fashion. Rather, they appear unexpectedly, as the eye moves across the scene. The white figures pop forward, almost like cutout negative spaces, against the darker background. In the lowest register, a figure stands, just shy of the horizontal center. His back is to the viewer, as he descends from the pit into lower storage rooms, carrying a scythe-like tool over his shoulder. His race, activity, and identity are all unclear and he remains the least readable figure. In the first balcony, along the theatre’s “first floor,” two figures, shown in profile, walk from right to left. They carry a long ladder, supporting it on their shoulders. These figures are African American. Though shown in respectable attire, they are very likely slaves and perhaps trained artisans. They both have close-cropped hair and bulbous foreheads. The man at right displays his full facial features in profile, including large, protruding lips and a pronounced skull contour, capturing common period racial stereotypes for rendering African Americans. Interestingly, Latrobe applies the same visual technique to rendering these African American figures as he

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does for the other workers: they are undi∑erentiated, all white in skin tone. The third group of figures is organized along the second floor balcony’s front wall. Two young men at right work intensely to a≈x fabric to the vertical wooden slats on the front of the balcony. One, shown in profile, wears a largebrimmed hat and holds the end of a long swag in his right hand. He walks forward grasping the fabric, which droops down from the balcony, nearly touching the seats below. The second youth leans over the balcony, head bent and body hunched in supreme focus, gripping the upper edge of the fabric and pulling it tight with his left hand. With his right hand, he pounds a nail securely through the fabric and into the wall. This nail joins a long tidy row of nails, their heads carefully indicated, dotting the fabric’s upper edge. The painter appears as part of this team of figures, standing on sca∑olding in front of the second balcony, and thus visually separated by the depth of the wall. This man is of a more elevated status than the others. He has a sophisticated air, enhanced by a decorative swag positioned behind his head. He stands in three-quarter profile, his right hand lifted to apply paint, his left hand holding a palette. If viewed from the front, his body would present in contrapposto, as his right knee is bent. He wears a long jacket, vest, stockings, and knee-length pants. His hair, perhaps a wig, is in a single braid behind his shoulders. He stands as if frozen, with back rigid and hands gracefully posed. Interestingly, his is the only figure crossed by architectural lines, which continue straight through and across his body, fusing it with the structure. Standing on the railing of the second balcony, just to the right of the central bay, the final two men are shown in deep conversation. Both wear broad-brimmed hats. One listens, head cocked, leaning on a walking stick with his right hand, and holding out his left hand, palm upward, in an inquisitive gesture. The other expounds to his companion, standing at ease, his back resting against a column, legs crossed nonchalantly. He points with his extended left arm toward an uncertain area. With his right hand, he gestures toward his own head. Evidently, this man holds some sort of intellectual or supervisory role. He sports a long jacket, down to his knees. His short, slightly wavy hair, and overall facial profile are not dissimilar to Latrobe’s features; perhaps this is the architect

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himself. His interlocutor may be the theater impresario West, or Quarrier, Latrobe’s collaborator. Whatever the accuracy of these identifications, the specificity of the mens’ features suggests precise identities. The painter also seems precisely rendered, as a portrait. Perhaps he is the man expected to work on the Norfolk Theater’s new sets for the Virginia Company. Significantly, it is this figure—the painter, rather than the supervising architect—who brings the building to life. He alone stands bathed in moonlight. The viewer sees the painter’s role quite literally acted out, as his hand moves from right to left across the balcony, his paintbrush adding trompe l’oeil garlands and decorative brackets. Even the neoclassical details on the pilasters are added by his hand, a detail evident only because he is shown adding a vertical burgundy rectangle to a pilaster. To the left, an empty panel with details sketched in awaits the painter’s enlivening touch. The painter is already finished with the first floor, where designs in red, white, and blue decorate the balcony’s face. Neoclassical vases, in red on a red background, flank long blue rectangular panels, featuring decorative ivy scrolls. At the center of each panel is a white oval and each oval shows a relief portrait in profile. Each minute portrait has unique features and Latrobe may have dreamed up individual identities for them, though he may also just have indicated standard portrait types and poses. All these elements—portrait busts, antique vases, and architectural details—are products of the skilled hand of a master of the painterly art of architectural illusion.°‹ This image, not unlike A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus, is constructed around pictorial illusion. The frontispiece presents a crowded, claustrophobic space, while View of the House from the Stage o∑ers a nearly empty interior, sparse on details and virtually monochromatic. Although nearly opposite in terms of visual e∑ect, both scenes feature Latrobe’s skills as a watercolorist with bravura. Both o∑er a window into his mind as he was developing the building’s concept. The ideas driving View of the House from the Stage are especially apparent when considering the overseer and painter in relation to one another. The overseer’s hand gestures in the painter’s direction, while his gesture toward his own head lays claim to the building’s appearance and maybe also to the drawing and its content. This figure (if interpreted as Latrobe) emphasizes

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authorship of both the architectural vision and the pictorial conceit. Meanwhile, the painter embodies the powerful potential of painted illusions to transform appearance and give form to visions. He makes the interior a compelling space, creating motifs to confuse future audiences’ perceptions of illusion and reality. In producing renderings to capture the imagination of a Virginian populace unprepared to read architectural plans, Latrobe created a section rendering the theater as a figment of his own imagination. This dream building is shown as it comes into being, caught in a developmental moment, a conceptual e∑ect furthered by the magical light of the moon, reinforcing its dreamy atmosphere. Latrobe may have enjoyed the emphasis this set of images placed on his mind as the source of generative vision. As he focused on the integral role of the visual artist in the theater arts, he could further emphasize the power of watercolor. On the next sheet, Latrobe includes a polished rendering of another significant public space, a view down the length of the hotel’s large and luxurious ballroom. Ballroom at first seems complete, though Cohen and Brownell have identified multiple unresolved design elements in the scene [Fig. 6.10].°› The rendering is precisely finalized, yet still only a compelling vision of a potential building. The room is not shown during the crowded action of an evening’s festivities, but bathed in direct sunlight displaying the full glory of its ornate details. Five figures try out the dance floor, dressed in festive attire. One couple proceeds toward the end of the room, with backs turned toward the viewer. A second pair stands face-to-face before the large window in the far apse, seemingly engaged in conversation with a third man. Ballroom is both faded and damaged, yet the dramatic color palette is still evident. Color plays a significant role in both the architectural features and the watercolors’ visual qualities. Cohen and Brownell observe that “the color scheme is the most striking aspect of the drawing,” but also assert that “the color scheme merits adverse criticism” because it indicates “Latrobe’s unsureness in composing the architectonic elements of the room.”°fi Notably, in comparing the ballroom’s decorative scheme to the theater’s painted details in progress, we notice that the theater features a red, white, and blue color scheme for architectural ornament and also uses pictorial illusion to enhance the architecture. Ballroom prominently

features red and white, with only a few blue highlights: three settees placed in niches and the jacket of the man standing with his back to the viewer. Since none of these blue highlights relate to architectural ornament, and since there are a large number of blank panels along the frieze above the mirrors and windows, it is reasonable to hypothesize that this space awaits enlivening by the architectural painter. The visually dramatic color scheme of this watercolor has made this one of Latrobe’s better-known architectural renderings. Doubtless, these same qualities were intended to entice prospective subscribers. Human dynamics take Ballroom to another aesthetic and intellectual level. Its characters’ actions are benign and routine, but their purpose is not immediately apparent. The man and woman facing one another look intensely engrossed. They incline their heads toward one another, and he holds her left hand in his right. She is dressed in a flowing neoclassical gown, her long hair falling loosely down her back, below a headband. She holds a folded fan in her right hand, her left hand drooping by her side and slightly extended toward her partner. Since these figures are located in front of the vanishing point of the image, the viewer’s eye is drawn toward them. Latrobe prompts his viewer to share their confidence. Similarly, the third man stands back in an appraising fashion, elbow sticking out and hand on hip. He may well be in on their secret, whatever it is. The drama within the group of three figures holds the viewer’s attention, while the pair to the right also fascinates, as their ghostly reflection in the mirror provides a counterpoint to their retreating backs. They perform a dance step. As they advance, they assess their reflection in the mirror. The woman is extravagantly dressed in a loose-fitting white gown, with a long trailing train. Her hair falls well below her waist and two prominent feathers wave into the air from her head. These feathers visually recall the many allegorical figures of “America,” so prevalent in Latrobe’s time, whose feathered headgear conventionally indicates the United States, at the expense of stereotyped renderings of American Indians.°fl Mirrors in a work of art often orchestrate a visual game of illusion. Latrobe uses the mirror to stage a relationship of gazes between the couple and their reflection. They are represented in bright pigment, the blue of the man’s coat popping

Fig. 6.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Ballroom from Designs for a Theatre, 1797–98.

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out prominently. The mirror’s shining surface is created with a thin layer of white, so the reflected figures stare back at their counterparts as if through haze. The figures and their reflections demonstrate an ambiguous discrepancy in pose and action: while the man turns significantly toward the right, twisting his torso toward his dancing partner and lifting his right leg, his reflection moves forward at an uncertain obtuse angle. Further, the mirrored figures stand at an axis with both pairs of figures, triangulating the otherwise disparate pairs.

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Only the reflected figures stare back at the viewer, their distant location and hazy appearance preventing them from playing a welcoming role. Instead, the eye moves in cadence among the three groups (shown in profile, from the rear, and frontally) in an arrangement recalling choreographed dance. Yet in moving among these groups, the eye moves among two animate pairs and one mirrored illusion. Latrobe bases Ballroom on a non-existent space and an imagined future moment. His watercolor allows the viewer

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a glimpse into his creative mind. Simultaneously, the mysterious nature of the three groups of figures denies the viewer access to the deepest levels of such knowledge. Moreover, the figures are all represented in overblown evening attire, performing identities, not revealing their true daylight selves. Like the adjacent theater, the ballroom is a space of grand illusions, where members of society play a part and others must discern reality from performance. Ballroom invites viewers to take part in this process of discerning viewing and, thus, o∑ers a taste of the excitements and social benefits of such a space.

Following Ballroom, Latrobe includes a series of straightforward architectural drawings in his booklet. Among these is the Plan of Part of the City of Richmond Showing the Situation of the Proposed Building, which o∑ers some topographical tinting and indications of civic landscaping. Most significant about this plan is that it fixes the future theater within the city and reveals its relationship to Je∑erson’s new Virginia State Capitol. The booklet includes the requisite series of plans and elevations in eight total drawings, across six sheets.°‡ A final drawing, the beautifully rendered Section or Internal View of the Theatre & Stage, presents a section revealing the stage

Fig. 6.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Section or Internal View of the Theatre & Stage from Designs for a Theatre, 1797–98.

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and house of the auditorium, including accompanying support areas behind the stage and public zones in front of the house [Fig. 6.11].°° A clear distinction is evident between these architectural drawings and Latrobe’s more ambitious watercolor renderings in the booklet. This can be seen by comparing Section or Internal View of the Theatre & Stage with View of the House from the Stage and Front of the Stage. All three present di∑ering information about the same space. In Section or Internal View of the Theatre & Stage, human activity is absent. The other two works emphasize human interest and suspense. Section or Internal View of the Theatre & Stage relies instead on structure, space, and form to capture attention. Having begun his booklet with a series of alluring watercolor images, Latrobe completes it with Front of the Stage. In assembling his Designs of a Theatre, he was evidently aware that his intriguing watercolors were the most likely means to secure subscriptions. Thus, he opened and closed the manuscript with them, nesting plans and elevations on interior pages to be available for a technically educated audience, while not overwhelming a novice. Rendering and the Architect’s Imagination The ensemble of drawings in Designs of a Theatre constitutes a significant artistic project, supporting Latrobe’s architectural designs. They supply the social and cultural context for his engagement in the project, representing the theater not merely as a space for frivolous enjoyment, but as a venue for playing out heady intellectual, social, and historical concerns. Within the building’s space, the theatrical troupe may interpret plays, poems, and literature, shaping their audience’s perspectives on pressing issues. The hotel and ballroom add spaces for Richmond’s residents to gather in public, performing identities while exploring mutual interests through personal engagement. Beginning with his quotation from Horace, accompanied by overt Republican meditations in A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus, and progressing through his red, white, and blue decors, and prominent American eagle, Latrobe attempts to endow his proposed building with civic importance. The booklet’s symbolism connects the structure to literary and theatrical history (with an emphasis on the ancient Greek

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tradition), and posits that the theatrical tradition is serious, not frivolous. These references assert the building’s social and political purpose. The images create a visual argument for their audience to support the building project, making savvy use of widespread political and social rhetoric prevalent in contemporary Richmond. But beyond this practical agenda for the commission, with its clear social and ideological perspective, Latrobe created these watercolors for a self-interested purpose. They are rare among his Virginian watercolor oeuvre in being clearly intended for a public audience. Latrobe self-consciously exhibited his watercolor skills, shaping individual visual works to tantalize viewers and provide high levels of intellectual content. As an ensemble, they evidence watercolor as an ambitious medium. They advance the renderer’s art as being vital for envisioning architectural projects. These works assertively present Latrobe’s skills as a watercolorist and renderer, simultaneously o∑ering a professional perspective on his art to promote his skills to a generally ambivalent American audience. Alongside this public message, Latrobe used his watercolors to further explore his private priorities in more subtle ways. A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus, Head Piece, View of the House from the Stage, Ballroom, and Front of the Stage work together to create an immersive experience. Each is a thought piece that strives to engage the viewer in reflection, rather than focusing on stylistic and architectural details. A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus presents an initial aesthetic riddle, and eventually guides viewers toward social and political questions linking past and present, old and new regimes, art and life. The lessons of the piece are vaguely threatening. For a contemporary Virginian, the same work might trigger reflection on emerging Republican social models. This vignette embodies expectation, with its meaningful array of objects, once used in frenzied action, now still and awaiting future use. Head Piece visually presents the three central modes of theater, Tragedy, Comedy, and Farce, as neoclassical allegory. Building on Flaxman and Wedgwood motifs, and through them calling on the Classical tradition, this vignette subtly yet firmly positions the theater space and future performances within an aesthetic and ideological ancestry. Latrobe does not point out his connections to Flaxman.

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He probably expects these references to make his vignette seem familiar to his audience, implicitly communicating neoclassical associations and sensibilities. View of the House from the Stage, Ballroom, and Front of the Stage transition the image series to visualizing the proposed building within the spectrum of human action. View of the House from the Stage focuses significantly on the artist and architect as conceptual centers of the work. The structure seems transported from the imaginary realm into the real world, though, importantly, this is still an illusion. Ballroom and Front of the Stage both present the structure alive with human action caught in medias res. Ballroom focuses on activities within the glamorous hotel. Front of the Stage captures the stage springing to moonlit action. Individual activities are not readily discernable as in View of the House from the Stage, in which several figures appear to portray real individuals, perhaps known to Latrobe’s audience. The anonymous actors and actress on the stage are costumed, playing their parts. The dancing couples in Ballroom are shown similarly, as if masquerading. Front of the Stage concludes this series, leaving its viewer with a moonlit vision of the future stage. Mesmerized by the moonlight and the mysterious stage action of its figures, the viewer is invited to expand on this vision. In other words, the viewer is quite literally invited to participate in realizing this dream. Latrobe leaves his audience in a trance, uncertain what is illusion and what is reality. Thus, Latrobe o∑ers a tour into his own creative mind in action through his images—it is an exclusive tour, not necessarily intended for a large audience. While he may hope viewers will follow his allusions, their subtlety makes them di≈cult to discern. The eagle and guillotine are easily recognizable for their symbolism, but the color palette and neoclassical references are less evident. Even the Latin excerpts, which have deeper meaning in a literary context and would have been legible to any contemporary educated reader, would have been inaccessible to all deprived of a Classical education. Further, not all educated viewers would have recognized that Vivat Respublica constitutes both a political and a theatrical reference. Some associations, indeed, as with the larger social and political reflections of A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus, are not only di≈cult to discern but also evade resolution.

It seems that Latrobe did not intend his introspective watercolors to be widely intelligible. Instead, his embedded references were to communicate to his close confidants and intellectual peers. His images require narrative discussions explaining the theater project, its significance, and its associated ideas. Latrobe may have provided such context in the promotional gatherings held for the subscription. Modern scholars must rely instead on Latrobe’s journals and surviving letters, which presumably provide a di∑erent perspective into the breadth of his concerns. Revealing aspects of Latrobe’s architectural mind, these images cohere in an introspective artistic project, o∑ering an aesthetic and intellectual supplement to the Richmond Theater project. Head Piece presents the neoclassical stylistic movements underlying Latrobe’s architectural practice, and nods toward two primary sources of inspiration: the art of John Flaxman and original Classical sources. View of the House from the Stage visually embodies the actual process of construction—here rendered as a visual metaphor of the architect’s own imagination, as he was sketching out, decorating, and constructing the building’s image in his mind. The man in the upper balcony, pointing forward and gesturing toward his head, refers on a grand scale to both the watercolor itself and the envisioned building as products of Latrobe’s mind. Ballroom and Front of the Stage imagine the building during construction. Latrobe populates it with inhabitants, while envisioning future actions and events therein. Ultimately, these last two images, by representing significant spaces, allowed Latrobe to render his architectural dream, blurring the boundaries between form and illusion. As in his dream of Scandella’s family, Latrobe used these images to explore the boundaries between desire and reality. Front of the Stage leaves Latrobe’s faint penciled and drafted lines visible, foregrounding the constructing of his vision. Ballroom shows dancers practicing the social pageant they will perform within that space, allowing the imagined building to test its viability under public scrutiny. Front of the Stage takes this farther, bringing the spirit of the stage to life. The moonlit scene fascinates, while refining the essence of the theater to a few visual components characterized by suspense, dramatic lighting, and ambiance. This is a generative scene. In bringing life to Latrobe’s theater, it grants rebirth

Performing Spaces ·

to the art of theater. The arts of watercolor, architecture, and theater unite, communicating Latrobe’s hope for the powerful mesmerizing e∑ect of his building. Of this sequence of watercolors, A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus is perhaps the most closely allied with Latrobe’s personal introspection. It captures his inspiration and reflection. The objects shown are at rest after being used on stage in the prior Richmond Theater, where Latrobe witnessed them in performance. Their prior roles provide possible associations for familiar viewers, and their inactivity anticipates future roles. This watercolor most fully intersects with Latrobe’s struggles during his Virginian residency. The disrupted state of this image, full of allusions to social status and political turmoil, echoes Latrobe’s laments about his historical era and his personal experiences. In its ambivalence about heroic political action, its melancholic fascination with the specter of the guillotine (accompanied by numerous references to headless bodies), and its overall air of threatening uncertainty, this image is deeply reminiscent of Latrobe’s contemporary views of Virginia’s ruins, with their built-in references to earlier tragedies and missteps of European history, now recently reenacted on American shores. Here, Latrobe’s study captures both his anxieties and his meditations on larger issues. Accompanied by Horace’s verse, the scene invites philosophical reverie. Rather than providing answers, it poses questions, the core of which refer back to the architectural project. Can the art of theater, often upheld by Latrobe’s contemporaries as the highest and most moral art, assist in mitigating society’s wrongs? Will Latrobe’s theater, by supporting this art form, contribute to a new, stronger life for the Republic in Virginia? Ultimately, can art intervene in the repeating cycle of human tragedy? Had Latrobe’s theater come to fruition, Designs of a Theatre might have become obsolete, perhaps even destroyed during construction. As the attempts to raise money for the project proved futile, the booklet remained in Latrobe’s possession. Gradually, his hopes for construction disintegrated. Probably out of concern for his own rights to the design, as well as the value he ascribed to his watercolors, he kept the manuscript. With the project abandoned, the booklet has continued to serve as the best, indeed the only, substantial record of Latrobe’s designs for the Richmond Theater complex. Yet, its

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watercolors are significant in their own right. Ambitious and visionary, these images allow a deep view into Latrobe’s mind. They rely on the context of 1790s London, in which Latrobe learned to infuse avant-garde content into watercolor and asserted the significant role of the medium for architectural rendering.°· Yet, Latrobe’s cultural context, audience, and agenda were far distant from the issues preoccupying British contemporaries like J.M.W. Turner and Joseph Gandy. Due to the smaller financial stakes and concerns of Virginia’s architectural world, Latrobe worked both as designer and renderer, an increasingly rare phenomenon in contemporary Britain. While debates in Britain questioned the validity of watercolorists documenting archaeological sites or historic structures, and probed the line distinguishing architectural practice from rendering, Latrobe could simply pursue his own intuitive fusion of design and rendering.·‚ Because of these factors, his Designs of a Theatre o∑ers a rare instance wherein architectural imagination is given form in both rendering and design by a single individual. The intellectual, stylistic, and imaginative visions are packaged in a cohesive project, wherein even the smallest watercolor vignette is devised to further and clarify that vision. In his Virginia Penitentiary and Richmond Theater manuscripts, Latrobe employed his watercolor skills to conjure visions of the possible form of public architecture in Virginia. His watercolors marketed his work for a Virginian audience. But Latrobe also used the manuscripts to pursue his interests in the medium. Indeed, while the booklets’ marketing concept relied on Latrobe’s skills as a watercolorist, the visual logic of their images dominates and even displaces the proposed architectural forms. The watercolors create their own narrative, argument, and intrigues, designed to lure in the viewer and prompt reflection on large issues well beyond the scope of the proposed buildings. More dream than practical reality, the manuscripts invite viewers to enter into the architect’s mind, imagining with him what these buildings might become. Because of the significant social purpose for both Virginian structures, these dreams also invited reflection on the future of (American) society. Latrobe’s final illustrated manuscript, the subject of the next chapter, opens by visualizing an allegory of the architect’s dream, foregrounding the juncture of ambitious watercolor and architectural design visions. 

Chapter Seven

Castles in the Air

In Designs of Buildings Erected or Proposed to be Built in Virginia by B. Henry Latrobe Boneval From 1795 to 1799, henceforth Designs of Buildings, Latrobe assembles his domestic architectural designs from his years in Virginia, bringing closure to these years of architectural (un)productivity through retrospective consideration.⁄ The exact dates of composition are uncertain. The title page frontispiece is dated “Richmond 1798” at the top center and “Philadelphia September 8, 1799” at the bottom right. With the caveat that “Latrobe’s inscribed dates are frequently unreliable,” it seems reasonable to assume the manuscript was begun in late 1798, corresponding to his November 1798 departure for Philadelphia, and completed in 1799.¤ Designs of Buildings contains twenty-five sheets, across which nine architectural projects are rendered. With his relocation, he consigned these designs to the category of specimen-exemplars or past visions, rather than projects he still hoped to complete. He intended these designs to attract future clients and to highlight his skills. Perhaps due to his intense work on the Bank of Pennsylvania and the inevitable disruption of relocation, most of these watercolors are less complex than those in Designs of a Theatre. Still, Latrobe continued his approach of attracting viewers via compelling watercolor technique rather than through the technicalities of architectural drawings. Unlike the social and public content presented in Designs of a Theatre, the focus of Designs of Buildings is turned inward. Beginning with its opening vignette, the booklet provides a playful glimpse into Latrobe’s architectural imagination. Paging through this booklet, prospective clients encounter an aggressively self-aggrandizing yet humorous vision. Designs of Buildings combines the neoclassical tradition, as epitomized by a connection with John Flaxman, with realistic naturalism via close attention to Virginia’s topography and flora. The manuscript captures and markets skills Latrobe promises to bring to Philadelphia. While its vision is introspective, it is also professional in that it seeks to make a statement about Latrobe’s architectural abilities, promising his importation of rigorous and intellectual European architectural design and rendering traditions that he would then adapt to the United States. Like Latrobe’s other illustrated manuscripts, Designs of Buildings has been considered only in the context of his architectural career. Its contents have served primarily to allow for the assessment of Latrobe’s architectural skill and productivity while resident in Virginia. Je∑rey Cohen and Charles Brownell summarized the booklet’s contents as looking forward with promise to Philadelphia, while also capturing that “all of his Virginia projects were at least partial disappointments, either being unexecuted or altered in certain significant aspects.”‹ As they note, Designs of Buildings is concerned with the process of transferring Latrobe’s architectural skills from Virginia to Pennsylvania. However, the manuscript does not assess his Virginian projects as failures—though they have consistently been deemed as such in subsequent scholarship. Instead, it heralds them as substantial

Fig. 7.7 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View in Pennock’s Hall & Staircase, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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visual and intellectual precursors to future work. While Latrobe addresses his disappointments, such as in his narrative on the William Pennock House, his drawings o∑er enticing, multi-dimensional accounts of the unrealized or imperfect structures. Commenting on the drawings within the volume, Cohen and Brownell state that they, “portray the professional lineaments of the architect during this period at the outset of his American career: they show his delight at introducing innovative elements new to the American scene . . . and ample leisure time in which to make elaborate retrospective and uncommissioned drawings.”› This assessment accurately recognizes that these drawings encapsulate the maturation of Latrobe’s American design vision and assemble a curated portfolio to document his professional capacities. It falters, however, in considering the drawings to be merely the byproduct of excessive leisure hours.

Fig. 7.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Frontispiece, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

Unsurprisingly, Michael Fazio and Patrick Snadon’s focus on Latrobe’s domestic architecture causes them to use Designs of Buildings extensively, yet they treat it merely as a sourcebook for designs. Like Cohen and Brownell, they attribute the manuscript’s significance to its anticipation of future success in Philadelphia and its demonstration that, “[Latrobe] was able to put his distinctive British and European training and education to use immediately in solving parochial, uniquely American problems.”fi They o∑er no analysis of Designs of Buildings as a manuscript. The manuscript is a significant watercolor proj ect, although that fact has gone unremarked. Within this work, Latrobe creates a clear aesthetic vision, a mature watercolorist’s view of potential architecture in the United States. In his most polished watercolor specimens, he studies each building via the combination of architectural information

Castles in the Air ·

and watercolor’s visual form. The result is images that relate to and build upon his extensive Virginian watercolor oeuvre, employing techniques he developed during his travels to communicate an architectural vision for the United States. Naturally, this vision grew from and depended on his architectural imagination. The booklet’s ambitious nature is evident from first sight of its dramatic opening Frontispiece [Fig. 7.1]. The image exhibits Latrobe’s mastery of trompe l’oeil technique, presenting the vignette as if torn from a larger sheet, in a conceit complete with a curling lower border, uneven and ripped sides, and two ripped and folded tabs at the top center. The lower foreground shows a pile of gently rounded rocks and accompanying leaves, mosses, and vegetation. In the middleground, an allegorical female figure, stately robes rippling gently, flies from right to left. In her uplifted right hand, she holds a model of Latrobe’s Bank of Pennsylvania, scaled just smaller than her head. Her tiara is decorated with small crown-like features, resembling miniature buildings. Her earth-toned wings are erect, pointing upward, coasting through the sky. Latrobe identifies her as “the Architect’s Imagination, such as she is” and indicates “the idea of the Figure is imitated from . . . Flaxman, the celebrated Sculptor,” a point to which I will return.fl In the background, a series of buildings appear along the horizon and above in the piled cumulus clouds. Most attention paid to this image concerns these buildings, each of them either a house Latrobe successfully constructed in Virginia (shown a≈xed to the ground) or one he designed there but never saw built (shown in the clouds). Latrobe’s frontispiece allegorizes his relocation from Richmond to Philadelphia. He describes this, noting that the “Architects imagination” is “leaving the Rocks of Richmond and taking her flight to Philadelphia.”‡ Thus, the image conceptualizes Latrobe’s creative productivity from his Virginian period. The foreground rocky landscape is immediately coded as representing Virginia, identifiable from elsewhere in Latrobe’s watercolors. The allegorical figure, meanwhile, is fully integrated with Latrobe’s epic and literary

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preoccupations of these years. Summarizing the connection of imagination to design, Latrobe notes that in Virginia his “fancy was kept employed in building castles in the air, the plans of which are contained in this Volume.”° The architect’s “fancy” or “imagination” gave form to his creative productivity. The frontispiece captures the essence of Latrobe’s aspirations in this period. Each aspect of the image refers to some element of his “fancy,” which it emphasizes as a generative creative force. Latrobe’s text is self-disparaging, but his triumphant allegorical image seems only self-aggrandizing. His victorious imagination presents a new, public architectural form for the United States, merging the architect’s dreamworld with the realities of the North American landscape. Architecture relies on giving structural form to vision—constructing a building from the germ of an inspired mental image. This allegory very specifically renders the architect’s imagination in opposition to that of the artist, but significantly, it achieves this contrast via the watercolorist’s skillful vision. Here, imagination is a catalyst for positive change and self-referential allegory carries a larger message. As elsewhere in his watercolors, Latrobe cites Flaxman strategically. Frank Sommer identifies the figure in the frontispiece as the representation of Io’s Dreams as captured in the fifth plate of Aeschylus [Fig. 7.2].· Flaxman’s Io’s Dreams lacks wings, but is otherwise a close match to Latrobe’s “Architect’s imagination.”⁄‚ Typically, Latrobe selects the figure for its literary, as well as formal, associations. Io may seem an unlikely character

Fig. 7.2: John Flaxman, Aeschylus, Plate 5, Io’s Dreams, 1793.

200 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

to attract his interest, but hers is a story of exile and unjust fate, two themes of ongoing interest to Latrobe. In addition, Flaxman’s scene gives form to the concept of the dream-vision, another persistent theme in Latrobe’s watercolors. Io’s Dreams captures an incident from Prometheus, Bound. A recumbent, sleeping Io is posed temptingly. Although she appears serene, she is su∑ering from a recurring traumatic vision that triggers her personal tragedy. Three female figures hover above her. Two are mostly blocked, but with faces similar to Io’s own they may represent dreamed versions of her. One seems calm, but clutches her robe tightly around her neck. The other has eyes brimming with tears and looks at Io in apparent distress. These figures are dwarfed by the dominant allegorical figure. She hovers immediately above and parallel to Io’s body. Hand raised in dramatic emphasis, she stares blankly beyond and above Io, acknowledging the young woman as merely a pawn in her agenda. After all, Io’s dreams and the consequences they trigger are machinations of various Olympian gods. Io’s divinely induced nightmares cause her subsequent agony. In Aeschylus’s account, these are past events, a story within a story, recounted by the still-haunted Io to the tortured Titan Prometheus, whom she meets after her exile and many years of aimless wandering. The maiden was harassed by dreams alerting her to Zeus’s interest and commanding her to succumb to his desires. Defiant, Io informed her father, and an oracle instructed him to exile her to protect his people. While wandering, Io became deformed and mentally unstable. After many years, she arrives at the end of the Earth in an unlikely encounter with the equally tragic Prometheus. Io enters the play with the exiled wanderer’s lament: “My far-roaming wanderings have taught me enough, and I cannot discern how to escape my su∑erings.”⁄⁄ As the narrative unfolds, Prometheus informs Io about details of her future. Although he forecasts many further hardships, she will eventually travel to Africa, wander along the Nile, and find the land of “Nilotis.” There, he tells her, “it is ordained for you, O Io, and for your children to found your far-o∑ colony.”⁄¤ Ultimately, one of her descendants will rescue Prometheus from his su∑ering. Latrobe might have found several themes of interest. Unwillingly and unfairly, Io is forced into exile. Despite following her moral compass, she su∑ers cruelly at the hands of

power. Pursued mercilessly by a divine gadfly, she experiences insanity. Finally, and reassuringly, her travels prove to provide a reward in sight. In Nilotis, she will settle, rise to power, and establish a dynasty. In the spirit of Prometheus’s prophecy, Latrobe’s Frontispiece captures a vision of his own auspicious future in a distant land, the reward for years of unhappy wanderings in exile. Further, in alluding to Flaxman’s image and organizing his own visual allegory around this figure, Latrobe casts Frontispiece in a dream state. Though grounded in the real Virginian landscape, the flying figure and fanciful buildings are imagined. Although the watercolor contains visual illusions, it does not attempt to trick the eye into accepting the entire scene as real. The verisimilitude of the foreground rocks and plants is countered by the fantastical nature of the figure and the buildings improbably floating in the clouds. In Frontispiece, Latrobe is interested in the border between reality and illusion. His image toys with this boundary, and uses the literary context of Aeschylus to heighten its meaning. Io’s dream, although imagined, is nevertheless transformative; it proves to be a divine premonition, not a false reality. Similarly, the “Architect’s Imagination” is a catalyst for realworld action, revealing the interior workings of the mind. The viewer is invited to enter the image, to see its di∑erent fanciful elements functioning together, and to join in its prophetic vision of Latrobe’s positive professional future. The oracular image forecasts his success forcefully, eschewing other outcomes. As when Latrobe retold his dream of Giambattista Scandella’s family, now he constructs an image that flaunts its illusions, while inviting his conclusion, “I cannot persuade myself that the illusion is much unlike the truth.”⁄‹ In e∑ect, this Frontispiece may bolster Latrobe’s image for his future and persuade an audience of potential clients and benefactors of his architectural genius and inevitable success. But other, more personal, forces are at play, as this vignette also manifests Latrobe’s e∑orts to convince himself to move to Philadelphia, perhaps contributing to his ultimate action. The idea was on his mind long before the Bank of Pennsylvania commission. Given his di≈culties in Virginia, he wondered if Philadelphia could be a better place for him, but he su∑ered from a psychological block against another relocation, as he recounted to Scandella:

Castles in the Air ·

It is my interest and my wish; my a∑ections, my vanity, my ambition all coincide to point out Philadelphia as the only situation in which I ought to reside—if I reside in America—and yet, by some inchantment I find myself unable to stir from this state. To my own indolence I can give a very good account of this phaenomenon, but not to the prudence or the little common sense I may happen to possess. I have not even the excuse of love to plead, whatever you may suppose. [The hope] however is not entirely extinct that I may still see you this spring.⁄›

Looking with envy on Scandella, happily ensconced in the camaraderie and intellectual fulfillment of an expatriate European community in Philadelphia, Latrobe added the postscript, “Could you give me a corner in your cabaret philosophique if I come to Philadelphia?”⁄fi Eventually, Latrobe made a visit to the city, which ultimately helped him to relocate, as it directly led to the Bank of Pennsylvania commission. Frontispiece energizes the viewer with a similar impulse toward movement. As an image for himself, this work bolstered Latrobe’s resolve to set out in search of success. The watercolor’s bravura proved a public front, counteracting private self-doubt, anxiety, and depressive lethargy—which, notably, Latrobe described as “some inchantment,” another apt parallel to Io’s Dreams. Frontispiece played a therapeutic role, helping Latrobe build his confidence, bolster his ambition, and envision escape from profound unhappiness. With Frontispiece as an introduction, Latrobe filled the volume with his Virginian architectural visions. The architectural details of these projects have been analyzed in detail by Cohen and Brownell and later by Fazio and Snadon. My discussion, therefore, focuses on the booklet’s artistic features by analyzing its most complex and detailed watercolors, namely those of the William Pennock House, the Tayloe House, and the Garden Temple/Retreat. False Hopes The house of Captain William Pennock is the first featured design in Designs of Buildings, filling five manuscript pages, including watercolors and extensive explanation. Nevertheless, the architectural drawings are incomplete, missing, for example, the elevation of the exterior and sections through the interior. Instead, Latrobe o∑ers attractive visual elements

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and chatty text, used to engage his audience in the place of fuller architectural data. If Latrobe’s narrative is accurate in its general contours, it may be because the project was one of his first attempts at design in Virginia, developed prior to April 1795 and thus dreamed up during his very first month in the state. Unfortunately, as a naïve new arrival, Latrobe was duped by a worldly American sea captain. Latrobe avoided hostile accusations, nevertheless allowing the reader to suspect the wily Pennock of exploiting the skills of his new acquaintance. While attempting to prove his abilities, Latrobe appeared a bit silly. Likewise, his architectural skills were questioned by the American audience. He was even misperceived as a Frenchman, allowing him to find humor in some of the critiques of his work that were based on the mistaken or assumed identities applied to him. As in his An Essay on Landscape, so here Latrobe’s narrative advances his role as a hero in a prose epic, where the unwitting youth is duped by locals, and his identity is misperceived. Underneath a header vignette (discussed below) and elaborately written title, Latrobe recounts this origin story for his American design career: This design was made in consequence of a trifling wager laid against me by Capt. Pennock that I could not design a house which should be approved by Mr. Luke Wheeler, which should have only 41 feet front, which should contain on the Ground floor, 3 Rooms, a principal Staircase, and back stairs and— which was the essential requisite—the front door of which should be in the Center. I won the Wager, and on leaving Norfolk in March 1795, I gave him the drawing, drawn to a very small scale. He had then no idea of executing the plan. About two months afterwards, I dined at the Eagle Tavern in Richmond, where accidentally, Colonel Kelly of Norfolk was also present. In the course of general conversation he related, that some time ago, a frenchman was at Norfolk, who had given Capt. Pennock the most preposterous design, which he had ever seen and that Capt. Pennock had been mad enough to attempt to execute it, and that having carried up part of the Walls, he was now perfectly at a stand, as none of the Workmen knew how to proceed. From his description, interloaded with many oathes and imprecations against the Frenchman, I learnt that my own design was meant.⁄fl

Latrobe suggests that nothing untoward occurred in the initial encounter.⁄‡ Perhaps similar to a hypothetical intellectual query, the initial wager seemed intriguing and innocent,

202 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

o∑ering a challenge and an opportunity to demonstrate his abilities in a public, masculine display. Unfortunately, Pennock’s motivations were more pragmatic and specific: to secure house plans without paying an architect. Having been duped, Latrobe had to su∑er hearing his skills maligned. Next, our hero determined to mitigate this damage to his reputation by writing to Pennock, while Pennock simultaneously appealed to Latrobe’s skills. Acquiescing to Pennock’s request for assistance, presumably curious about the disaster, Latrobe headed to Norfolk. His account of the situation is scathing:

in respect to its situation, my intentions have been actively overthrown, by the prejudice in favor of placing the house upon the street, ‘in order that one may see what is going forward.’ To accomplish this [?] the dust, the noise, and the smells of a seaport have been encountered, and the prospect of the river, and of an open airy expanse of Water sacrificed. It was my intention to have built the house upon a small rise in the garden and to have occupied the street by two small and ornamental stores, which would have yielded a very good rent. On this account, I have arranged all the communications along the entrance front, whereas, had I known how much interest would be taken in what is going forward in the street, I should have given the ladies a good room in front, at least upstairs.⁄·

[I] found that [the work] was in the hands of Mr. Field, a Ship joiner, and Mr. Gracie, an ingenious Scotch joiner, but obstinately wedded to the heavy wooden taste of the last century. It was with much di≈culty that I could repair the mischief already done. No part of the plan had been accurately set out. The front was totally altered: all the sash frames, instead of being in reveals, were solid, and placed on the outside, and no two sides of the bow window were equal, or set out from the same center. The chimnies occupied double the space requisite for them, and in general it was necessary to accommodate the original plan to the blunders committed by the workmen, to combat their prejudices and obstinacy, and to inform their ignorance as well as I could.⁄°

Latrobe’s sketch accounted for garden, vista, and other lifestyle concerns not addressed in the wager. But family preferences (perhaps expressed by the Pennock women) called for changing the position of the house. Corresponding adaptations to the plan were necessary—but both clients and builders were unaware. The resulting construction, not thought through by an architect, left nobody contented and contributed to negative critiques. The exterior details of the house also di∑ered from those in Latrobe’s proposal. Concerning materials and ornament:

The system of construction for Pennock’s house reveals the disconnect between Latrobe’s British professional context and standard practice in the United States, and may have revealed these di∑erences to Latrobe. The builders, for di∑ering reasons, are not those best suited to construct his design. Mr. Field, a ship builder, belongs to Pennock’s sphere, but is not necessarily as familiar with building on terra firma. Meanwhile, Mr. Gracie, an experienced builder, knows only vernacular Scottish conventions. Unsupervised by an architect, Gracie and Field had begun the building only loosely inspired by drawings they could not fully understand. Instead, they had followed their trade knowledge. Attempting to “inform their ignorance,” Latrobe strived to resurrect his original vision. But the changes from his vision were extensive, including a reorientation of the building on its site. These alterations may have been motivated by the lack of a proper site plan, the inability to understand the plan, or decisions between the builders and patrons based on other questions of convenience and logistics. Whatever the rationale, Latrobe was very disappointed and vented:

The walls are built of very red brick. The front is faced with red Philadelphia brick, which being thinner than the others are badly bonded, and the wall has given way, and is bulged about four inches. The woodwork in general is indi∑erently performed, excepting that executed by Gracie, which includes the staircase. The cornices which I designed, were deemed too plain, and Mr. Ferguson was employed to furnish such as were tastier, and finer.¤‚

Latrobe emphasized the important role of supervising architect to monitor the quality of the final product. His ideas were criticized and second-guessed by the clients, who gave the vernacular tastes of local craftsmen greater traction. With bitter irony, he here underlines the words “tastier” and “finer,” echoing the Pennock family’s disregard of his expertise. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, the completed building pleased neither the Pennocks nor Latrobe, who included its designs in his manuscript with a disclaimer that readers should consult the manuscript rather than visiting the house since, “the house, as it has been executed, is by no means so perfect as the design.”¤⁄ This narrative highlights the deep chasm between Latrobe’s practice of architecture in collaboration

Castles in the Air ·

with an elite family, and the conventions he met with in Virginia. It shows the damage possible if his architectural drawings circulate without accompanying text and vivid renderings, and are inaccurately interpreted or executed by laymen and builders. Finally, this text clarifies the significance of Latrobe’s original concepts within the context of the booklet, in which readers may carefully assess and experience his envisioned structure, which only exists in the included renderings. At the top of his first page, Latrobe includes the vignette Sketch at Norfolk, executed with borderlines at left and underneath [Fig. 7.3]. A dock scene is presented in the foreground. A bustling harbor full of ships occupies the background, some vessels secured at the dock, others sailing. Each of the four ships secured along the wharf features some portion of masts, flags, rigging, and sails projecting above the blue-grey wash of sky that defines the image’s upper edge. These elements piercing through the confines of the watercolor give the sketch a spontaneous, real-life a∑ect. This is a scene of activity. Ships’ sails blow in the wind. An array of people tread the dock. Vessels of all shapes and sizes ply the river. In contrast to this bustle, the water is calm, and grey clouds part to reveal a peaceful blue sky. Sketch at Norfolk sets the scene for the Pennock project. It introduces the viewer to Norfolk’s primary focus: its flourishing port on the Elizabeth River. The house is represented

Fig. 7.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch at Norfolk, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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in its larger urban milieu, including the surrounding built environment and society. The scene also o∑ers insight into male activities at Norfolk, centered around the sea trade, a context that deeply involved both Captain Pennock and Mr. Field. Although these characteristics might suggest that Norfolk was a cosmopolitan center with global networks, Latrobe’s image emphasizes the city’s provincialism. None of the individuals depicted are particularly high-class or cosmopolitan. All may be identified as belonging to three groups: sailors to the left, dock laborers at center, and, to the right, a group of men of slightly more elevated status, perhaps businessmen or captains. Sketch at Norfolk reduces the city to a thin strip of dock and focuses on the ships and water beyond. The Elizabeth River is shown at a juncture where a finger of water splits o∑ to form a promontory of land on which the town is located, and Norfolk is bordered on a second edge by a separate finger of water. Latrobe’s sketch looks out over a body of water, showing a wooded strip of land at the far horizon. The middleground is populated with boats, which are rendered in great individual detail. Norfolk, by contrast, is either nondescript or even absent. When he landed at Norfolk, Latrobe’s first vision would have been from the Eliza’s deck, sailing down the Elizabeth. The sketch identifies the boats and their fittings with more personality and specificity than it does the people

Fig . 7.4: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Map of the Pennock property, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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on the dock. It echoes the immigrant’s anonymity in a new land, and follows his yearning gaze toward the vessels that could take him homeward. This immigrant’s sensibility is furthered by the unwelcoming composition of the foreground figures. Of the nine visible figures, six are organized into two groups of three, engaged in deep conversation, standing in tight-knit circles of intrigue and turning a cold shoulder to the viewer. In the group on the right, one figure returns the viewer’s gaze with dark, black eyes, his turned head and direct stare suggesting surprise. He sees an interloper, rather than preparing to greet an old friend. The three figures at center, meanwhile, are deeply engrossed with their work on the dock. One is shown in profile and pushes a barrel, unaware of the viewer. Another hammers on a barrel. Head down under his hat, he focuses on his work. The third sits on a barrel looking out at the ships. In a moment of leisure, he turns from the viewer’s inquisitive eye. The only objects inviting his gaze are the ships, which parade around the harbor. At the narrative’s conclusion, Latrobe includes a map wherein the Pennock House is positioned “as intended” [Fig. 7.4].¤¤ This diminutive rendering gives visual form to the logic outlined in Latrobe’s narrative. Here, the large house occupies most of the center of the property. The plat shows the house as situated to enjoy a vista of the finger of the river (which Latrobe labels the “Creek”) while being secluded from the disruptions of the city. A straight carriageway connects house and street, while two rectangular buildings along the property’s boundary with Main Street shield the Pennocks from curious eyes and a∑ord spaces for work or rent. Although the property is not very large, Latrobe sites the building to correspond with his engagement in the picturesque tradition. The map also demonstrates the house’s large scale relative to the small adjoining buildings, emphasizing the Pennocks’ wealth and the fact that the house would have made a striking addition to the cityscape. Also evident on the map, though not shown elsewhere, is a small, rectangular attachment to the house, facing the water. This narrow rectangular building joined the house along the property’s southern edge. Its purpose is indicated as a “passage to the Kitchen O≈ces,” indicating the service areas of the house (including the work spaces for the domestic servants/ slaves and, perhaps, for Captain Pennock’s shipping business), which did not merit inclusion in the formal plans.

Latrobe dedicates three additional pages to the Pennock home. One sheet presents the floor plans of the “ground story” and “chamber story,” another the “second floor” plan at the bottom of the sheet and the “elevation on the Main Street” above [Figs. 7.5–6].¤‹ Throughout the drawings, Latrobe includes significant neoclassical elements. The front elevation is a boxy square, forty-three-feet long and equivalently high, featuring a small entryway complete with a pediment and flanking columns. Cohen and Brownell comment, “The order of this porch provides the most tellingly neoclassical characteristic of the design, presenting a heavy, strongly tapered Greek Doric rather than a more familiar order in a Neo-Palladian or Adamesque taste.”¤› More subtly, Latrobe integrates a simple rectangular foundation, possibly suggesting a column base, two parallel thin rectangular ribs (respectively above and below the entrance pediment) that form a blank frieze, and a final band between the second- and third-story windows. These ornamental divisions break the elevation into registers, and o∑er restrained Classical allusions. Of greatest significance among the Pennock drawings is View in Pennock’s Hall & Staircase, a highly finished rendering of the formal public entrance and stairway, infused with human drama [Fig. 7.7]. The well-known watercolor is a tour de force of Latrobe’s ability in the medium. Cohen and Brownell remark on its visual appeal, while critiquing the design: “This striking perspective was intended to convey to prospective clients a kind of spatial experience as yet unfamiliar in American houses. . . . Latrobe’s ambition here is evident, if perhaps still in advance of his ability to plan and decorate coherently.”¤fi Fazio and Snadon see in the rendering evidence of Latrobe’s interest in joining the interior and exterior. They further note its marketing appeal: “Latrobe first introduced such brilliant colored interior views as this one to American clients.”¤fl This rendering presents its American viewers with an unparalleled exotic interior. The view’s most dramatic element is the grand staircase, which is exhibited primarily in profile, thus reducing emphasis on its curved footprint. Instead, its visual e∑ect dominates, rising from the floor without vertical support. Since Latrobe claimed to like Mr. Gracie’s staircase, this impressive visual element may have represented some concurrence between Latrobe’s vision and the constructed house. The balcony along the “gallery” between the main second

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Fig. 7.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Pennock House ground and chamber stories, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

Fig. 7.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Pennock House second floor plan and elevation, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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floor rooms and the open two-story space above the grand staircase juts into view at left. Its picturesque semicircular footprint contributes visual drama. Only with some attention does the eye recognize that this semicircular route also follows a semicircular contour to the room plan that features the addition of a shallow arc to a square entryway. Careful attention to this curved wall, as rendered in Latrobe’s View in Perspective [Fig. 6.3] and compared to the corresponding footprints of the Dining Room (on the first floor), Drawing Room (on the second floor), and Nursery (on the third floor), suggests that these interior spaces might be almost as impressive. Strong light pours into the hall from large second floor windows, while deep shadow beneath the staircase and along the edges of the room adds drama. The front hall features black-and-white checkerboard flooring, complementing the chiaroscuro. Latrobe’s watercolor washes on walls and architectural details have faded, but seem to have been a red, white, and blue motif.¤‡ The walls are a delicate sky blue, the ground floor doors are red (now faded). All the remaining trim, as well as the second floor doors, are white. The ceiling features a central square panel in blue and white, with leaves and rosettes.¤° This decorative organic pattern contrasts with more stylized geometry in the rounded meander used in the trim between the gallery floor and the top of the foyer wall. This decorative ceiling recalls the painted details of Latrobe’s planned Richmond Theater interior, as does the red, white, and blue palette. The most alluring element of the drawing is the dramatic exchange among three figures on the gallery landing. Their interaction is perplexing; it is clearly emotional, but unexplained. Two men are shown ascending the stairs. One man, who has white or powdered hair, mounts the final step. Back to the wall, and facing the viewer, he holds his right arm forward into the gallery in

Fig. 7.7: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View in Pennock’s Hall & Staircase, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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an inviting gesture further emphasized by the hat in his hand. A deep blue jacket, with knee-length tails, knee-high black boots, and tight beige trousers complete his dapper ensemble. Although he welcomes the viewer, he is less important than the two other individuals, around whom tension builds. The other mysterious man mounting the stairs follows just behind the first. He is robed in flowing white and wears a hat with a prominent feather atop shoulder-length curling dark hair. Shown in profile, he appears expressionless. On the balcony, a woman leans over the railing, with her right arm fully extended, pointing a finger at the caped man in either exclamation or accusation. Like him, she wears a long, flowing neoclassical garment. A cape is thrown over her shoulders and pinned at the neck, indicating her recent entry to the house. Her long hair flows over her shoulders, caught in a simple, white headband. Both the woman and the caped man are outlined in homage to Flaxman’s technique. Cohen and Brownell interpret the man in the navy blue jacket and the woman as residents of the house, the robed man as a guest. They further elaborate how these figures contribute to the scene: The oddly costumed figure ascending the stairs, escorted and seems to have stepped out of the previous century. Perhaps Latrobe wished his clients to recall the British nobility of an earlier time, and to imagine such a guest at their home. With this in mind, they might have been more receptive to the new kind of spatial grandeur and grace of design that Latrobe’s generation would introduce into American domestic interiors.¤·

Indeed, the robed man looks otherworldly, though it seems more likely that Latrobe was using him to refer to theater than to evoke “British nobility.” The watercolor’s inherent theatricality is particularly evident in the woman’s emphatic gesture. Both the mysterious man and the exclaiming woman recall figural types Latrobe rendered in Designs of a Theatre. Her neoclassical garb and hand gesture evoke the pose of tragedy in Head Piece [Fig. 6.7]. The robed man, meanwhile, wears a plumed hat and robe similar to those in A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus [Fig. 6.6]. The close resemblance to Flaxman’s work also allows the figures to suggest ancient theater or myth, invoking at least a generalized epic mode.‹‚ Latrobe certainly includes these figures, dressed like thespians, to increase the visual appeal of his design. The viewer

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immediately understands the grand hall as a fitting space for this drama to play out. Latrobe’s design o∑ers the support for the interactions between the figures, a visual construct suggesting a way of life built on the lessons of art in all its forms. The image communicates that this ambitious, neoclassical building can support a lifestyle grounded in the principles of theater. Given Latrobe’s belief that theater could transmit grand lessons into real life, his image profits from this approach. Though his original design was created some years earlier, this rendering likely dates to the months following the completion of Designs of a Theatre. If so, the rendering, like its elaborate counterparts in the theater booklet, entices the viewer with a theatrical ambiance and, in so doing, invites the viewer into a space that exists only in Latrobe’s mind. These suggestions of Latrobe’s underlying logic would not have been apparent to his audience. Instead, readers might have understood the Pennock House figures through two other lenses. Having already studied the Frontispiece to Latrobe’s Designs of Buildings, and read his description of that allegory, his audience may have seen View in Pennock’s Hall & Staircase as another hyperbolic and enticing rendering of the architect’s imagination. Latrobe showed his building as inhabited, a stage for human drama; he o∑ered a compelling vision to bring life to his design. The odd costumes and unlikely emotional display help the viewer to identify View in Pennock’s Hall & Staircase as fantasy in the same allegorical mode as Frontispiece. Alternatively, the viewer might perceive the scene as permitting space for his or her own fantasy. The figures’ dynamic inspires more questions than answers. The mind begins to wonder as it seeks explanations of their interaction, but this search is in vain. Ultimately, the only satisfying answer is for the viewer to imagine his or her own resolution, inventing a scenario to accompany the scene. As the viewer creates a backstory, the space comes to life in three dimensions. The juncture of the imagination of the architect and that of the viewer brings both building and watercolor rendering to life. Reflecting this ideal cooperation between architect and patron, the watercolor attempts not only to excite its viewer about Latrobe’s design, but also to model a collaborative design process. This rendering may be the ultimate critique of Pennock’s construction process. Rather than modeling an

Figs. 7.8–9: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Garden Temple/Retreat, Sheets 1 and 2, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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ideal collaboration of like-minded patron and architect, Pennock deceived Latrobe, employed tradesmen in his stead, and then, when the damage was already done, called back the architect to salvage the design. Although his View in Pennock’s Hall & Staircase enticed the viewer to hire him for future commissions, the historical garb and dramatic pose of the figures put this image to work as a tragic glimpse at a glorious place, once envisioned, now permanently lost. It is a nostalgic and reproachful vision of what might have been. In Retreat In contrast to the Pennock commission, most of the other projects in Designs of Buildings are poorly documented. Of particular interest are one leaf on which Latrobe penciled in his intent to represent a structure on “Washington’s Island” and another on which he wrote, “Put 10 Blank leaves after this for John Mayos house[,] Volney’s Philosophière[,] My own house. And sketches.”‹⁄ Correspondence documents his design of the Philosophière retreat for Count ConstantinFrançois de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, well-known French author, who Latrobe met in Philadelphia among Scandella’s circle of European friends.‹¤ Unfortunately, no record of drawings for the retreat exists. Similarly, his correspondence attests to plans for a house on Washington’s Island.‹‹ The envisioned house was a retreat from the world wherein one could live, hermit-like, in an isolated bubble of intellectual and artistic pursuits. Although it seems likely that he produced sketches of this dream retreat, none are known. The separate reference to “my own house” is puzzling. Again, this may refer to an imagined residence, never constructed.‹› It may be the plan he mentioned in a letter of April 30, 1798, to Scandella. He rented a property near the attractive estate of Colonel John Harvie “with liberty to purchase for £400 in three Years, all the land before it to the South.”‹fi Latrobe promised to have a “little house upon my beautiful little hill here by the end of the Summer,” and invited his friend to visit.‹fl He dreamed big, further exclaiming, “I need now only my Children and a Mother for them to be happy. Alas! I feel I am still on the minus side of the question.”‹‡ He concluded with a telling comment, both explaining his proliferating visions of Virginian retreats and connecting these now-lost designs to his larger oeuvre of

Fig. 7.10: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Garden Temple/Retreat, Sheet 3, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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a structure that would be realistic in Europe and corresponded with his and Latrobe’s mutual ideas about appropriate spaces to bolster intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately, Latrobe felt that conforming to Volney’s wishes was impossible in the United States. As he remarked, “Mr. Volney is too much a Philosopher, I fear, for the workmen of Philadelphia. I see exactly what he wants; but he would find a thousand prejudices to encounter before he could persuade them to deviate so far from established sizes, proportions and forms, as to put together the parts of his little hermitage so as to make it habitable.”›‚ Scarred by bitter experience, Latrobe tempered an architectural dream into a buildable reality. Volney’s idea was overly ambitious. Latrobe feared his simplifications would not satisfy his client. He fret to Scandella:

writings and images. Realizing that his many plans may strike his friend as unrealistic or even manic, he wrote: “these little schemes amuse, and keep at bay reflexion—And literature is another inexhaustible sedative of anxiety.”‹° Latrobe may have worked on these images, booklets, and designs, with little expectation of realizing them specifically to relieve his anxieties. The integration of literature, another of his “sedatives of anxiety,” with his visual explorations surely helped him achieve some intellectual satisfaction amid perpetual frustrations in Virginia. Within the context of these tantalizing dead ends, the design for a house in the form of a garden temple/retreat, included in Designs of Buildings, is especially interesting.‹· Cohen and Brownell speculate this might resemble the Philosophière designed for Volney. There must be di∑erences, though, since Latrobe allocated separate sheets for that project. He consulted on Volney’s retreat in February 1798. Volney learned of Latrobe through Scandella and wrote with a sketch or two and a description of the philosopher’s retreat he hoped Latrobe could help design. The commission proved challenging, as Latrobe confided to Scandella. Volney envisioned

Mr. Volney must not think, that the very slight notice I have taken of his elegant note, has arisen from any cause but this, that while I am writing to you, I am talking to a Bricklayer about mortar, lime, sand, arches and sca∑olding. The very neat and well turned explanation of all his wants in his Castle in the air, renders it a most distressing circumstance to me to consider, that the convenience of his arrangements exceeds their practicability, and that over two Parlors of 12 feet wide and 14 feet long, it is not easy to contrive plusieurs chambres, avec un petit cabinet a chaque chamber, et des armoires dans les murs &c &c. Pray assure him however, that I feel myself much honored by his letter and that I heartily wish that my very humble musical abilities, if they cannot raise the Walls of a second Thebes, had however the power to conjure up such a neat little convenient cottage around a philosopher, whose mind di∑ers as much in size from the small habitation he proposes to himself, as he himself does from many other eminent men, by deserving the celebrity he has acquired.›⁄

Having studied Volney’s ideas and considered local practical realities, Latrobe completed a design that considered Volney’s preferences but, overall, he “took the liberty to give him an entirely new plan.”›¤ Latrobe’s description of Volney’s dream building indicates a complex intellectual puzzle with multiple distinct rooms. The architect’s garden temple/retreat, by comparison, was small, with few distinct spaces. There are relatively few points of correspondence between the described Philosophière and the garden temple/retreat; nonetheless there is conceptual and aesthetic a≈nity. Latrobe’s work on Volney’s concept, and his desire to join the Scandella-Volney community in Philadelphia may have led him to produce other designs that conformed to

Fig. 7.11: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Detail, Bedroom Alcove, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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their vision. He confirmed such a general aspiration, commenting, “There is nothing, indeed, I so much desire as to make [myself ] one of the garcons philosophes, who live so harmoniously together under your roof et qui s’amusent a batir des chateaux en Espagne.”›‹ Inspired by this community, Latrobe’s Designs of Buildings includes several additions adapted less to practical Virginian architectural opportunities and more to such dreams. The garden temple/retreat design may well count among those to which Latrobe referred as his unrealistic visions, which provided distraction from unpleasant anxieties. Since the structure was small, Latrobe accommodated an exterior rendering, an elevation, plans, and four sections across three sheets [Figs. 7.8–10]. Among these, the exterior rendering and the four sections o∑er the most interesting watercolor explorations. The small garden temple is in the Doric style, with front and rear porticoes envisioned to encourage communion with nature. It sits on a sloping hillside; the rear portico allows a ground level entrance, while the front portico accommodates a gracious vista. Presumably this vista includes a view over the James River, although it is not indicated. The rectangular plan of the building’s interior includes two rooms. Both have a similar footprint to the stair hall, dining room, and other formal spaces of the Pennock plan. Here, the arched end of one room permits views through the portico beyond. At the opposite end of the house, the same arc added to the rectangular footprint repeats on a smaller scale and turns on its side, allowing the room a more sheltered appearance and accommodating three distinct spaces: a sleeping alcove, a passageway to a larger formal room beyond, and a gracefully arcing wall framing a window opposite the bed. Like other service areas in Latrobe’s plans, the basement is only minimally indicated. It contains two rooms, one probably a kitchen/hall and the second a sleeping area, probably for a servant or slave. The garden temple/retreat images lack human figures. Their visual solitude promises their viewer an available space for peaceful contemplation. The front elevation presents the house in its landscaped context and sets the series’s aesthetic and philosophical tone [Figs. 7.8–9]. The building occupies the horizontal center of the page. A drafted plumb line extends down the sheet, vertically linking the exterior elevation to the first floor plan below. The white facade is bathed in light. Its surface first appears like marble, but closer scrutiny reveals

Figs. 7.12–13: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Details, showing Sections 1 and 2, Garden Temple/Retreat, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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clapboard walls upstairs. A slightly orange patina on the lower story suggests sandstone or tinted plaster facing. Contrasting with the brilliant white facade, and in the shade of staid Doric columns, the black window grid dominates the exterior. The neoclassical building plays counterpoint with its landscaping, directly drawn from British picturesque tradition. A winding footpath curves into the foreground at right, wraps its way to the left edge and disappears into the trees, nearly completing a circle around the structure. The building’s crisp geometric lines are juxtaposed with the unkempt foliage of tall trees to left and right. The design proposes communion with nature, with foundations in Classical form and ideals. The building’s interior, captured in four meticulous sections on a single page, further communicates harmony with nature and comfort for its inhabitant [Fig. 7.10]. In the uppermost section, Latrobe o∑ers a minute view into a bedroom alcove [Fig. 7.11]. Rich fabric is dramatically posed above the bed, in contrast with light blue walls and pu∑y white clouds in a distant sky. The alcove’s single bed, positioned directly beneath the window and hidden by a curtain at night, projects a restful environment close to nature. If seated on the bed with the drapes pulled up, the resident may enjoy views from windows on either flank of the building.

The living room is captured in the remaining three sections. These provide, variously, views of the two end walls, and a longitudinal slice from front to rear portico [Figs. 7.12–14]. The showpiece of the design is the view through the front portico. Latrobe’s section indicates a gridded window divided in three, presumably consisting of two sidelights and a central door. Wooden window trim o∑ers minimal decoration, with the slightest indication of pilasters and neoclassical ornament. This section is viewed from roughly floor height and indicates the entire vertical extent of the space. The view through the windows consists solely of blue sky, sunlight, and pu∑y clouds. The room o∑ers an experience of a vivid encounter with nature, mediated by an architect-designed environment. Latrobe created what he perhaps thought of as “castles in the air” in the garden temple/retreat drawings, as well as in his lost plans for homes on Washington’s Island and in Richmond, and for the Philosophière. All these spaces embody ideal environments for the artist, philosopher, intellectual, and poet. At a remove from society, these retreats would encourage communion with nature. The hermetic lifestyle helps insulate the intellectual from many unpleasant distractions, providing an ideal environment for elevating his art. Within such a space, the architect’s imagination increases in potency, training for e∑ective action. Dreaming up such a space allowed Latrobe to imagine personal happiness and the height of his creative capacity. Although there is no evidence this particular structure was specifically meant for Latrobe, the garden retreat was certainly intended for an individual of similar sensibilities. In a period of isolation and exile, Latrobe imagined an intimate space to be inhabited by a kindred spirit. Although his compelling miniature drawings of the retreat are unpeopled, they are permeated with the presence of their inhabitant. Latrobe’s rendering of a space in communion with nature, supporting a life of the mind, enabled him to envision a place where he could finally find intellectual and emotional communion with a kindred individual who possessed similar “morbid sensibilities.”››

Fig. 7.14: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Detail, showing Section 3, Garden Temple/Retreat, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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Rational Vision Among the projects within Designs of Buildings, one is exceptionally complete in visual terms, though lacking in narrative. Known as the John Tayloe House due to Latrobe’s caption, which reads “Mr. Tayloe’s House in the Foedera[l] City,” this design has caused confusion. The Octagon House in Washington, D.C., one of the most significant extant structures of the era, was designed by William Thornton for John Tayloe.›fi Tayloe purchased his property in Washington, D.C., in 1797. By February 1799, he was busily allocating resources toward the “improvements I contemplate putting up in the F[ederal] City.”›fl The chronology would fit for Latrobe to have prepared his drawings in 1798, perhaps while on his brief trip through Washington, D.C., that year. As any relationship between Latrobe and Tayloe in this period is unknown, it is likely that mutual acquaintances (perhaps the Washington family) informed Latrobe of Tayloe’s property and construction goals. Cohen and Brownell rightly question the correlation of the depicted structure to the specifics of the Octagon property. Whatever the actual chronology of this project and its relationship (or lack thereof ) to Tayloe, this watercolor series remains one of the most ambitious visions of Latrobe’s ideas for his American houses. A brief summary of Cohen and Brownell’s conclusions, as well as Fazio and Snadon’s, can focus this discussion of the design’s most elaborate watercolors. A full reevaluation of the architectural language in the seven pages on them from Designs of Buildings would contribute little to this analysis of Latrobe’s watercolors. Cohen and Brownell conclude that Latrobe’s Tayloe House drawings represent an exceptionally sophisticated architectural vision for Latrobe’s Virginian years. They remark: Had Colonel Tayloe felt disposed to underwrite Latrobe’s design he would have housed himself in a distinguished mansion. The prismatic major and minor blocks of the house and the freestanding Doric order would have created a daring severity that the coloristic play of peach-brown walls . . . Suites of rooms . . . would have a∑orded the most aristocratic accommodations. The principles of architectural scenery would have created a variety of visual sensations . . . ›‡

They further assert that Latrobe’s designs for Tayloe influenced and haunted Thornton’s Octagon. Fazio and Snadon refocus their analysis on the drawings themselves—a rare phenomenon. Nevertheless, their interest

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quickly reverts to a description of the structure’s architectural characteristics: More significant than these matters of client and location are the completeness of Latrobe’s architectural drawings for this project and what their completeness reveals. They depict his well-developed version of a much-investigated English type, the central-tribune house with a central longitudinal axis; thoroughly illustrate his conception of a systematic interior architecture and furnishings; and provide one of the few examples from his oeuvre of a full-blown landscape plan.›°

Fazio and Snadon argue for the Tayloe design as Latrobe’s first example of a new American domestic architecture, which they term, following Latrobe, the “rational house.”›· This significant housing model merits notice in American architectural history and its first iteration here is important. Describing the concept’s ambition and significance, Fazio and Snadon write: “Latrobe had responded quite consciously to the specifics of the American social and physical context and had, as a result, invented such a new house form for the nascent, democratic, American republic. Latrobe made a conscious e∑ort to develop this new domestic type. . . .”fi‚ The drawings from Latrobe’s late Virginian residence, especially those in Designs of Buildings, demonstrate an artistic confidence and consistency supporting Fazio and Snadon’s conclusion that Latrobe developed his rational American house in the same period. Though a miserable misfit in Virginian society, Latrobe found fuel for his creative precision in these years. Recent scholarship has also found his rational design to be closely related to early projects in Philadelphia, most specifically the William and Mary Waln House.fi⁄ Latrobe’s Tayloe House renderings contain no human figures. Instead, they permit their viewer to experience the mansion house as it would have appeared from the street, from the interior, and within the landscaped grounds. As an urban mansion, the Tayloe House was designed on a large scale, but within a constrained rectangular site. The proposed building would have presented a dignified and aloof public face, while o∑ering an oasis of delight to its occupants. Although impressive, Latrobe’s renderings are incomplete. At the beginning of the set, he instructed himself to leave “two blank sheets.” Maybe he intended to compose an introduction and vignette image(s), as he did for the Pennock House. Unfortunately, this work, which would have provided

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valuable context, was never completed. There are seven full sheets of drawings, the last of which—Library Plan and Sections—is incomplete, o∑ering only an outline. Perhaps other tasks called on Latrobe’s time, or he was disappointed that Tayloe did not adopt his design. Regardless, the surviving series communicates a great deal about Latrobe’s interests concerning rendering and architecture. The first Tayloe House drawing is Ground Plan of Mr. Tayloe’s House in the Foedera[l] City, one of the few landscape designs surviving from Latrobe’s Virginian period [Fig. 7.15]. The

Fig. 7.15: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Ground Plan of Mr. Tayloe’s House in the Foedera[l] City, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

viewer sees the intimate garden at the center of the property, shielded by the mansion house and the stable block at either end, with walls on the remaining sides. It is a peaceful family retreat. Thick copses of trees planted at the margins (rendered as mature trees in the accompanying elevations) shield the mansion from views of the working areas. Carriages may enter along the edge of the property, discharging guests at the grand entrance stairway. House servants use a side door and service stairwell. The carriages then pull forward, retreating behind trees and reaching service areas without disturbing views from the public spaces of the house. Large windows facing the garden from every possible ground-story room allow a relationship between interior and exterior in an urban paradigm for harmony between building and nature. The picturesque curves of the interior garden juxtapose the elaborate geometry of the mansion with the simplified geometry of the stables. Although carefully designed, the landscape feigns a natural appearance, with a quixotically curved circuit around the central lawn. The garden’s focus is a central arrangement of shaggy bushes and a stump, rather than a sculpture, fountain, or formal central feature. This counterpoint of nature and structure repeats in Latrobe’s South Front and East Flank elevations [Figs. 7.16– 17]. Previous analyses have labored over the austere neoclassicism of the facades. A “stern” Doric portal, with minimal ornamentation in the entablature, dominates the front facade of an otherwise plain rectangular profile.fi¤ Strips of stone separate the three floors, with a cornice between the second and third floor windows. The di∑erentiation between the two paired lower stories and the third floor, with smaller windows and a lower roof, articulates the distinction between the grand purposes of the lower floors, and the lesser ones of the third, typically the domain of children, guests of lower social status, and domestic servants. Flanking the house, the garden walls project two single-story towers slightly beyond the facade line of the house. Playing the conceptual role of guard towers, these diminutive architectural features emphasize the genteel state of society wherein armament and protection are unnecessary. Behind the tower tops, the exuberant foliage of the garden is just visible. The East Flank elevation furthers this aesthetic narrative. Here, the facade is dominated by a single-story Doric portico,

Fig. 7.16–17: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, South Front and East Flank, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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whose six columns frame the ground-floor windows. The front tower is balanced by a nearly identical counterpart, marking a direct entrance into the interior courtyard. Traditionally, aristocratic European homes provided semi-public areas where gentry interacted with the public; the groundstory arcade makes reference to this, though Fazio and Snadon suggest that here it merely serves to shade the windows.fi‹ The arcade is located under the scrutiny of the ground-floor windows opening from the study and library and could have allowed for supervision of slaves or servants, or served as a porch from which family members could

observe the city’s activities. Viewed from the side flank, the garden’s luxurious greenery is in plain view, a contrast to the geometric stone mass. The umbra of the trees emerges in an irregular profile above the garden wall. Latrobe represents a variety of trees, o∑ering diverse textures, profiles, and color patterns. Their appearance attracts the viewer, yet they are concealed behind a wall, a reminder of the courtyard’s privileged privacy. The real visual excitement of the Tayloe drawings is manifest in the section and interior views. Latrobe filled his fifth sheet with two sections: Section Looking North (on the top)

Fig. 7.18: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Section Looking North, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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and Section Looking West (at the bottom) [Figs. 7.18–19]. These carefully drafted renderings are also tinted watercolors. Their clear focus is on architectural detail, but they include interior design elements that contribute to an understanding of the intellectual and aesthetic culture Latrobe hoped the house would nurture. They reveal a building of four actual stories, rather than three, counting a sunken basement. Like the third story, this basement has a lower ceiling than the two principal floors do, and would have supported service work. The kitchen is here, underneath the library. So is the scullery, the butler’s quarters, and the “servants’ hall.”fi›

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These sections are rendered with such great detail that they create the sensation of looking deeply into the private interior. Further, they reveal a complex space, which deviates substantially from its straightforward four-square plan. The sections convey Latrobe’s sensibility of artistic elements working in concert with structural features to shape meaning. One key detail is Latrobe’s representation of the grand entryway. Visitors would enter through the Doric temple facade, followed by a second Doric portico with two columns in antis. This semi-interior rectangular entrance acted as a threshold to the private interior. The dark and

Fig. 7.19: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Section Looking West, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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shaded area would also perform a rite of passage, guiding the visitor from exterior to interior, from public to private. Once inside, the visitor would enter a circular hall, which Cohen and Brownell refer to as the tribunal and which would present a surprising sense of space. From the center of this room, the viewer could look upward, through a circular opening in the chamber story, surrounded by a delicate railing and accompanying circular gallery walkway, and still further into a saucer-domed ceiling. Here, Latrobe designed a cupola with dramatic lighting, following the course of the sun. This vertical well is rendered with a great contrast of light and dark, to powerful e∑ect.fifi In terms of lighting, spatial arrangement, plan, and square footage, Latrobe made this central hall a significant conceptual element of the house.fifl Its centrality is fully revealed only after carefully studying this section, and juxtaposing it with the plans. A statue is included within this impressive view, tantalizingly located within an arched niche above an iron hearth. Cross-referencing between section and plan shows the statue and hearth pictured are probably half of a pair. A second set of arched niches would have sheltered doors leading into the stairway on one side and Mr. Tayloe’s study and its lobby antechamber on the other. While visitors to the house awaited their invitation to other areas, they would linger in this hall, awed by the grand space and flanked by two nearly life-sized statues. Unfortunately, Latrobe’s section is too small to discern the features of the statue in his view. Cohen and Brownell identify it as “a capped female figure with something standing in her upstretched right hand,” and further speculate, “it is tempting to identify this as being based on descriptions or illustrations of Phidias’s Athena Parthenos.”fi‡ This analysis is simultaneously too specific and too uncertain in its Classical precedents. The gender of the figure, for instance, is not clear. Its shoulder-length hair might indicate a woman, if Latrobe intended to suggest a sculpture in the Anglo-American tradition. However, it might easily be a man following Greek archaic models, or referring to one of Flaxman’s figures. The statue wears a headband or cap, and Classicized falling drapery, with the bottom hem hitting at the calf. Somewhat contradictory is the combination of the seemingly rigid vertical stance with the supporting log or vertical element to

the right, generally used in statues that assume the delicate S-curve of contrapposto. No identification of this figure can be made without more evidence. However, its location in the context of the significant hall suggests symbolic weight within Latrobe’s overall conceptual program. This statue was probably intended to feature an allegorical figure. Even more ambitiously, the paired statues might have represented the master and mistress of the house in allegory. This later technique was commonly used in European aristocratic traditions, though the sociopolitical context of the Early American Republic would have required judicious application. If the proposed location of the house within Washington, D.C., was accepted, then these figures might have been planned within a patriotic context. Given his consistent use of allegorical figures to advance the content of his watercolors, it is probable that Latrobe had a larger symbolic intent in mind for this statue, which might have been revealed had he completed his textual description. An additional sculptural element contributed to Latrobe’s symbolic program for the house. The planned library could accommodate an impressive collection, with built-in bookcases rising nearly to the ceiling. Along the upper strip of its wall, he left space for a continuous frieze. Again, this detail is too small to be interpreted exhaustively, but certain elements seem significant. The frieze has a blue background and white or cream-colored figures. Their forms and actions are not discernible, but they are arranged in clusters. Some figures seem human, while others appear to be horses with equipment. A continuous frieze such as this would be used within the Classical tradition to narrate a significant event— the life and actions of a hero or some significant allegory. One likely visual precedent would have been the glazed terracotta frieze from the Medici Villa at Poggio a Caiano, with its similar color palette and figural array. Latrobe’s frieze could also have been inspired by Wedgwood-Flaxman stoneware collaborations. These sculptural examples o∑er tantalizing opportunities to consider how Latrobe’s Classical inspiration, with its contemporary consciousness and historic inspirations, was adapted to the American scene. We cannot decipher the final intended meanings of Latrobe’s ornaments, hall statue, and library frieze, and yet he

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probably had a conceptual and symbolic program in mind. At Hammerwood Lodge, his architectural vision was developed intact with sculptural reliefs drawn from ancient precedents. Certainly, in this American urban villa, Latrobe would have followed a similar approach, setting a moral tone for residents via style and details. Yet, it is also possible that Latrobe deliberately left his sculptural references vague, hoping to eventually establish a detailed symbolic program in collaboration with his patrons and, perhaps, with a sculptor. These general renderings of allegorical and Classical themes could inspire intellectual, aesthetic, and ideological debate, without dictating a finalized stylistic program. Leaving unplanned elements to inspire and cultivate the full intellectual support of the patron may have represented a strategic attempt to develop a collaborative model of design of the type that he had failed to achieve with the Pennock House.

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The final completed drawing of Latrobe’s Tayloe series is also its most visually striking. Plan and sections of the Dining Room presents the room’s floor plan, with its four walls unfolded around it in section [Figs. 7.20–24]. The walls are rendered in full color, with the decorative details indicated down to the smallest touches, including miniature paintings. The beauty of this architectural rendering has earned it more notice than most of Latrobe’s watercolors. Cohen and Brownell comment that it “is a lavish attempt to beguile the eye of a prospective patron.”fi° Remarking on the completeness of this space, and speculating that even the rendered china and place settings were meant to be in Latrobe’s design, Fazio and Snadon take special note of the graceful and holistic maturation of the unity of Georgian design here, noting the relationship of the dining room to earlier Virginian precedents.fi· These assessments also identify the decorative elements of the room, including paintings, as being carefully arranged to complement the design features of the space, such as the entablature and dado rail. Latrobe’s rendering of the dining room, with its elaborate picture gallery, is the most complete example of the architect’s interest in a symbolic program for the home.fl‚ The primary emphasis in discussions of the paintings has focused on the gallery’s support for the interior design. Cohen and Brownell, for instance, have linked such design with the gallery’s arrangement: The display is systematic: landscapes showing waterfalls, mountains, cottages, trees and sea range with the door heads vertically along the top, and horizontally at mid-wall; those in the latter tier alternate with narrower pictures of standing figures in varied poses; those over the doors range with bust roundels, some with subjects apparently in the dress of earlier times and possibly family progenitors. . . . The paintings diversify the color scheme of cream dado, blue-green walls, and mahogany doors. In e∑ect a “real picture” appears in the form of the view into the garden, here whimsically showing a polygonal outbuilding.fl⁄

This understanding of the scene can be developed further: in arranging these framed works on the walls, Latrobe placed them like architectural features. On the fireplace wall, for example, horizontal and smaller vertical paintings fill a frieze panel above the hearth, clearly alluding to metopes and triglyphs. Above them, three tondi are positioned in a row between two rectangular works, again recalling architectural ornament.

Fig. 7.20: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Plan and sections of the Dining Room, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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Two sculptural relief figures in dancing poses flank the fireplace. They also fill an architectural role; with upraised hands they are caryatids supporting the mantelpiece. Also interesting is the visual program conveyed via the contents of the images. The complete omission of painted still life, for example, is notable. Latrobe’s rendering contains several significant still-life moments, such as the two arrangements of servingware. Yet this genre is completely lacking on the gallery walls. Displays of foods, beverages, and dining accoutrements aim to whet the appetite and provide a fitting gustatory atmosphere, while hunting scenes or grand narrative history paintings provoke conversation, and are also common in such spaces. These too are lacking in Latrobe’s watercolor. This begs the question: are these omissions the result of Latrobe’s visual decisions for his watercolor or do they reflect a prospective patron’s collection? With insu≈cient evidence to address the latter scenario, I will o∑er some reflections on the former. Within the context of Latrobe’s other watercolor figures, the dining room portraits suggest a greater degree of symbolic logic than observed by Cohen and Brownell. Most notably, the west wall juxtaposes a pair of contrasting tondi. One shows a young man in the height of French court fashion, his long curls, a ruΩed collar, and jacket all indicating rank. The second shows another young man, perhaps a Quaker or a Puritan, with a black hat and simple ruΩed collar.

This pair could establish any number of opposing dynamics, some of which could include: Europe versus the United States, Catholicism versus Reform Protestantism, or aristocracy versus republic. On the east wall, three figures, also in tondi, complete this collection. Two portraits show figures in austere black jackets with elaborate lace collars. One is a youth, while the second, placed at center, has grey hair. The third shows a young man with long, curly hair, wearing a bright blue jacket, his right hand pensively posed beneath his chin. All five portrait tondi are shoulder-length, but show their subjects in varying three-quarter, frontal, and profile poses. The Romantic persona of the blue-jacketed youth is apparent; perhaps he represents an artist or poet. Might the other figures stand in for other professional or character types—barrister or cleric, perhaps? Two final tondi, on the north wall and flanking Latrobe’s rendering of the garden view, are smaller in scale and seem most likely to fit Cohen and Brownell’s interpretation of family portraits. These two show an elderly man with white hair and a woman of uncertain age. Like the portraits, the landscapes communicate some relevant themes. They juxtapose views of ruins with views of nature (including dramatic waterfalls and picturesque groupings of trees). At least three of the large-scale landscapes suggest European mountain scenery. Others are not clearly identifiable as depicting Old or New World. They feature only the ubiquitous water, rocks, and trees. The waterfall

Figs. 7.21–24: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Details: Plan and sections of the Dining Room, Tayloe House, from Designs of Buildings, 1798–99.

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scenes are also not specific enough to distinguish a view of Tivoli from one of the Great Falls of the Potomac. One of the scenes of ruins, on the south wall, seems almost identifiable in its pile of Gothic ruins perched on a high cli∑ with a water backdrop. The empty window tracery and triangular profile of the darkened ruin against the background of sky is particularly striking, even in miniature. However, we must remember the trick of Latrobe’s Norfolk scenes— such ruins may look like they are in Europe, but nevertheless are located in America. The final category of the dining room works are six small, vertically oriented images. All but one contain a single fulllength human figure rendered in white against a slate grey background. Perhaps, given the color scheme, the images are meant to be prints, but they might be grisaille paintings, possibly in the Etruscan revival style. Each of the four figures on the east wall represents a distinct type. Like the tondi, these may show di∑erent categories of people or allegorical tropes. The figure on the northern end strikes a dashing pose, his body swathed in a full-length cloak. To his right, the second figure is less clear, but might be a knight in armor with a feathered cap. At the southern end, the first figure sports a broad-brimmed hat and loose-hanging garment. To his right, the final frame contains two figures: a woman stands behind and embraces a young boy. On the west wall, the two figures are both female. One strikes an

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Arcadian pose, carrying a vessel on her head. The second holds an object, possibly a book, and bows her head, as if reading, praying, or meditating. This gallery does not permit one precise interpretation. Drawing from contemporary pictorial traditions, but including figures and landscapes that allude to various eras in European history, Latrobe suggests an aesthetic program reflecting on the lessons of landscape and civilization. Male figures dominate, giving an air of concern with civic duty and the structures of government. The juxtaposition of natural scenes with ruins could inspire philosophical, political, and social reflection. Latrobe viewed landscapes themselves as embodying history and representing the lifecycles of nature. The natural scenes allow for profound meditations on death, as well as satisfying reflections on the beauty of life. The ruins, meanwhile, speak to the frailty and transience of human endeavors. The final experience of this dining room requires the viewer to imagine the scenes of sociability and conversation that would bring it to life. While enjoying polite or intellectual conversation, visitors would have much to consider in the dining room gallery. Unlike in a similar room ornamented with history paintings, the landscapes and portraits here would have been more directly accessible to a Virginian audience because of their familiarity, and would also have avoided the critiques of aristocratic tendencies often associated with history painting in the Early Republic. At the same time,

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landscapes and portraits were widely accepted as inviting more elevated content than still lifes did. Diners would have absorbed this ambiance while enjoying the actual garden view, which (with proper design priorities) could contribute to elevating the scene. Overall, the Tayloe House drawings demonstrate Latrobe’s interest in translating his rendering skills into practical architectural solutions to influence both the mind and emotions of occupants. On a larger social scale than in the garden temple/ retreat, the Tayloe House would create an upper-class villa similarly organized around an aesthetic and intellectual program. By carefully structuring the experience of space, color, and light alongside strategically designed pictorial and sculptural programs, Latrobe envisioned a building interacting powerfully with individuals. Never constructed, this house remains one of his “castles in the air,” but its form is very much a reaction to Latrobe’s understanding of useful creation for the United States. In a civilization whose culture was gradually adapting from European precedent, Latrobe saw a nation that needed to learn from its past. He sought a vision that combined universal and literary human truths with landscape and architectural form, melding precedent appropriately with physical reality. As the Tayloe House renderings indicate, he realized that the visual qualities of watercolor rendering might enable him to make his sophisticated design ideals more real to viewers. Even the interior of the American home could benefit by allowing the viewer to enter into the architect’s imagination. Dream Vision Throughout Designs of Buildings, Latrobe recompiles his architectural reveries. Within the space of the volume, these projects spring to life. Collectively, they o∑er a view into the architect’s mind, a concept introduced by his Frontispiece, luring the viewer to probe further not only into the details of what can be seen in the images, but also into fantasies inspired by these designs. Within Designs of Buildings, Latrobe’s domestic architecture provides images through which viewers can learn to see themselves, as they populate and puzzle over the designs in their own imaginations. In this manuscript, early American lifestyles come into their own at the juncture of Classical tradition and the American landscape. Latrobe’s

“rational house” is born through architectural dreaming. Within his three illustrated architectural booklets completed in Virginia, Latrobe makes extensive use of his watercolor expertise, both to render the buildings he designed in their most enticing light and to continue his artistic, philosophical, and conceptual explorations as a watercolorist. Latrobe completed these booklets in short order—Designs of a Theatre, the Virginia State Penitentiary presentation booklet, and Designs of Buildings all date from the final months of 1797 through the first half of 1799. Notably, he also composed An Essay on Landscape during this same interval. During these years, Latrobe’s architectural opportunities increased, but his personal and professional frustrations mounted. If Latrobe could be comforted in his initial Virginian travels by the knowledge that his very recent emigration removed him from a mainstream culture that he found unappealing, then equally by this later period, he realized that he would not readily achieve a successful future in the United States. In the journal entries and watercolors completed during his immigrant voyage and first year in Virginia, Latrobe saw epic possibility and was intrigued to discover the marks of human struggle on Virginia’s landscape. Although he continued to write in his journals and complete individual watercolor studies, Latrobe’s energies of 1798 and 1799 were more devoted to the architectural booklets, signaling his motion toward matured projects that integrated his watercolors into a larger creative vision. Across these manuscripts, Latrobe makes use of avantgarde artistic techniques, ambitious visual themes, allegorical forms, and highly polished architectural renderings. Undoubtedly, the beauty of their watercolors was intended to attract patrons, admirers, and supporters—a crucial task during this period in which he forcefully attempted to build a professional base. However, these booklets also speak to other, more personal concerns. My analysis has revealed that Latrobe used these booklets to cultivate his architectural practice. By setting a design within an allegorical or literary context, or making use of other “knacks” of watercolor, Latrobe nuanced his design vocabulary. Bringing buildings to life through his renderings helped clients to better understand a proposed structure, but also allowed Latrobe to formulate his imaginings. Across the

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scope of each booklet, Latrobe gives holistic form to a single building or, in the case of Designs of Buildings, delves into a period of his life. Projects can be examined, considered, and edited across many facets. Rather than being seen as a medium for presenting completed architectural designs, each of these booklets may more appropriately be interpreted as an act of envisioning. In Latrobe’s attempt to capture the spirit and significance of his structures, the watercolors within these volumes are equally as important as the stylistic details of the buildings. These drawings should not be confused with the completed working drawings needed for construction. Perhaps more significantly, Latrobe’s booklets contributed to his ongoing pattern of using watercolors and literary references to anchor his experiences both emotionally and intellectually. His ambitious visual allegories, trompe l’oeil elements, and puzzling intellectual quandaries were directly self-referential. While investing intense days and nights into completing these images, Latrobe found cathartic release from the unhappiness of Virginian life. Though still exploring facets of displacement, Latrobe’s signature watercolor scenes of Designs of a Theatre and Designs of Buildings redirect his aesthetic ambitions and intellectual reflections. Individually, images within these volumes are invested in Classical references, contemporary politics, and Latrobe’s own biography. Both volumes are deeply rooted in Virginia—one with great precision in its theatrical culture, the second in its built and natural landscape. Together, they show Latrobe asserting his abilities as an ambitious artist, articulating significant intellectual themes and creating watercolors with thoughtful content paired with powerful visual forms to influence viewers. Though small in scale and modest in medium, the frontispiece images of both volumes present themselves as Latrobe’s reflective treatment of significant historical and biographical concerns. Distinct from his sketchbook watercolors, these scenes are intended for a public audience and convey a self-promotional message. For an audience with the visual and literary knowledge to dig deeper, the frontispieces indicate a holistic philosophical, literary, and artistic vision explored further in the booklets’ images. Latrobe wrote little about his complex watercolors, yet these scenes and accompanying literary references embedded themselves deeply within the context of his contemporary

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concerns and reflections. Ultimately, Latrobe’s Designs of a Theatre communicates his thoughts on the possible harmonious union of theater and visual art. Though in the structural viability of its proposition is doubtful, its watercolor program o∑ers melancholic queries on the social value of artistic productions in a global society disrupted by revolutions. His Designs of Buildings shapes a more celebratory message, presenting his victorious allegory to its audience. On a deeper level, its images o∑er a philosophical tour through Latrobe’s mind. They examine his experiences in Virginia, juxtaposing reimaginings of many of his buildings and dream visions of others never constructed. Truly a deep study of his “castles in the air,” this booklet is less a summary of brick and mortar achievements and more an example of his artistic ability to enliven a building on paper. In some ways, as his most substantial architectural accomplishments of the period, these booklets represent Latrobe’s deepest intellectual engagement with the built, natural, and cultural environments of Virginia. The ambitious watercolors contained in these manuscripts also signal a larger artistic purpose. While they consider his individual and local experience, they also expertly situate Latrobe’s visions within contemporary global currents: neoclassicism, Romanticism, revolution, and the international intellectual currents occurring within literature and theater. They result from a period in which Latrobe self-consciously shifted from considering the application of his work in Virginia to contemplating larger questions about art, society, and morality. These themes continue in the next chapter, which explores Latrobe’s experimentation with trompe l’oeil in a series of images created across his years of residence in Virginia. Yet, the last image in Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil series has also featured prominently in this chapter. Latrobe’s Frontispiece, with its winged female allegory, merges two distinct types of work within Latrobe’s larger watercolor oeuvre. Self-glorifying and answering to insecurity, contemporaneously personal and public, this image captures the significant juncture of watercolor rendering and architectural form for Latrobe. It simultaneously introduces crucial questions about the purpose and meaning of both artistic and architectural practice that pervade Latrobe’s architectural booklets and motivated his trompe l’oeil. 

Chapter Eight

Illusions of Selfhood

Dark eyes stare back at the viewer through a handwritten block of text in Latrobe’s Watercolor: Two views of the Potomac and a Portrait, henceforth Watercolor: Two views [Fig. 8.1].⁄ A thin watercolor wash en grisaille radiates out from them, defining the sketchy contours of a man’s face, the prominent eyebrows, deep-set eyes, and a defined nose of which are all apparent, while the hair, cheeks, and neck di∑use into a grey oval pool. The face looks back as if from beneath still waters. The uncanny eyes are insistent yet intimate, anchoring the image. They probe and challenge the viewer’s gaze. True to its genre, this trompe l’oeil is puzzling, with this mysterious face at its heart. The figure’s mouth is obscured by the text; the viewer struggles to understand what this phantom attempts to communicate. Though the figure is muted, the image is at no loss for words. The superimposed text block is a stanza from James Beattie’s epic The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius, with careful citation included.¤ The e∑usive stanza, transcribed later in this chapter, rhapsodizes over nature’s wild beauty. Taken out of its original context, the passage communicates an emotional response to nature, yet is also confusing, as its subjects and objects are unidentified. To the viewer, the vague “he” seems to refer to the ghostly figure—but without any clear identification of whom the figure is. The stanza conjures a mental image of nature, describing rocky outcroppings, murmuring groves of trees, a gently rising mountain, and a distant body of water. This mundane landscape has a latent, embedded meaning. Trimmed in gold and shaped by a “magick spell,” it is a “savage dell,” through which running water burbles in “eternal” chorus. These terms, redolent of richness, enchantment, and wilderness, invoke sublime experience, creating dramatic sensation. Two small landscape vignettes, ostensibly tossed onto the paper below, complete the image. Both show a rocky landscape with foliage and cascading water, identified as the Potomac River.‹ The relationship between these images and the accompanying text is oddly disconcerting. The vignettes’ unassuming appearance seems to deflate the “magick spell.” To which of these worlds—that of the European epic, or of the American landscape—does the work’s central ghostly face belong? For a viewer familiar with Latrobe’s watercolor oeuvre, these Potomac views are comfortingly similar to his Virginian sketches, yet their visual context is new. The image’s complexity hints at its significance, but resists the viewer’s desire to decode meaning. Face, text, and vignettes present contrasting stimuli, resistant to a unified analysis. The image has a contemplative tone overall. A viewer may easily conclude that it conveys a straightforward rhapsody to natural beauty, yet its lack of cohesion leaves nagging uncertainty as the viewer struggles to integrate its content. Watercolor: Two views is one of five complex trompe l’oeil completed between Latrobe’s departure from London and his relocation from Virginia to Philadelphia. Some precedents from his earliest architectural drawings, discussed in Chapter 2, indicate his long-standing interest in trompe l’oeil technique, but nothing beyond ornamentations survives from his years in Europe. These five images are devoid

Fig. 8.1 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Watercolor: Two views of the Potomac and a Portrait, 1798.

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of architectural purpose or “practical” application, with the possible exception of the Frontispiece to Designs of Buildings. They seem only to serve visual and mental delectation. The first, A Breakfast Equipage, is discussed in detail in Chapter 1 [Fig. 1.2]. The last, Frontispiece, from Designs of Buildings, is introduced in Chapter 7 [Fig. 7.1]. The present chapter unites analysis of these two studies with that of the three remaining trompe l’oeil, all created between 1797 and 1799 and containing scenes of the American landscape: Three Small Landscapes. Rainy Weather, henceforth Three Small Landscapes, (previously published within the Latrobe papers as Country Scenes Against a Background of Script [Squally Weather James River], dated Sept. 14, 1797) [Fig. 8.2]; Collection of Small Moonlights (uncertain date, 1797) [Fig. 8.3]; and Watercolor: Two views (dated March 19, 1798). Latrobe is not known to have completed any trompe l’oeil after Frontispiece, perhaps due to his reduced attention to watercolor after 1799.

Latrobe’s five trompe l’oeil form a distinct subset of his immigrant oeuvre, and here I treat these images specifically as his “immigration series.” As analyzed in Chapter 1, Latrobe used A Breakfast Equipage to ponder his anxieties about immigration and his future legacy. Similarly, Chapter 7 introduces his Frontispiece as a meditation on another relocation. In the interval between these images, Latrobe produced the remaining trompe l’oeil, each of which grapples with aspects of his immigrant experience. Although no writing survives about these works, the close correlation between them and the themes considered in his diaries, sketches, and correspondence reveals these to be deeply introspective works, in which Latrobe employed trompe l’oeil to help craft a new sense of self across a challenging period in his life. Latrobe’s “immigration series” works its way through social, political, and personal allusions, gradually maturing into images of personal purpose. This culminates in the final two images,

Fig. 8.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Watercolor: Two views of the Potomac and a Portrait, 1798.

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which explore di∑ering facets of the artist-architect’s mind. Both are autobiographical, Frontispiece overtly so, while Watercolor: Two views is subtly self-referential. These trompe l’oeil are exceptional within Latrobe’s oeuvre because they are so intertwined with his emotional and psychological state. Though their personal messages are concealed within literary and landscape themes, they are nonetheless discernible to an attentive viewer. These are truly therapeutic pieces that allowed Latrobe, through visual and philosophical experimentation, to remove himself from the discomforts of life to explore alternative realities. These works render Latrobe’s experience of interiority, while also capturing the American landscape. Their greatest significance is the way they interweave his introspective observations with the American places he depicts. By the final two syncretic images, self and site are inseparable. Within Frontispiece, the fusion of self and landscape is so complete that the Virginian rocks and flora become visual triggers for Latrobe’s aspirations. These rocks and plants directly evoke Virginia to any eye familiar with Latrobe’s views. Yet, this landscape is presented within an image that captures the contours of Latrobe’s mind. Here, the landscape is not real, but a symbolic figment within Latrobe’s imagination. The image renders the psychological, emotional, and intellectual isolation of Latrobe’s Virginian period as both paralyzing miasma and catalyzing impetus. Landscape and biography, private mind and public space, merge in this illusion, crafting a powerful new self-vision, as Latrobe seeks to reconfigure and relocate his American identity. A particular formal a≈nity exists among Three Small Landscapes, Collection of Small Moonlights, and Watercolor: Two views, as all include text and landscape vignettes derived from Latrobe’s Virginian residency. These watercolors rely self-consciously on the interplay of text and image. Completed within the sketchbooks, the pieces also refer directly to them, as well as to Latrobe’s correspondence and journals. In each, the context of the sketchbook is emphasized by the conceit of a carefully handwritten passage on a depicted background page, with which

Fig. 8.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Three Small Landscapes. Rainy Weather, 1797.

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the “painted” sections of the trompe l’oeil interact. On top of a depicted sketchbook page, two or three vignettes appear tossed in. In Three Small Landscapes, the vignettes block several chunks of text. In both of the later pieces, Latrobe wraps his text around the vignettes, leaving it more legible. Each image is meticulously rendered, with the neat, legible texts carefully written, and the vignettes finished to a high level of detail, despite being only a few square inches in size. Such minute detail suggests substantial time was invested in their creation. These pieces also represent intense intellectual

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planning. The interactions between text and image are complex and multilayered—clearly the result of premeditation. Much like A Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus [Fig. 6.6], these images fascinate for their interacting cycle of allusions, signs, and signals. They continue to absorb interest over long spells of viewing due to the pleasure of gradually decoding connections among their di∑erent elements. The trompe l’oeil contain subtle allusions to images elsewhere in Latrobe’s watercolor oeuvre. Like his interrelated serial landscapes, the complexities of these watercolors do not immediately appear, but reveal themselves over extensive comparison and contemplation. Their ambitious, layered meanings surprise within the context of their relatively humble medium, o∑ering strong evidence of Latrobe’s great personal investment in watercolor during this interval. All of this makes Latrobe’s lack of references to the images surprising, though not unprecedented. Many of his sketchbook images receive no commentary, while others are discussed in excruciating detail. Still, there may be a reason

Latrobe omits discussion of the content of these trompe l’oeil. He does provide an explanatory paragraph for both Breakfast Equipage and Frontispiece. These accompanying texts ostensibly explain the images and itemize elements in them. In reality, though, the paragraphs only o∑er the reader a false sense of knowledge, as they fail to delve into the true complexities of the pieces’ content. Arguably, these texts contribute to the works’ trickery. Perhaps, then, Latrobe abandons explanatory text for his remaining three trompe l’oeil because they are already constructed around distracting texts that engage and puzzle the viewer, playing the devious role modeled by the captions in the two other images. The void of scholarly discussion about these images is harder to understand. Wendy Bellion considers three of Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil with a brief analysis in her dissertation.› After a cursory discussion of A Breakfast Equipage, she remarks that the three text-and-image-based trompe l’oeil are notable in their untraditional treatment of background text.fi Latrobe’s View of

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America illustrates two of the images (A Breakfast Equipage and Collection of Small Moonlights) with catalog entries and gives a very brief analysis of Collection of Small Moonlights. After transcribing the text in the document behind the image, which they describe as a “satirical” reference to a military defeat, the modern editors of Latrobe’s View of America comment only: “the [landscape] watercolors seen here seem to have no thematic connection with the text that serves as their background.”fl The deeply embedded content of these works has surely contributed to their oblivion. True to their genre, they are enigmatic and do not cede readily to critical pressure. They require deep knowledge of Latrobe’s watercolors, combined with a rich understanding of his era, to tease out their themes and meanings. Because their correlation between image and text is di≈cult to discern, hurried viewers would dismiss them as having little intellectual substance and no compositional unity. Accordingly, they have been deemed amateur products, light entertainment pieces, and quaint outliers within Latrobe’s serious career. The images’ apparent casual nature encourages this quick and dismissive viewing mode. Only a curious eye and a persistent mind will move beyond this initial reaction to find deeper meaning. Despite the di≈culties of decoding them, or maybe because of this challenge, the trompe l’oeils’ enticing visual form merits attention. Their modest scale and delicate medium draw the viewer into their illusive puzzle. The miniature spaces they create are convincing and intriguing. A viewer easily becomes absorbed in piecing together text and image. Even without evident intellectual content, these works set a distinct philosophical tone. They reveal themselves as being in deliberate progression when coupled with careful study of Latrobe’s writings. Among his most ambitious watercolors, they deftly unite the concerns and conceits of his immigrant years, gradually laying aesthetic and intellectual foundations for his later American work. Trompe L’oeil Practice and Precedents Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil, which I will refer to alternately as “deceptions” or “illusions,” connect his watercolors to a highly skilled and introspective artistic tradition.‡ By their very nature, illusions aim to intrigue. A viewer must disambiguate reality from pictorial fiction and, further, discover underlying content.

Fig. 8.3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Collection of Small Moonlights, 1797.

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Often serving as centerpieces of dialogue within social gatherings, trompe l’oeil allowed amiable friends to dig deeply into salient topics. Unlike partisan political cartoons, deceptions of Latrobe’s era often avoided taking obvious political stances in favor of raising debate. By introducing pertinent topics from an intellectual perspective, Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil hint at how images could attain meaning within elite and cosmopolitan communities in the young United States of the late eighteenth century, while also dovetailing with practices common in European genteel circles. Located within Latrobe’s sketchbooks, his trompe l’oeil would have adopted aspects of the larger tradition, while also deviating from others. As private works, they could only be viewed with Latrobe’s sanction, and he was their primary audience. Further, these images relied on obscure references and would have o∑ered only clever, teasing nonsense to a viewer not in Latrobe’s confidence. Finally, although each image is interesting in its own right, they are exceptional as a progressive series. The understanding of each work builds on previous examples. While a social tradition of examining, exchanging, and enjoying trompe l’oeil existed, this development of an interrelated series of images is rare. Latrobe may have been drawn to trompe l’oeil because of its association with the development of rational, skeptical viewers. Elsewhere he wrote about his belief that landscape should be elevated to greater esteem within the hierarchy of the genres, and his investment in these deceptions may indicate his understanding that their capacity to prompt reflection could likewise elevate their stature. Further, as this book has already explored, Latrobe was fascinated with the interconnection of fantasy and reality. Deceptions allow the exceptional opportunity to make illusions real for viewers. Ultimately, through such a process, trompe l’oeil can transform fantasy into reality, allowing viewers to occupy alternative spaces. As Bellion has explored, “deception painting” played a crucial role in the creative practices of the Early American Republic. Bellion’s consideration of how trompe l’oeil created agency and civic awareness in viewers of Latrobe’s era lends cultural depth to our understanding of what might have motivated his practice. She argues that viewers become “undeceived” by discerning the artifice of deceptions, thus recovering “truth through the rational faculties of reasoning and perception.”°

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Through undeception, artists and their publics negotiated a “post-Revolutionary culture in the throes of radical change,” while practicing and performing their own citizenship.· Latrobe used the term undeception and may have instinctively sought to employ it in his art. Another context for Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil is the tradition of medley prints, common in Britain and Continental Europe in the early eighteenth century, and with which Latrobe would surely have been familiar. Such medley prints delight in pictorial intrigue through playful and provocative illusions. Latrobe may well have been familiar with George Bickham’s illusions in his publications on penmanship, or with the medley prints Bickham issued as single works of art.⁄‚ One such illusion found in Bickham’s Museum of the Arts, Study, or, The Curious Repository, has some formal ties to Latrobe’s illusions [Fig. 8.4]. In it, a realistic printed view into a scholar’s room is paired with text concerning the moral and ideological benefits of studiousness, and a sepia-toned landscape vignette in Claude Lorrain’s style appears casually dropped across the text. Bickham’s conceptual message is clear and pedagogical, not complex and introspective, but is comparable to trompe l’oeil in both form and overall moral engagement. Perhaps even more interesting is the comparison with contemporary French studies of the Revolutionary era. Richard Taws’s analysis of trompe l’oeil representing Revolutionary assignat bills—which were printed in large quantities over a short period of time, then systematically destroyed by the French government—proposes that deception pieces played a complex and psychologically relevant role for both artists and viewers during French Revolution. Taws argues that these images allowed artists to explore the Revolution in the context of history-making and to contemplate its “successes, failures and inheritances.”⁄⁄ Further, he asserts that these works were therapeutic, created to “represent a kind of visual actingout, or repetition, in the place of coherent, unambiguous remembrance, a practice we might consider part of a reparative process aimed towards accommodating revolutionary trauma.”⁄¤ During the Terror, artists grappled with traumatic losses—the destruction of bodies, both social and individual—by representing the loss of assignats. Artists and viewers alike could acknowledge their painful experiences with perturbed, upended, and disorienting images, su≈ciently subtle

to avoid censure and made safer by the insignificance of their genre. Trompe l’oeil flew underneath the radar, since the authorities failed to recognize its ambitious content and, furthermore, associated it with the intellectual flu∑ of an outmoded aristocratic lifestyle.⁄‹ Rejected as an o≈cial form of “revolutionary representation,” trompe l’oeil could, instead, serve individualized, contemplative purposes.

Fig. 8.4: George Bickham, Study, from Museum of the Arts, or, The Curious Repository (London, 1745?).

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Latrobe may or may not have seen these assignat prints, but his trompe l’oeil are conceptually similar in their meditations on trauma, loss, history, revolution, and the individual’s place in society. They convey and conceal ambitious content usually associated with history painting. Hidden within these private illusions, Latrobe explored art’s highest ambitions without subjecting himself to a larger audience’s public scrutiny, ridicule, or censure. In a period when American audiences often rejected grand manner history painting, Latrobe’s humble deceptions o∑ered an outlet without the personal and financial risks associated with history painting, avoiding the sort of negative publicity given to his play The Apology (see Chapter 6). Trompe l’oeil has long been understood as allowing artists an outlet for psychological and autobiographical journeys, often concealed within the works’ illusions. In literature concerning Dutch still life, Svetlana Alpers, and more recently Celeste Brusati, closely tie trompe l’oeil to artists’ introspection.⁄› Dror Wahrman’s analysis of Edward Collier introduces an artist functioning in the British context addressing autobiographical concerns, including experiences of social unrest, in trompe l’oeil.⁄fi Similarly, Bellion’s analysis of Charles Willson Peale’s well-known painting The Staircase Group brings these themes across the Atlantic.⁄fl Finally, textually driven trompe l’oeil have been closely associated with concerns over “the status of art and the artist.”⁄‡ Because trompe l’oeil minimize evidence of the creative hand, self-reference is especially powerful. As Sybille EbertSchi∑erer explains, the discovery of self-referentiality within a trompe l’oeil links the artist to viewers by giving intimate access to “the artist’s most deeply personal discourse—that concerning the essence of art and . . . —serves to bring him back into the viewer’s consciousness.”⁄° Latrobe’s images permit his exploration of interlayered, and largely contrasting, personal identities: European versus American, the “common man” versus the aristocratic intellectual, and the private versus the public persona. They reflect his sense of self and are simultaneously deliberate acts of self-making. Trompe l’oeil enables the multilayered treatment of identity, allowing the artist to point the viewer in multiple di∑erent directions and to eschew authoritative vision. Ultimately, the problem of identity and its meanings is consistent across these works, and is plausibly the driving motivation for their creation.

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The Illusion of Solace Latrobe’s first fully American sketchbook (Sketchbook II), contains two of his text-based trompe l’oeil, and opens with the title page inscription: “Virginia, Sketches from Nature begun June 9, 1796, B. H. Latrobe Ubi Solatia Ibi Patria.” In reading this final phrase, which Latrobe underlines with an elaborate, scrolling flourish, we should remember the words on the title page of his Atlantic journal: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit (“perhaps someday it will be pleasing to remember even these things”). Here again, a Latin phrase sets a tone for the images. Ubi Solatia Ibi Patria (“where one finds solace, one finds a homeland”) is a variant of the Roman dictum Ubi Panis Ibi Patria, “where one finds bread, one finds a homeland.” In the Roman world, this saying alluded to the government dole that distributed bread and wine to the masses, buying internal peace and loyalty.⁄· Latrobe’s adaptation of the phrase is found in at least one contemporary text—Charles Este’s A Journey in the Year 1793 through Flanders, Brabant, and Germany to Switzerland.¤‚ There is no direct documentation of Latrobe reading this book, but it fell within his range of topical interests and was published during his London residency, so he likely read it. Este opens with a dramatic introduction to travel motivated by European turmoil, lamenting: “Europe . . . being, by the malignity, of something worse than fortune, plunged into the bitterness of war, produced, among other evils, the following journey.”¤⁄ Describing one region of Germany, he observes that half its population has emigrated to Pennsylvania, fleeing “the tyranny of intolerance, imposition of wars and taxes.”¤¤ Reflecting on the limited choices these individuals had when deciding to leave their native land, Este comments: “Ubi solatia, ibi patria, strong as the heart at first may cling about a native place, yet what hold can continue undetached when violence incessantly shall assail it? What peasant can love the ground to which he is bound only by a chain?”¤‹ The Latin characterizes these German emigrants’ new American homeland, reducing the distinction between old and new homes to its essence: in Pennsylvania, the immigrants find peace. Abandoning constant oppression and conflict, they may now enjoy individual freedoms and escape a cycle of violence. To Este, the New World o∑ers solace, the Old World, unrest and oppression.

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On the sketchbook’s title page, this phrase sets the tone for images and texts that document Latrobe’s immigration experience. As a counterpoint to the Virgilian inscription in Sketchbook I, the phrase demonstrates hope for a new era of contentment. It is worth remembering, Aeneas’s words were a promise of a better future in which he, himself, did not believe. Similar to Aeneas’s attempts to bolster himself along with his men, it is possible that this phrase is meant as a personal exhortation—a call to contentment and to the reallocation of loyalties—even though Latrobe still struggled with these goals. Ubi Solatia Ibi Patria is an invocation of healing and homeland to which Latrobe may have been calling himself to conform. Perhaps most poetically, the phrase refers to Latrobe’s watercolors themselves. He states that watercolor provides him with personal fulfillment and relief from anxiety, providing enjoyable diversion from vexing concerns. His words conjure the vision of a homeland within the very pages of his sketchbook. Beyond the actual borders of nations, the vagaries of politics, and social structures, his sketchbook o∑ers a world apart where Latrobe, and to a lesser extent his viewers, may travel, seeking a sense of self and of solace. The sketchbook as a metaphoric substitute for an actual homeland seems an especially likely concept for Latrobe to have employed. This idea would have fit nicely with the stammbücher tradition of his youth. It would also have adhered with his general ambivalence about the possibility of finding a fixed homeland. Life’s twists and turns carried Latrobe across various national boundaries. Moreover, he observed unstable national territories. He ruminated on the damaging human proclivity toward war and ruin once he arrived in Virginia. As we have seen, he feared that American history was already tainted. While his final trompe l’oeil are potentially hopeful, forward-looking, and personally and professionally ambitious, his first works in the immigration series are melancholy and doubtful. The earlier works juxtapose European and American society, while also grappling with the displaced immigrant condition and the disorientation of individuals who attempted to navigate the chaos of the Age of Revolutions. These images evoke hopes for stability and future happiness but also question the possibility of their realization. Latrobe’s inscription alludes to these

ideas, while simultaneously inviting the viewer to enter and enjoy the space of his escape within the watercolors. Understanding the chronology of these images is significant to tracing Latrobe’s ideas of solace and homeland. Dating his sketchbook images is challenging because he sometimes jumps around in the pages, or moves back and forth between sketchbooks. During his Virginian years, Latrobe worked across three sketchbooks. The process that guided the creation of his architectural booklets may o∑er some explanation of his habits here. In the booklets, he leaves sheets blank, setting them aside for specific topics or texts ultimately never completed. As Latrobe sketched and ruminated, he may have similarly left sheets blank, planning to return to them later. When his interests shifted, or new opportunities arose, he may have filled these sheets with unrelated imagery. Collection of Small Moonlights appears on sheet thirty-one of Sketchbook II, shortly after the Mount Vernon studies, and among several natural history studies. Three Small Landscapes appears four sheets later, directly before Latrobe’s John Flaxman-inspired figure studies for his Mount Vernon presentation drawing. When published in Latrobe’s View of America, Collection of Small Moonlights was dated to 1799. I have redated it to 1797 based on historical evidence from within the image, which is discussed further below, as well as on its position in a sketchbook largely devoted to Latrobe’s earlier travels.¤› Three Small Landscapes displays the date September 14, 1797, and all evidence supports this as the date of its completion. It is reasonable to hypothesize that Collection of Small Moonlights was completed shortly before Three Small Landscapes, perhaps in August or early September 1797. Other evidence, including their proximity, suggests that these two trompe l’oeil are closely related. Both thoughtfully address multiple facets of Latrobe’s pensive “Ubi Solatia Ibi Patria,” though challenge the viewer with di∑ering conclusions. Transatlantic Deception In Collection of Small Moonlights, Latrobe superimposes three moonlight landscape vignettes on the text. The central vignette, which occupies the uppermost layer and the physical center of the painting, is captioned “Scene at Hampton, Virginia.” A small log house with a large brick chimney nestles in a forest. Dusk deepens, but a welcoming bright red light radiates

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from the cabin. The house abuts a rippling pond upon which a full moon shines. A large boat drifts on the horizon. The viewer is positioned in a sheltered cove, opposite the house. A rowboat gently bobs before the viewer, o∑ering safe passage to the cabin. To the left is another water-oriented vignette. A shimmering river, lined by trees and rocks, runs through the scene. The large full moon close to the horizon shines a strong beam across the water and lures the viewer. At the central vanishing point, a large sailing vessel rounds a bend in the river. The final vignette, at right, shows what appears to be an ocean scene. In the foreground, a fire blazes, illuminating the hull of an immense ship. In the distance, four more ships sail on still water, the full moon again on the horizon. As before, moonlight drives a beam along the water’s surface. Behind these vignettes, the text o∑ers sardonic commentary on European wars. Some words appear concealed by the images, but the text is largely legible. Where a word is partially shown, I indicate this with a “/”; where omitted or mostly illegible, I suggest the likely text enclosed in brackets. The passage reads: Nothing however appears more probable than that the Archduke Charles having beaten Jourdain to a mummy, and worked up [the mum]my to an Oil,¤fi should push his victorious troops across the Rhine at a Dash, as he has hardly lost a man, and so go straight forward to Paris, swallowed up the City and [its inhabi]tants at a Gulp, and throw the Convention as an Englishman does the Be/ard of his Oysters into the Seine. In the mean time General Wurm/ser seeing what is [going] forward will make a snap at Buonap[arte] and ravage-[the] remnants of his Army. All this being proved as plain as the Nose on [a] Face, I am aston[ished] you should so doubt that peace will be immediately concluded between England and France, the Stadholder restored and religion order and subordination put upon its old proper footing.¤fl

The text concerns European a∑airs, which provide clues for the context of the image. Charles Brownell’s 1799 date derives from a conclusion that Latrobe is alluding to the Franco-Austrian battle at Stockach, on March 29, 1799, where French general Jean-Baptiste Jourdan fell to Archduke Charles of Austria. However, Latrobe is referring instead to the Campaign of 1796, when these same military leaders, along with the French general Jean-Victor-Marie Moreau, met in a series of encounters. Charles eventually beat Jourdan, forcing a French

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retreat back across the Rhine.¤‡ The events were covered extensively in the press. Even from Virginia, Latrobe could follow these encounters, figuring among the first European updates he would read while in the United States. The third military figure mentioned in Latrobe’s text is General Wurmser. Dagobert Wurmser, active primarily in the Italian Peninsula, died in the second half of 1797 after his surrender to Napoleon. Latrobe predicts Wurmser will finally oust Napoleon from Italy altogether. Perhaps the trompe l’oeil predated Wurmser’s death in spring 1797 or, more likely, Latrobe may have missed this development. He also may have used the Wurmser reference to discredit his narrator’s predictions. Either way, by 1799, Wurmser was dead and long irrelevant to current events. In 1796 and 1797, by contrast, newspapers contained regular updates on all the military leaders named in this text. They were familiar headline protagonists, activating the interest of readers. The text also refers to Charles pushing into Paris and overthrowing the National Convention. This future vision is anachronistic, since the Convention governed France between 1792 and October 1795. By the Campaign of 1796, France was reorganized under the Directory, as instituted by its new Constitution. The Directory lasted until 1799. Latrobe’s allusion to the “Convention” was already outdated in 1797, but would have been even more so by 1799. Since Latrobe followed news of the French Revolution fairly closely, he may have purposely been strategically inaccurate. His reference to the Convention could have been a specific critique of what he deemed the wrongheaded and amoral mismanagement of the Revolution, a position he dramatized with the reference to discarding politicians into the Seine. Alternatively, these inaccuracies may have been a technique to discredit the text’s unknown, fictional narrator, who assumes victory and peace with unwarranted pride and nonchalance. Finally, and most ambitiously, these errors may have focused the content of the accompanying image on the construction of history, a process it could initiate by forcing viewers to rehearse the events of the French Revolution. Latrobe had ample opportunity to follow the worst events of the Terror while resident in London. In Britain, these events were further sensationalized.¤° Though in Virginia the news updates were fewer, France was nevertheless viewed as the antithesis

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of Republican success. In 1797, Latrobe could not have predicted the rise of Napoleon, but his image is built around misgivings about the future of France, frustration with European turmoil, and distaste for current trends. His text forces the reader to remember events and to assess—and then reject as erroneous—the narrator’s words. Such skeptical viewing would immerse Latrobe’s audience both in the images and in the events mentioned in the text. This immersive experience would have appealed to the “politicomania” of Latrobe’s Virginian peers. Although initially Americans exhibited strong sympathy for the French Revolution, their support was faltering.¤· By late 1797, tensions were building between the Directory and John Adams’s government. The increased repression of the Directory reflected poorly on Republicanism. By the spring of 1798, the “XYZ A∑air” exploded in the press, horrifying Latrobe and his associates.‹‚ Increasingly, European wars and instability were perceived as a threat to the United States, with those in the public sphere hotly debating the nation’s role in these conflicts. The assertive voice of the trompe l’oeil plunged its viewer into these conflicts, using obstreperous opinions to preclude neutrality. The text’s narrative tone is disrespectful and self-confident. With the brash posturing of a contemporary opinion piece, it is unapologetically biased in its commentary. Actual coverage of the skirmishes along the Rhine, for instance, reported devastating loss of life on both sides, often determining victory only by shifts in troop positions. Charles’s troops were not the unstoppable military machine presented by Latrobe. The narrator seeks to humiliate the French as much as possible. Jourdan, for example, is beaten “into a mummy”—an archaic, dead, fragile object—and disrespectfully ground up into oil by Charles. Napoleon, meanwhile, is “snapped up” and swallowed by Wurmser, a bodily metaphor assuring that Napoleon will eventually become another form of organic refuse. Ultimately, the author’s absurd conclusion that peace will be restored to Europe is coupled with his stated desire for a supreme leader to put “order, religion, and subordination on its old, proper footing”—a profoundly reactionary dream for an American audience. His suggestion that European peace is attainable only through political and spiritual repression would have been unpalatable and disturbing.

Brownell comments that the viewer experiences an odd disconnection between the peaceful vignettes and the violent text in Collection of Small Moonlights.‹⁄ The overall image challenges interpretation through this contrast and the confusing text furthers this murkiness. The mocking narrator claims the battle’s significance is as “plain as the nose on your face,” and is astonished that the viewer doubts imminent peace. The viewer, puzzled and confused, is challenged and chastised for missing the transparent message of the image. The narrator’s tone is a warning that excessive self-confidence is dangerous, since the “obvious” may deceive and history is capricious. Due to this untrustworthy narrator, Latrobe’s viewers are invited to conclude this “obvious” peaceful result is inaccurate, thus opening the work for further scrutiny. Collection of Small Moonlights negotiates a complex international spectrum of concerns, all hinting at content that remains di≈cult to decode. Perhaps the image probes Latrobe’s perspective on Revolutionary France or his own competing identities. From another angle, it reflects Latrobe’s disdain for Americans’ lack of political acumen in international a∑airs. Neither interpretation, however, explains the compelling magnetism of “Scene at Hampton, Virginia.” The minute cabin depicted in the scene, pouring warm light across the water, is at the center of the trompe l’oeil. The three vignettes culminate in the central cabin, o∑ering an alternative to European chaos, in visual counterpoint to the text. The recurring motifs of ship and water are coupled with the moon, which shifts its position in each view, yet is present in all, crafting the motif of European emigration. Study of the vignettes, beginning at right and moving clockwise toward “Scene at Hampton, Virginia,” reveals a theme of travel and homecoming. The right-hand vignette is dominated by a large ship, which is shown docked, perhaps loading cargo before launching. No point of origin is indicated, but the flaming bonfire presents a potent metaphor for war in Europe, its flames driving so many eager escapees. Imminent departure is suggested by the ship’s prow pointing expectantly to the left, toward the other vignettes, and by the expanse of the open ocean dominating the left side of the scene. The moon beckons across the water, o∑ering clear passage. In the left-hand vignette, the ship enters a wide river, reminiscent of Latrobe’s many Virginian river views.

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The moon hovers above the ship, just visible at the vanishing point, its beams directing the ship’s course toward the foreground. In the final vignette, the ship appears on the horizon, while moonbeams shine into the foreground cove. After the long voyage, the passenger now finds home in this sheltered cove, in the small glowing log cabin that evokes the familiar cliché of an American frontier home.‹¤ While chaotic war permeates Latrobe’s text, his image depicts travel across the Atlantic to another world. Rather than praising the heroism of revolution and military conquest, Latrobe cites their futility. The central contradictions of the text are clarified by the visual contrast. Revolution in France has caused war, chaos, and instability. In the name of Republicanism, the European power structure has dissolved, leaving uncertainty. The text concludes with a lose-lose proposition in the return to absolute monarchy. European society cannot and should not return to “normal,” yet the current situation is untenable, and the future prognosis is poor. The vignettes represent emigration as gateway to an alternative reality. While armies bestride Europe, the Atlantic separates the United States from this turmoil. Clearly, European conflicts did a∑ect North American life, but the conceit of Latrobe’s image o∑ers the American woods as an isolated haven. The humble cottage, closely tied to its environment, is a modest, peaceful vision, far removed from the unrest of Europe. This illusion echoes Latrobe’s inscription Ubi Solatia Ibi Patria in a contemplative illustration, though without repeating the phrase. Collection of Small Moonlights prompts the viewer, through the combination of its text and vignettes, to consider loyalties, emigration, and the nature of homeland. The problem remains, though, of reconciling this message of homecoming and solace with the extant evidence of Latrobe’s own experience of emigration—for the artist did not find such happiness in Virginia, nor did he find the United States safely isolated from European a∑airs. Indeed, in spring 1798, Latrobe observed that he felt himself carried out of control in the undertow of Europe’s shifting powers.‹‹ A return to the image unsettles the tidy resolution of Ubi Solatia Ibi Patria, with the jarring unrest of the text confronting the peaceful rhythm and message of the vignettes. These inbuilt contradictions parallel Latrobe’s conflicting experiences. The image juxtaposes restful contentment and

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restive dissatisfaction, stability and disorientation, secure political/national sensibilities and irresolute and uncertain conclusions, and, ultimately, homecoming and homelessness. The viewer is unsettled by the narrative of war and violence and made uneasy by the text’s overconfidence and historical errors. Contagion from these wars seems imminent; the text threatens armies sweeping into nations, gobbling up their inhabitants and deposing or reinstating governments in rapid succession. Citing the disrespectful reuse of Egyptian mummies demonstrates a long view on this bleak historical perspective. Describing Jourdan’s defeat as grinding his mummy into dust and turning it into oil recalls the practice of unceremoniously disinterring past leaders and scattering their bones as, indeed, the French Revolutionaries did with the royal remains in Saint Denis. The hand of fate and history is ruthless. Even the greatest leaders, are quite literally, transformed into dust, their memories desecrated or obliterated. When Latrobe cites Lucan’s account of Caesar’s missteps at Troy, he evokes similar concerns. Reading such references, the alarmed viewer is impotent, for the forces of history and human actors are beyond individual control. Discerning a clear course of action from the image is impossible; anxiety and aversion mount as the viewer pieces together its elements and decodes no positive resolution. The anxious viewer looks to Latrobe’s vignettes to temper the text’s negative progression. These images seem timeless. They counter the ruthless march of history with eternal markers of human civilization including the hearth fire and the hut. Theorists, following Vitruvius and Alberti, have often referred to these elements when seeking evidence of civilization’s formative germ.‹› To a modern eye, Latrobe’s cabin appears a quintessential, almost saccharine, American image. In the late eighteenth century, the log cabin mythos had not yet developed in the American landscape tradition, and Latrobe’s image thus contains an early visual instance of this trope. More likely, then, Latrobe may have expected his viewer to see this cabin as a philosophiere, akin to his garden temple. Whether in North America or Europe, such a hermit’s retreat o∑ers an intellectual and emotional escape from civilization’s rampant chaos. Given the long voyage to this destination and its sparse built environment, Latrobe’s vignette implies a location isolated

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from civilization’s damaging forces, a vision of solace and retreat—an idealized characterization of the homeland he, himself, wished to inhabit. The moonlight permeating the image is a final key attribute. The presence of silvery moonlight sets a melancholy tone, one that was well established in Latrobe’s work. Moonlight appeared at Hastings, emphasizing the emigrant’s melancholy [Fig. 1.6]. Moonlight also serves in two of Latrobe’s narrative scenes, Oft by the Setting Moon [Fig. 2.35] and An Indian Mother Mourning Her Child: An Illustration for Ned Evans, both representing desperate mourning.‹fi Here, Latrobe’s vignettes initially draw the viewer toward the warm light of the cabin, but the moon’s cold shimmer sets a haunting tone of longing or sorrow. In Front of the Stage [Fig. 6.1], Latrobe uses fictive theatrical moonlight to suggest a dream vision of his imagined space. Collection of Small Moonlights similarly creates an emotional state through which to study the vignettes and invites the viewer into a fantasy in which solace and homecoming exist in reverie, not in reality. Viewed through sorrow’s veil, the image promises illusory security and an unlikely Arcadian future. The moonlight vignettes pro∑er a vision of the United States as a place of escape and regeneration, but undeception proves this is fantasy. Collection of Small Moonlights invites the viewer to experience Latrobe’s emotional state and endure his era’s anxieties. As artist-author and primary viewer, Latrobe creates complex and potentially therapeutic reflections for himself, likewise beguiling the viewer into contentment. At its most optimistic, the image puts a brave face to Latrobe’s Ubi Solatia Ibi Patria pledge. Yet, the visual experience of it also evokes the sorrow of the emigrant viewer, sailing cyclically back and forth across the Atlantic in an unending loop of longing. Pulled resolutely toward the protected cabin, the viewer yearns for a dream refuge, safe from society’s disruptions. The image is tantalizing and seems attainable, and yet it is minute, distant, and bathed in silvery moonlight. Perhaps the cabin is only another castle in the air. Meanwhile, the text fills the reader with fevered anxiety, its focus on sweeping war and its brash tone unreliable. Reflecting on history’s humbug and the insecurities of heroism and idealism, Latrobe’s illusion leaves the viewer confident only in his immersive scene. As hypothesized concerning the sketchbooks as a whole, and as encapsulated in the

cabin vignette most specifically, Collection of Small Moonlights o∑ers the viewer an ideal homeland within the image, even if such a place cannot actually exist. A Tempest in Virginia Latrobe’s next deception puts its spotlight on Virginia’s contemporary struggles. Three Small Landscapes again has a central vignette captioned as showing a Virginian location—this time an unspecified site on the James River. It is vertically oriented, unlike Latrobe’s other trompe l’oeil, but appropriate to the epistolary backdrop. Also unique among the illusions is the oppositional orientation between the text and vignettes. When the text is legible, i.e., when the sheet is vertical, two of the three vignettes are on their sides. To study them, the sheet must be rotated on its side, at which point the text cannot be read. The background shows a letter addressed from “Richmond, Sept. 14, 1797” and signed by “George Gattle.”‹fl The odd letter is di≈cult to read, partially because some words are concealed and others are illegible. In this transcription, where the missing words can be inferred I insert them within brackets. Where the text is illegible I write [word missing], and fill in, if possible: My dear Friend, As I well [know] how very fond you are of venis[on,] ducks and oysters, in which y[ou] keep up the good old opinion [that they] never would have abounded in [land and?] rivers of Virginia if it had e[ver been] intended that the inhabitants [of their] banks should perform any manner of [word missing—labor?] I have hereby se[nt—word(s) missing: a supply?] of prime oysters and canvass backs;‹‡ a[nd] hope you will [word(s) missing—meet the?] Stage. Land is fal[len] in price very [word missing—much?] of late. All the [word(s) missing: inhabitants with resour?]ce get up the C[ash, but funds that re]main are scarcely su≈cient to b[u]y ploughs. Wishing you therefore a very good appetite. I hope to hear from you, and as soon as I [word missing—receive?] another cargo from Williamsburg, I shall send you another supply. I am My dear sir Yrs truly George Gattle

Gattle maintains a friendly banter with his reader, sending both news and vittles. The text abounds in inside references between sender and recipient, which become more cryptic because of the blocked text. Gattle’s letter hardly seems worth

Illusions of Selfhood ·

the time it takes to read, let alone meriting inclusion in Latrobe’s image. Yet, any reader who quickly abandons a search for additional meaning becomes the butt of the deception’s satire. Gattle discusses a shared interest in local game and land acquisition. He recalls that his reader/friend is a proponent of “the good ole opinion” that abundant native fauna precludes hard work, and he sends his friend a shipment of oysters and canvasback ducks, promising to send more soon. The passage suggests both an abundant supply of foodstu∑s and a regular trade network enabling the circulation of perishable goods. The letter moves on to consider a recent drop in land prices, which seems to be whetting Gattle’s appetite. He communicates that Virginia’s inhabitants are scrambling to pull together the resources to buy up cheap land. Yet, with limited cash reserves, such purchases allow scant resources for farming. Funds are “scarcely su≈cient” to buy a plough, and residents can hardly hope to invest in the livestock, seeds, buildings, and slaves needed to support southern farming practices. Thus, the letter paints a disturbing contrast of abundant natural resources coupled with economic instability. Although Gattle and others are pleased that natural abundance removes the need for labor, insu≈cient currency nonetheless prevents economic stability and profit. Despite the national mythos of small family agriculture, Gattle’s letter implies that Virginia has not truly progressed beyond hunting and gathering. In a familiar technique, Latrobe’s image raises suspicions about the letter’s author. The most significant pressure point is Gattle’s conspiratorial assertion that Virginians do not need to work, suggesting two equally dangerous connotations. First, that a life of leisure is disturbingly aristocratic. Although Gattle and his correspondent are both proud Virginians, their aspiration toward leisure would have been anathema to American society and would have, instead, linked them to the Colonial hierarchy. This analysis is furthered with the mention of Gattle’s gifts having originated in Williamsburg, the Colonial capital. Freed from Britain, Gattle and his reader nevertheless dream of living like nobility. The second connotation was that living o∑ the land alternatively associated Virginians with indigenous huntergatherer communities, a comparison distasteful to late eighteenth-century Americans. Social theorists and critics of

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Republican American society alike wondered if the American democratic experiment could survive its individual freedoms. If the American man, enjoying the abundance of the natural environment, did not corrode into an aristocrat, he could still degenerate into the much-criticized “savage.”‹° Social theory held that a hallmark of civilization lay in “improving” the land. Indeed, according to John Locke, landowners who fail to use properties for agriculture, industry, or structures are not legitimate owners.‹· Not only does Gattle’s letter presage the collapse of Republican society by suggesting Americans should not bother to work, but it also further emphasizes that Virginians will fail to improve, and thus to truly own, the land. If Gattle simply praised Virginia’s Edenic luxuries, then his missive would have attracted the sympathies of an American reader. Instead, his observations about Virginia’s bounty are paired with veiled threats to the character and viability of American society. His conspiratorial tone attempts to trick readers into complicity with a social ideal antithetical to their interests, both as individual citizens and as a nation. Ultimately, views such as Gattle’s might have triggered the failure of the American experiment. If a careful reader rejects Gattle’s values, there is nonetheless an unpleasant ring of truth to aspects of his discussion. Gattle bungles into some of the period’s great economic concerns. Despite low land prices, cash was scarce and its value unstable. Even for individuals fortunate enough to own a large stock of local products—a successful crop or surplus game, for example—there was no guarantee such goods could be sold for money when needed. Gattle’s text reveals the inevitable subculture of gifting, trading, or bartering to redistribute goods under such circumstances. Though currency is a cornerstone of modern society, Gattle and his friend defaulted to a more traditional economy. The stark contrast of insu≈cient cash and natural abundance prompts the reader to realize that for such a wealth of resources to exist alongside cash-strapped poverty, the country must su∑er from great inequality. Within this context, certain aspects of Three Small Landscapes, resonate more clearly. The visual format conceives of the three vignettes placed above the letter as enclosures spilling out to greet their recipient.›‚ The vignettes follow a clockwise rotation, beginning with the image shown at the

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bottom of the pile, captioned “Squally Weather James River,” then rotating up toward the top. The rainy weather motif pervades this image, creating a muted, waterlogged tone, unlike the crystal clear melancholy of Collection of Small Moonlights. In “Squally Weather James River,” Latrobe replaces his usual black border with a simulated picture frame with three rectangular lines and a muted orange wash. Because of its stylized appearance, this vignette mimics a hand-tinted print. The scene presents a storm raging over a body of water, edged by trees that blow dramatically in the wind. Dark clouds loom and pelt a sheet of rain onto the river. Two prominent trees blow in the wind, as do shrubs around their trunks. A road winds away from the foreground and drops down a hill toward the riverbank, its path providing the viewer’s eye its only invitation into the trompe l’oeil. All elements contribute to sublime experience. Instead of rendering a recognizable place on the James River, this scene is unrecognizable even as being set in Virginia due to its stylization. The caption roots the vignette in the environment inhabited by Gattle and his recipient, though visually it seems foreign. Both Williamsburg, mentioned in the letter, and Richmond, the city from which Gattle wrote, are located on the James. Pinioned at the center of the sheet and anchoring the image around it, this view is well situated to influence the illusion’s content. The next vignette is unfinished and the only one with a vertical orientation aligned with the letter. It o∑ers a faint wash of stormy sky around a rough pencil sketch of a tree trunk. It is unclear whether this vignette’s unfinished state means that Three Small Landscapes is itself incomplete, or if this vignette is deliberately unfinished. The latter case seems more likely. The balance of the image is fully finished and completing this diminutive vignette would not have been time-consuming. Assuming it is deliberately unfinished, its partially blank surface contributes usefully to the overall impression of the trompe l’oeil. The light blue wash and blank paper contrast with the two other landscape scenes, in which dark and highly saturated colors prevail. The revealed white paper also calls attention to the sheet’s physical presence, contributing to the illusion that this vignette really exists in a separate space from the letter. The addition of the non finito increases the watercolor’s picturesque e∑ect. Conceptually, these formal qualities also introduce content associations,

suggesting an incomplete beginning, a location only partially formed, or a creative act in process. The final vignette presents another scene of stormy weather over water. No caption identifies the site. The scale of the water suggests the ocean, rather than a river. An odd scene appears in the left-hand corner. A tall shaft with protruding branches appears to be a tree, but closer scrutiny reveals it is a large, ruined hearth, overgrown with weeds. Two naked people shelter in this ruin; a man sits on the ground, wearing an animal pelt across his shoulder, and a woman stands to his left. Although Latrobe does not point out the reference, the ruined chimney is copied from the central ruin in View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk [Fig. 4.1], completed the previous spring. The reference is significant, perhaps the visual seed for the entire deception. This likely also grounds the vignette in Norfolk, rather than in an anonymous or generic foreign land. As vignettes and text are considered together, a proliferation of references to Virginia, and specifically to the socioeconomic struggles of the state, becomes apparent. Four specific sites—Richmond, Williamsburg, Norfolk, and the James River—are mentioned across the text and images. Further, the caption “Squally Weather James River” is suggestive not so much of an actual weather incident, but of the commentary Latrobe seeks to make about the state’s social, political, and economic upheaval. Collection of Small Moonlights has an international valence. In contrast, Three Small Landscapes is concerned only with critiques of Virginia. Both the vignettes and the letter initially seem either irrelevant or innocuous, but they are designed to work together, in a sympathetic mode, making a strong social statement. A humble letter thus replaces a political text. Here, no narrative voice speaks of great world leaders or events. Instead, the subject matter seems mundane: farms, trade, and obscure friendship. The landscape vignettes initially appear generic, o∑ering prototypical scenes and revealing their close Virginian connections only gradually. The image’s message is thus more focused and more localized and, thereby, possibly more cutting. Three Small Landscapes visually shapes a topsy-turvy sensibility, embodying the inversion of social values, the dislocation of immigration, and Latrobe’s unsettled perception of the New World’s degradation into the Old. To absorb the work’s

Illusions of Selfhood ·

subject matter, its viewer must swivel from horizontal to vertical and back. Images and text exist in physical counterpoint; if one is in focus and properly oriented, the other will be compromised and illegible. The viewer’s act of grasping and turning the sketchbook plays into the ruse of the painting. A real letter with three loose sheets would shift with this motion, allowing access to the text’s hidden passages, but the viewer’s hand would encounter the single sheet, text resolutely unseeable. Touch does not reward the viewer with greater meaning. Instead, it emphasizes the irresolvable challenges of the work. The image remains persistently, insistently topsy-turvy. Turning this sheet meditatively in circles, the viewer moves through a physical manifestation of the cyclical theory of history. We know that Latrobe read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during his Atlantic voyage. We have already considered how he infused Gibbon’s ideas into other works. Similar ideas may have contributed to Three Small Landscapes, and can be explored by probing the vignettes more deeply in succession. In the first vignette, “Squally Weather James River,” a romanticized image of contemporary Virginia invokes the sublime, with a visual suggestion of the dangerous, disorienting international upheavals of Latrobe’s historical moment. The pictured storm’s violence provokes an instinctive reaction of fear for life and limb. The scene’s small scale and secure position on the sheet reassure the viewer of safety from any direct threat of a “squall,” but not from contemporary sociopolitical dangers. In the second, unfinished vignette, placid nature, devoid of human presence, appears, potentially inviting peaceful emotions. Finally, the viewer arrives at the third, and most concerning, vignette. Already tricked by the trompe l’oeil conceit, the viewer is again deceived, since it first presents as a scene of rugged nature, then clarifies into a warning about human civilization. Here, Virginia’s civilization has collapsed and its citizens now are reduced to a subsistence lifestyle. “Americans” have degenerated to an indigenous society, just as foreshadowed by Gattle’s blithe banter. Another storm brews on the horizon, building fiercely over the water. The pelting rain progresses ominously forward. A storm from across the Atlantic blows further trouble violently toward Virginia’s shores.

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Three Small Landscapes uses the subject matter of the American landscape, combined with the knacks of watercolor, to confront social issues. It also expresses significant concern over the impact of economic, social, and political developments on local life, evoking Virginia at multiple points, yet raising implications well beyond one state, as these local issues resonate more broadly with national and transatlantic concerns. Three Small Landscapes is in direct dialogue with A Collection of Small Moonlights. The former studies the New World in ruin, while the latter is concerned with the contemporary collapse of the Old World. The central vignette in Three Small Landscapes takes the viewer readily back and forth across the Atlantic, intertwining the themes of the two images. Once the seeming tree trunk is identified instead as a ruin, the viewer must reconcile the expected European locus of ruins against the Virginian site, allowing Latrobe to transport the viewer “at an instant” across the Atlantic. Latrobe uses the serial scenes at Norfolk, from which this ruin is excerpted, to transport the viewer through space and time. No doubt he returns here to some aspect of that content, revealing melancholy doubts about the progress of civilization. In the context of Three Small Landscapes, the viewer ultimately experiences Latrobe’s muted longing for the Old World, along with a sense of strangeness in the New. The omnipresent lakes, ocean, and rain connect the two sides of the Atlantic, while also communicating Latrobe’s emotional state. Given these associations, although Three Small Landscapes is especially concerned with Virginian a∑airs, it nevertheless relates to global and enduring questions about living a worthy life and human progress. The pessimistic and disheartening focus—the ruined Virginian hearth with its primitive inhabitants—issues a powerful warning. If a solution cannot be found to calm the international waters, then humanity’s future may degrade rather than improve. If Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil succeeds, then its viewer’s response to the image’s messages will be to ask, “What can be done?” Latrobe o∑ers no answer, as yet. This deception’s waterlogged tone expresses depression and pessimism, with little positive anticipation for resolution. It mirrors Latrobe’s own depression in an upended personal and political world, as he inhabited a new homeland in which his longed-for philosophical, intellectual, and artistic solace remained unobtainable.

Conjuring a Comprehensive Mind Meditative in form and subject, Watercolor: Two views is at seeming variance with Latrobe’s first two Virginian trompe l’oeil. In it, Latrobe turns to an epic to develop a concept of national salvation, accomplished by the artist’s “comprehensive mind.” This image o∑ers the visual antidote to the unrest explored in his earlier illusions. It is on the thirty-first sheet of Latrobe’s third sketchbook, adjacent to a series of images on literary themes, a position that suggests it was created during a period of intense reflection, and perhaps concentrated on the relationship between literature and modern society.›⁄ In April 1797, Latrobe connected his fears of growing insanity to his fiction reading.›¤ A year later, he completed Watercolor: Two views. In it, he engages again with reading, but this time considers a famous and (at the time) respected contemporary epic. The stanza included from James Beattie’s The Minstrel is fully legible and clearly cited. The text is

centrally positioned on the sheet, and the lines continue along the right-hand strip of the image. It reads: Thither he hied, enamour’d of the scene: For rocks on rocks piled, as by magick spell, Here scorch’d with lightning, there with ivy green Fenced from the north and east this savage dell; Southward a mountain rose with easy swell, Whose long long groves eternal murmur made; And toward the western sun a streamlet fell, Where, through the cli∑s, the eye, remote, survey’d Blue hills, and glittering waves, and skies in gold array’d.›‹

A column of text separated at left maintains the illusion of a single body of background text segmented into three parts by the vignettes, even though only the final word in this column (“Blue”) is from the poem.›› Most of the remaining words are fragmented, but can be reconstructed with relative ease: “Where Scene[s?] For Though[ts] Noble Satis[fy] Some,” delivering the basic aim of the trompe l’oeil—to raise “noble

Fig. 8.5: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, View of the Potowmac about a mile above George town, taken from the road, to the Westward, March 16, 1798.

thoughts” in its viewers. The marginal text might refer to the landscape vignettes through its mention of “scenes.” This line also relates to a central social issue for Latrobe, concerning the possible impact of his art. Namely, while a small proportion of individuals ponder “noble thoughts,” the vast majority are not deep thinkers. Throughout his time in Virginia, Latrobe struggled to connect to the general population. Even with his close American friends, he felt a chasm separating his cosmopolitan interests and their pragmatic spheres of knowledge. His image acknowledges that only certain viewers will appreciate its philosophical and aesthetic stakes, thus limiting its possible impact. Society’s remaining members, including women, would be impervious to its influence and would remain unenlightened. A secondary point this line introduces is the impact of nature on the viewer’s mind and emotions. In Beattie’s passage, the e∑ect of the scene immediately transforms its viewer “as if by magick spell,” invoking a profound communion with

nature that could be either calming or exciting. But, as Latrobe argued in An Essay on Landscape, only mediated reflection can e∑ect in the most profound and specific impacts of nature. Educated viewers have minds trained in many other realms of knowledge that they carry with them. Both images and texts o∑er forms of mediation, which may guide responses via association. This trompe l’oeil models such mediation of nature through the medium of watercolor, making use of both epic text and visual imagery. Superimposed above the stanza are two small river views, both rendered with a “torn” edge. At left is “Scene near the little Falls on the Banks of the Potowmac,” and at right is “Group of Rocks near the Bridge at the little falls. Potowmac.” “Scene near the little Falls” is taken from water level, with the rapids rushing toward the foreground. An outcropping of striated rocks, trapped within the roots of a broad tree, fills most of the space. “Group of Rocks” is dominated by a jagged outcropping of rocks. In the background are a small building

Fig. 8.6: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sketch of the Bridge at the little Falls of the Potowmac, March 16, 1798.

242 · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor

and the footing of a bridge. River rapids are barely visible at right. Despite the references to Little Falls, the cascades themselves are not included. A final line of text on the lower left reads “Greenwood park March 19, 1798.” The date corresponds with Latrobe’s first trip to Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia, suggesting both the date and location refer to this trip and cite the creation of, or inspiration for, this image. Although this period is poorly documented in Latrobe’s journal, his sketchbook allows some ability to follow his travels. Two sketchbook watercolors, both dated March 16, 1798, render locations on the Potomac closely associated with this image. View of the Potowmac about a mile above George town, taken from the road, to the Westward captures a scene from the carriage in which Latrobe rode, following the contours of the river to the west [Fig. 8.5] The view is located about two miles south of the Little Falls on which Watercolor: Two views is focused. Sketch of the Bridge at the little Falls of the Potowmac [Fig. 8.6], the subsequent scene in the sketchbook, reflects the location that must have inspired Latrobe’s Watercolor: Two views. It includes three features also included in Latrobe’s vignettes: the prominent rock formation in the middle foreground, signed at top by Latrobe, the small building to the left of the bridge, and the bridge itself. In the sketchbook, these views are followed by a study near Havre de Grace, Maryland, thus directly tracing Latrobe’s trip north toward Philadelphia. A lingering intriguing point of Watercolor: Two views is Latrobe’s inclusion of the location—Greenwood Park—along with the date. Given the course of Latrobe’s travels, it has proven possible after extensive research to trace this location to a plantation in Montgomery County, Maryland.›fi The dearth of written records from Latrobe’s northward trip to Philadelphia prevents developing further knowledge about Latrobe’s visit to this property, though the location remains an aspect of the piece for further research. The mention of location could simply have reflected Latrobe’s consistent interest in siting his images precisely, but it could also have pertained to the philosophical content or the subject matter of the scene. In a later mention of his return trip to Richmond, Latrobe narrates passing through the Washington, D.C., environs, where he enjoyed travels beginning in Bladensburg, Maryland:

. . . a very picturesque situation in a deep valley, surrounded by woody eminences. We stopped a few minutes in the Federal City, during which time I rambled over the Capitol. We got to Georgetown and crossed the Potowmac an hour before sunset. Scarce however had we proceeded half a mile, before we broke our splinterbar. Mr. Rogers and I therefore resolved to walk on. It was soon dark and began to rain, and we trudged up to our knees in Mud great part of the way to Alexandria. The stage overtook us just as we entered the town, about 10 o’clock. At 3 we again resumed our journey. We had a very pleasant day, and a very pleasant party, so that I forgot my excessive fatigue and a dreadful Cold. The trees on this side Potowmac seemed at least a fortnight more forward in vegetation than they were in Pensylvania [sic].›fl

This passage captures Latrobe’s observations of the beauty of the capital region. Even though traveling via stagecoach, he visited the U.S. Capitol and traversed many of the city’s distinctive areas, including the older towns of Georgetown and Alexandria. The Little Falls must have made a similarly attractive destination for breaking the northward journey. In December 1798, Latrobe returned to the area, traveling northward to Philadelphia with his friend and geology expert William Maclure. On this trip, Latrobe made another excursion to the Little Falls, commenting the following year in his journals, after a long period of silence: “We had also taken great pains to investigate the nature of the soil and stratification of the Stone at Fredericsburg on the Rappahannoc, and from George town to the little falls on the Potowmac.”›‡ Turning from the landscape, it is necessary to grapple with the phantom face hovering beneath the vignettes and text in Watercolor: Two Views. Its grisaille palette evokes a sculptural relief fragment, endowing it with monumentality, despite its diminutive scale and subsidiary position. Unlike most relief portraits, though, this figure faces the viewer head-on, in a convention familiar to that of painting or sculptural busts. As with the landscape’s magic spell, the mysterious visage entraps its viewer. Clearly, this is an important individual, but who is he? How should we react? These questions have no ready answer. Latrobe’s title mentions “a portrait,” with no further information. When published by Talbot Hamlin, the caption indicated that it was a portrait of George Washington, though no documentation was given for this assertion. The figure

Illusions of Selfhood ·

does, indeed, bear some resemblance to portraits of Washington, but not so much as to be definitive. Latrobe’s sketchbooks contain some contemporary portraits, and he may have occasionally sketched friends and companions, as he did during his visit to Mount Vernon. Perhaps the mysterious face is of one such acquaintance. Of Latrobe’s friends and associates, Giambattista Scandella would be a likely candidate, but no known portrait of him survives with which to compare this work. However, that the figure is a straightforward portrait is not the only possibility, nor is it even the most likely conclusion. Latrobe also rendered allegorical or disguised portraits, as in his representation of Eleanor Custis in the guise of Flaxman’s Helen in his Mount Vernon sketches. This is not a Flaxmaninspired face, yet Latrobe’s pictorial approach permits that he might have been reproducing or alluding to a portrait of a known individual or literary figure here. One possibility is that the figure is Beattie, also the subject of a well-known allegorical portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Triumph of Truth, which was reproduced in an engraving Latrobe may have seen [Fig. 8.7].›° More plausible is an identification of

Fig. 8.7: Thomas Gaugain after Sir Joshua Reynolds, James Beattie, 1805.

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this figure as one of the two central male characters from Beattie’s poem—either the young minstrel Edwin, or the elderly hermit. Both Edwin and the hermit had been rendered by other period artists. Latrobe’s face, if capturing either of these personages, does not resemble any artist’s interpretations of the figures that I have identified.›· Whatever specific individual may be intended, his translucent face takes on a distinct, mirrored quality. This ghostly portrait looks back at its viewer as another self or, perhaps, a phantom from the past. Its deliberately shadowy quality enables malleability in terms of age and mood (it can be silent or speaking, for example). The viewer is locked in mutual scrutiny with the man. Because the primary viewer for all of Latrobe’s watercolors is the artist himself, the specific construct of the rendering makes this ghostly figure possibly an actual or allegorical self-portrait. Whether real or fictional, the phantom measures Latrobe from the image’s inner recesses, and this relationship of gazes creates the work’s central visual drama. Study of the visual elements of Watercolor: Two views has provided many clues for interpretation. To deepen understanding, further consideration of Beattie’s epic poem is necessary. The subject matter of Latrobe’s vignettes closely matches his citation from Beattie: both show murmuring trees and light glittering on waves, and both whisk the reader/viewer o∑ into a deep sensory experience of nature. Once immersed in the image, a philosophical viewer, of the type that Latrobe upheld in An Essay on Landscape, can attain a deeper experience by contemplating the image alongside the epic’s message. Notably, Beattie explains that the great salvation of human civilization can only come via the highly trained “comprehensive mind,” and Latrobe’s image seeks to capture this concept and transform its viewer in the process. Close reading of the relevant portion of Beattie’s epic further elucidates Latrobe’s content. The Minstrel tells the story of the young Edwin, who as a “minstrel” typifies an archaic character type of great moral and sometimes sacred significance.fi‚ Minstrels are musicians,

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and Edwin begins the poem in the role of the artist, who enjoys his musical craft while wandering the world in the pursuit of aesthetic delight. When he is a mere pleasureseeker, his work has no moral weight, though the epic’s title immediately alerts the reader that the poet has reserved “some dramatic or moral purpose” for Edwin’s future.fi⁄ Unfortunately, Beattie left his epic unfinished, despite the publication of two volumes, and it is uncertain how he meant it to end.fi¤ As a reader of Beattie, Latrobe may have pondered Edwin’s future. The trompe l’oeil construct allows for both heraldic and melancholy outcomes. In its uncertain valences, the image leaves ample space for viewers to imagine their own conclusions. It is not di≈cult to identify ways in which The Minstrel would have attracted Latrobe’s interest. The text engages directly with contemporary themes that would have been of some urgency to him. Specifically, Beattie considered the future of human civilization, the form of modern empires, and the nature of individual morality. In the poem’s first book, Edwin, described as a child of the modern age, spends his days playing the harp and wandering the hillsides, seeking a permanent calling. Still an innocent youth, he lives in a remote corner of the world and delights in the natural beauties around him. Although the location of Edwin’s home is never made specific, Beattie, who lived and worked in Aberdeen, considered a New World setting, but eventually determined the Scottish Highlands were remote enough.fi‹ As Edwin seeks his vocation, he wanders the countryside, and: Meanwhile, whate’er of beautiful, or new, Sublime, or dreadful, in earth, sea, or sky, By chance, or search, was o∑er’d to his view, He scann’d with curious and romantic eye.fi›

Thus, in Book I, Edwin is essentially a picturesque tourist, buoyed by aesthetic experience. Seeking ever greater pleasures, he wanders far and wide in search of nature’s most dramatic experiences. Book II, published four years later, centers on the loss of Edwin’s naiveté and builds the foundation for a transformative moral art, crafted by “the comprehensive mind.” An opening passage sets a darker tone, when the narrator warns of the “dire e∑ects of time and change” and the unhappy

history of human civilization built into the landscape.fifi Individuals are powerless over their fates, which are linked to the ups and downs of human civilization. “Art, empire, earth itself, to change are doom’d,” intones the narrator, seeing degradation, not positive evolution. Latrobe focuses his illusion around the great turning point of the epic (Stanza VII, Book II), which introduces an encounter that leads to Edwin’s moral awakening concerning his art. Edwin has wandered to a remote valley, which is described in great detail over several stanzas, beginning with the passage that Latrobe cites.fifl Here, entranced, he is lulled into reverie. Without Edwin realizing it, noon fades toward twilight. The darkening valley begins to echo with a mournful soliloquy, which rouses Edwin, mesmerizing and haunting him. He does not know the source of these powerful words, but the reader is informed that the valley Edwin perceives as rugged wilderness is actually a cultivated landscape, home to a philosopher-hermit. From his retreat, the hermit calls out his sorrowful reflections on the growing moral corruption of human civilization, opening with the lament, “For virtue lost, and ruin’d man, I mourn.”fi‡ He critiques human violence and dishonesty and expresses the regret that evidence of both pervades the homes as well as all the “favourite haunts” of his peers. While he praises nature’s infinite beauty and peerless example, he finds moral darkness in the human mind, stating dramatically: “But, in the mental world, what chaos drear! / What forms of mournful, loathsome, furious mien!” Interestingly, the hermit’s words make clear that this taint exists on both sides of the Atlantic. Even as “continents bloom” and “oceans roll between,” the corruption of humanity is ready to defile these worlds with physical violence and moral turpitude. Edwin’s idealism is crushed by these words. He had always aspired to elevating his work in the service of high culture, but after hearing the hermit’s lament, he cries into the night: And is it thus in courtly life That man to man acts a betrayer’s part! And dares he thus the gifts of heaven to pervert, Each social instinct, and sublime desire!— Hail Poverty! If honour, wealth, and art, If what the great pursue, and learn’d admire, Thus dissipate and quench the soul’s ethereal fire!fi°

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After this outburst, Edwin returns home, but remains restless. He cannot forget the haunting soliloquy, nor does he have a su≈cient breadth of knowledge to understand how to apply the hermit’s warning to his artistic calling. His previous aspirations and achievements had been defined by civilization’s values, but he now fears that his successes may compromise his soul. Edwin has traveled to the globe’s remotest corners and found great natural beauty, but he has also learned that civilization is driven not by ideals but by corruption. At last, the young, naïve protagonist has been transformed into a troubled hero, whose melancholy and crushed idealism appealed to Latrobe’s despondency in Virginia. Eventually, Edwin returns to the valley in search of the person behind the echoing soliloquy. Once he identifies the hermit, the older man promises to educate him and o∑ers another poetic declamation, outlining his philosophy on nature and humanity. Though the hermit condemns the current state of civilization, his vision is not nihilistic. He does not wish to obliterate civilization or to return humanity to a primal state. Though civilization has many inherent dangers, the savage state is worse: Pleasure by savage man is dearly bought With fell revenge, lust that defies control, With gluttony and death. The mind untaught is a dark waste, where fiends and tempests howl. As Phebus to the world, is Science to the soul.fi·

Likewise, he upholds cultivated landscape over wilderness since: [Nature’s] bounty, unimproved is deadly bane: Dark woods and rankling wilds, from shore to shore, Stretch their enormous gloom; which to explore Even Fancy trembles.fl‚

Looking toward a possible salvation for humanity, the hermit places the future of civilization on the shoulders of learned men in the final stanzas of Book II. He elaborates a vision that relies on the combined force of Philosophy, Art, and Science within the “comprehensive mind” of the highly educated man. Fusing these three branches of learning will touch all facets of human civilization. Only such broad knowledge can solve the severe problems facing that civilization. The hermit’s closing arguments explain his sweeping vision and the role of the comprehensive mind:

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What cannot Art and Industry perform, When Science plans the progress of their toil! ··· When tyrants scourge, or demagogues embroil A land, or when the rabble’s headlong rage Order transforms to anarchy and spoil, Deep-versed in man the philosophic Sage Prepares with lenient hand their phrenzy to asswage. Tis his alone, whose comprehensive mind, From situation, temper, soil and clime Explored, a nation’s various powers can bind And various orders, in one Form sublime Of polity, that midst the wrecks of time, Secure shall lift its head on high, nor fear Th’assault of foreign or domestick crime, While publick faith, and publick love sincere, And Industry and Law maintain their sway severe.fl⁄

The product of the “comprehensive mind” is a “Form sublime of polity.” Shaped through the balance of the branches of knowledge, this new form of civilization will be true to nature and true to the needs of the human public. For these reasons, it will be durable and will upend the continuing cycles of civilization’s failure lamented earlier by the hermit. Inspired by the hermit, Edwin sets out to develop a comprehensive mind. Beattie concludes: For, mindful of the aids that life requires, And of the services man owes to man, He meditates new arts on Nature’s plan.fl¤

Edwin matures from an aimless minstrel into a heroic bard. Now motivated by his debt to humanity, he seeks to employ his art to craft a new, ideal “Form sublime of polity” consonant with the hermit’s vision. The Minstrel responds to the British Empire’s complex dynamic. Without naming his homeland, Beattie critiqued contemporary Britain, finding it in need of significant refashioning. Latrobe would have sympathized with Beattie’s critiques of Britain. Having lived as an “outsider” in London, Latrobe likely was attracted to Beattie’s position as a Scottish intellectual, striving for success against the odds in a social system that was stacked against him. The hermit lives in exile outside of society, chastising class systems, greed, and corruption. Latrobe may have found personal justification for his

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bankruptcy in the hermit’s criticism of a system that was oriented toward the wrong goals and set up individuals for failure. But Beattie is explicit that the hermit’s lessons are universal. Given the service of intellectual citizens, the benefits of the comprehensive mind can be enacted in even the most remote corner of the globe. Doubtless, Latrobe eagerly considered the application of such a comprehensive mind in the American context. Just a few months before the date on his image, in January 1798, Latrobe penned a letter to Scandella, touching on his frustrations along these lines. He was desperately unhappy in Virginia, as his broad interests and wideranging mind could not be satisfied by limited conversations on politics and the law. Frustrated, he planned to retreat from society—though noted with regret that he would be happier in the “active pursuit” of his profession if he thought his work could be accepted in his new country. Watercolor: Two views seems both to apply Beattie’s lessons to the American context more broadly and to contemplate the frustrations that Latrobe had itemized only a few months earlier. First, let’s consider how Latrobe’s image invites engagement with the hermit’s message. Watercolor: Two views cleverly represents philosophy, art, and science interwoven as they would be in the comprehensive mind. Art is represented both in the copied epic passage and in the watercolor itself. Science is present through the natural history views and in some sense also through the description of nature excerpted from Beattie. Philosophy, meanwhile, drives the state of mind and viewership on which the work depends. As already described, the absorptive mode of viewing that this piece requires—which involves the interactions of viewer and phantom figure, alongside the close study of nature scenes and reflective reading— guides the viewer to enter a particular aesthetic and mental space. To take in all the contemporaneous stimuli of this image, the viewer must focus and refocus the eye, moving among the di∑erent elements and, eventually, piecing them together in the mind. E∑ectively, Latrobe’s image persuades the viewer to emulate the “comprehensive mind,” interweaving philosophic, artistic, and scientific data to approach its content. If this image activates the comprehensive mind of the viewer, then the location of the vignettes on the Potomac River, close to the new capital city of the United States becomes even more suggestive. In his January 1798 letter to

Scandella, Latrobe o∑ered a critical report about Washington, D.C., that may make the weight of this allusion more specific. He comments: As to the foederal [sic] City, I have never seen it, but I am sure your judgement of it is correct. Do you remember a passage in Citizen Fauchet’s intercepted dispatch, published in our friend Edmund Randolph’s vindication, wherein he asks, speaking of the vices and corruption of our young government, ‘if this be the decrepitude of its youth, what will its old age be?’ I was reminded of the passage by your very comic comparison of the city to a Giant with pigmy limbs. My dear friend; considering you are a physician, you ought to have known better. The limbs are in a natural state, but the Child is strumous, badly treated . . . and I fear somewhat tainted with the King’s evil. Were I inclined to pun, I might say, that a blister of Spanish flies . . . (which is likely enough to be thus applied) would discover the nature of its disease.fl‹

This description is disturbing, and it is a damning condemnation of the nation’s leadership. Scandella has suggested that the young nation’s grandiose aspirations are diminished by the dwarfish capital. It is ambitiously planned but, insu≈ciently nourished, its growth has been stultified. In correction, Latrobe replies that the city is still in its natural state, hardly built up enough to assess its completed form, but the government is already diseased. The young nation—here called “the Child”—is aΩicted by a range of serious ailments: tuberculosis (scophula), swollen lymph nodes (strumous), softened and deformed bone structure (rickets), and a brain disorder due to built-up fluid (hydrocephalus). Latrobe worries that the nation is already corrupted by the aristocracy from which it grew. The only solution is through exposure to the Spanish fly (Lytta vesicatoria), whose secreted irritants will drain the aΩicted brain. This disturbing imagery of a diseased body is exceptionally pessimistic, as it asserts that the young Republican experiment is already failing catastrophically. Citing the retired statesman Edmund Randolph, Latrobe frets: “if this be the decrepitude of its youth, what will its old age be?”fl› Watercolor: Two views at first appears to o∑er a simple aesthetic, combining beautiful scenes of nature with verse to lull the viewer. But Latrobe’s fears for the nation, coupled with the hermit’s prophetic warning, lead to a di∑erent interpretation. The viewer, first lulled into complacency, must soon be provoked to action, like Edwin is. The insistent, returned gaze of

Illusions of Selfhood ·

the ghostly figure delivers this spark. Like the bite of the Spanish fly, the spark of the gaze from within the trompe l’oeil is an irritant, meant to rupture one’s reverie and trigger the active workings of Beattie’s “comprehensive” contemplation. Further, we must remember that Latrobe made this watercolor more for himself than for any other audience. He may well have created it in response to his frustrations and in order to dream about his future. It was well known that Beattie’s poem was semi-autobiographical.flfi Latrobe may have been attempting a similar creative act. As the content of both its text and vignettes suggest, this illusion grew from Latrobe’s burgeoning fascination with the American natural landscape, which was inseparable from his developing sense of self as a creative intellectual. His watercolor captures the experiences of sites that brought him into harmony with the United States and at the same time o∑ered the knowledge base through which he, eventually, gained the capacity to judge the young nation. His watercolor echoes the life-changing encounter at the climax of Beattie’s poem, similarly allegorizing a turning point for Latrobe. The artist’s comprehensive mind enacted here is implicitly Latrobe’s own mind, which he suggested might have the power to shape the nation’s capital into a “Form sublime of polity,” capable of weathering current and future storms. With his rare level of education, Latrobe more than most others could claim a “comprehensive mind,” and the trompe l’oeil enacts a personal awakening for the viewer similar to Edwin’s. Toying with both the role of the prophetic hermit and that of the youthful minstrel, Latrobe’s illusion allows him to step into the heroic spotlight of the image. This portrayal is neither modest nor unassuming. Representing an intellectual and artistic self-portrait, Latrobe’s watercolor reflects an idealized vision of his future self, capable of redirecting American society. If Washington’s early built environment was failing, then Latrobe dreamed of designing a more robust infrastructure to bolster the nation. Watercolor: Two views, created around the time of Latrobe’s visit to Philadelphia, is the product of a moment when he was emotionally and intellectually encouraged by exchanges and cordial friendships with Count Volney, Scandella, William McClure and others, and found himself capable of imagining this more successful future vision.

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Conveniently, Beattie’s story of Edwin and the hermit’s encounter in the wilds of Scotland may have allowed Latrobe to indulge a second aspect of his fantasy. He regularly fretted about his cruel fortune. He could have had no durable confidence in his heroic self-vision. If identification with Edwin o∑ered Latrobe the model of the heroic bard, then association with the hermit presented another viable model. In his conversations with Scandella and Volney, and in the architectural fantasies of his Virginian period, Latrobe envisioned life as a hermit-philosopher. His ideal life in this period, especially when he hit his lowest moments, consisted in retreat from the world (perhaps accompanied by his closest family or dearest intellectual companions) to pursue a solitary life of philosophy, intellectual pursuit, and the arts. Although the hermit in Beattie’s poem inspires Edwin to go forth and live the heroic ideal, he renounces any such attempts for himself. If Edwin’s struggles to change the world fail, he too might retreat to a hermit’s life. The slippery nature of the figure in the center of Watercolor: Two views allows the phantom to move easily among Edwin, the hermit, and mirrored reflection. Whether he made it in the depths of despair or the height of imaginative fancy, the image allowed Latrobe a visual space in which to imagine transcending his present travails and achieving a better future. Though self-serving, the image also o∑ers an exceptional challenge for other viewers. Can they identify with this artistic and philosophical vision? Can they achieve the mental state of Beattie’s “comprehensive mind” valued above all others? If the answer to these questions is “yes,” then the viewer is called to become a heroic bard. Of course, if the viewer fails to detect this content and concludes that the image o∑ers only a pleasing paean to nature, then he or she gains a pleasant experience, but is incapable of leading society. The Mind Victorious? Latrobe created his final trompe l’oeil one year later. Unlike his other deceptions, Frontispiece takes the genre out of the sketchbooks, and onto the title page of Designs of Buildings. In its role on the title page, Frontispiece serves the manuscript through its heraldic treatment of Latrobe’s design achievements from Virginia and its anticipation of great success in Pennsylvania. Frontispiece synthesizes the significance of the projects shown within the volume, rendering nine buildings as

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minute models in the background (discussed further below). The image also stands alone as the final work in Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil immigration series. As considered in Chapter 7, Latrobe’s allegory in Frontispiece extends beyond the female figure. The image embodies the very experience of relocation from one state to another. We see the transition of identity as Latrobe shifts from a Virginian to a Pennsylvanian. This image, though publicly celebratory, has a quiet and more melancholic undertone, inviting the meditative viewer to join Latrobe within the space of his imagination. There the viewer can experience the sadness of his immigrant journey, fate’s capricious twists, and the population of space and place by designs left unbuilt or else constructed as poor shadows of his mind’s conceptions. Although the image captures a single action—Latrobe’s relocation from Virginia to Pennsylvania—it encapsulates the cumulative experience of his immigrant years. It o∑ers a depiction of selfhood in transit, capturing an individual journey within the complex nexus of prior experience and future dreams. Fixed over the Virginian hills, it hovers perpetually, caught eternally in the immigrant’s state of displacement, even while attempting to presage successful resettlement. In its confidence and forward-looking vision, as we have seen, it may have bolstered Latrobe’s confidence to take a chance with undergoing another displacement. Frontispiece, like Breakfast Equipage, is accompanied by a descriptive text, explaining the subject matter: During my residence in Virginia from 1795 to 1799 the applications to me for designs were very numerous, and my fancy was kept employed in building castles in the air, the plans of which were contained in this Volume. The only two buildings which were executed from the drawings, were Captn. Pennocks house at Norfolk, and Colonel Harvies at Richmond. . . . The former stands on terra firma in the background to the left, the latter on a hill in the middle ground. The Wings of Coll. Harvie’s house were never built, and are thus following the other buildings into the sky. Higher up among the Clouds, are the buildings which may easily be known by looking over the following drawings.flfl

Latrobe assumes an authorial tone, projecting professional confidence and personal modesty. Although he built little in Virginia, he informs the reader that his knowledge and designs were nonetheless in high demand. While dreaming

up “castles in the air,” his mind was well occupied. After years spent thinking about architectural projects, Latrobe was now prepared to complete significant structures. As in his other illusions, the rendered image’s paper surface contributes to the conceit. The three-dimensionality of this sheet is emphasized through the premise that the image is placed across two sheets of paper, the actual title page of the booklet and a second, smaller sheet ripped from another source. Its irregular, folded, torn, and curled edges emphasize that it is severed from a larger context. At its apex, two rips form a V-shape, with a hairline tear shooting like a small lightning bolt into the image. Beneath the V, Latrobe writes, “Richmond, V[A] 1798,” with the text separated by the paper’s simulated folds. In the lower left, just underneath a simulated graceful upward curl, the architect signs the sketch “B. H. Latrobe,” designating the image’s artist as distinct, and yet identical to the author/architect (in the text above, indicated as “B. Henry Latrobe Boneval”). In the lower right, Latrobe records, “Philadelphia, Sept. 8th, 1799.” These three short notations are the only text included within the watercolor, though they must be viewed in relationship to the larger booklet’s text. At variance with most of Latrobe’s watercolors, the pigment here is shown spilling to the edges of the ripped sheet. Indeed, tearing produces the boundary of the image, shaping its irregular contours. Instead of his usual black outlining frames, Latrobe defines this edge through the slight shadow it appears to cast onto the page below. The illusion’s most prominent feature is the winged allegorical figure “The Architect’s Imagination,” already treated extensively in Chapter 7. Building on the progression of Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil, I focus here on considering Frontispiece generally, and this figure specifically, in relationship to Latrobe’s discovery of the possibilities of the “comprehensive mind.” By juxtaposing fantasy and reality, and present and future, this image foretells the possibility of a heroic creative professional, inspired by Beattie’s epic. Latrobe’s allegorical figure, who embodies his creative mind, is both monumental and triumphant. The viewer’s focus is on her extended, bare arm, which triumphantly uplifts the model of the Bank of Pennsylvania. Shown fully in profile, she stares intently forward, focused on her destination, sailing

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gracefully over a foreground landscape while sparing it no glance. This creative vision, if fantastical, is purposeful. The figure has a date with destiny. The allegory ignores the physical world around her, but the viewer does not. The beauty of a foreground scene of rocks and shrubbery is appealing. Because this section of the scene is the closest to the eye, it is also the most detailed, capturing the “real world” as Latrobe observed it during his Virginian years. Spotted by lichen and moss, gently rounded boulders nestle into a variegated bed of greenery, resembling the scenery in other Virginian views by Latrobe, especially from his contemporary An Essay on Landscape. A viewer familiar with Latrobe’s work would identify this foreground as distinctly Virginian, but a reader would need only attend to the architect’s own description, where he notes that the “Architect’s Imagination” is “leaving the Rocks of Richmond and taking her flight to Philadelphia.” Although the allegorical figure is the first aspect of the illusion to catch the eye, the landscape allows for more absorbing observation, by means of the meditative viewing stance required for all of Latrobe’s illusions. The winged woman stares resolutely forward, but the viewer’s gaze lingers on the incomplete “castles in the air” and the beauty of the rocks and plants where the buildings might have been situated. Even as the image celebrates the future in Philadelphia, it is predicated on the persistent relevance of past experiences. The image pulls the eye back and forth between the foreground landscape and the triumphant middleground allegorical figure—between the realm of the mind and physical reality. A third section of the image, featuring the diminutive buildings in the sky, draws the viewer into an intermediary condition, somewhere between these two poles. These structures represent the products of Latrobe’s architectural fantasies during his Virginian years, his first experimental attempts to meld his creative vision with the realities of the American South. The diminutive buildings are backdrops to the image and create a transitional zone between the dichotomy of real and mental spaces. Some completed structures are firmly rooted in the ground and others, merely planned or imagined, are in the air. These small buildings clarify what is distinctive about the project held in the allegorical figure’s hand, namely, that the Bank of Pennsylvania

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is the mature vision of a blossoming American architect. With the purposeful force the allegorical figure so wholly embodies, the image projects this building’s future value as the product of the heroic bard’s comprehensive mind and wills the structure into existence. Key attributes of Latrobe’s mature heroic art are captured throughout the image and are implicitly perfected within the design of the bank. The emphasis on nature reflects Latrobe’s interest in unifying building with site and style with culture. Architectural solidity (firmitas) and carefully articulated neoclassical values are also emphasized through the specific characteristics of Frontispiece. Latrobe’s selection of the figure appropriated from Flaxman reflected his interest in building the content of the work around a Classical literary context. Further, he modeled the rendered sheet out of which the trompe l’oeil was made on the appearance of a ruined fragment of monumental relief sculpture. For rendered paper to appear like stone, Latrobe put his artistic “knacks” to work. A thick, bold shadow outlines the image’s right side, looking more like broken stone than ripped paper. The allegorical female figure contributes her classicized appearance. This conceit introduces carved marble into the same visual space as the foreground’s weathered Virginian rocks. New World and Old are juxtaposed, contrasted, and combined, hinting at Latrobe’s interest in a rational design ethos custom-made for the American natural landscape. Latrobe’s life and actions appear in an allegorical image whose “ruined” state seems to praise the achievements of a past hero while visually addressing a future audience. This work shows a triumphal progression across Latrobe’s trompe l’oeil, now placing personal implications and argument in the foreground, rather than concealing them within nested layers of allusion and illusion. It embodies the cumulative experience of immigration, the achievement of greater professional capacity through observation and travel, and the corresponding emotional and mental journey . Created as Latrobe left Virginia, or shortly after his relocation to Pennsylvania, this work visualizes the endpoint of the epic journey he began as he left London. Still, the journey was not over. Rather, his life achievements were just beginning. Frontispiece prefigures Philadelphia as the possible future site of Latrobe’s personal and professional fulfillment—tantamount to the Rome of

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Aeneas or the Nilotis of Io—though that future is only a vision, not yet secured in reality or predicted via augury. Now appearing as a ruined sculptural fragment, this image, with its secure space of vision inside Latrobe’s mind, proposes the future fantasy of his legacy being immortalized in a sculptural cycle. Through the visual allusion to a continuous sculptural frieze, Latrobe gave concrete form to the epic imagery and allusions built into his watercolors from his first departure from England. Captured on the monumental frieze of a grand public building, this allegory of the architect’s imagination narrates the watershed moment of Latrobe’s relocation, his transition from wandering journeyman to potent artist. Like the verses of Vergil, Homer, or Lucan, Latrobe’s image captures the deeds of an epic hero. The unfortunate journeys nearly over, Frontispiece heralds his accomplishments. This illusion, which could be interpreted as either shameless self-promotion or assertive allegory, projects a fully realized sense of self. The purpose of this confidence was primarily commercial. Frontispiece was meant to convince a possible audience of Philadelphian patrons to employ Latrobe to design their buildings. While these viewers would have had no way of linking this image to the content of Latrobe’s other trompe l’oeil and, most specifically, to his interest in Beattie’s concept of the comprehensive mind, his Frontispiece would have communicated his exceptional capacity as a designer, his mental abilities, and his ties to the radical neoclassical avant-garde. Frontispiece seems fully invested in its oracular message, yet retains an inbuilt humor, suggesting its assertive allegory is tongue-in-cheek. Latrobe had a well-developed sense of humor and a predilection for self-deprecation. Any interpretation of Frontispiece must allow for such feelings. While o∑ering a confident self-image, this watercolor is playful and fantastical, inviting the viewer to dream and create alongside the artist. The illusion’s projections of meaning are alternately unabashedly heroic or gently joking, but a darker flip side is also evident. Latrobe employed the image to convince himself, despite frequent depression and despondency, that there was a chance at a better future. Like Aeneas’s conjured vision of a better future for his companions, Latrobe’s Frontispiece creates an alternative reality. While he hoped to successfully forecast a better future, all Latrobe could definitively o∑er was what he thought was the more likely eventuality—the achievement of

an illusion. Latrobe’s rendered success is no more than a deception. Like the thin paper on which it was created, it has no substance to ensure a durable future. Its self-confidence is the visual blu∑ of a skilled artistic poker player, boasting while concealing the weakness of his cards. Here we must remember that this allegory hinges on a dream vision, which for Io proved to be a lifelong nightmare. By self-confidently staging the part of the artist-hero, Latrobe’s image gives form to a brighter future, though the artist himself allows the possibility that this vision will remain nothing more than another haunting “castle in the air.” Whether or not he truly believed he would be able to play this heroic role, Latrobe strategically imagined the eventuality, projecting the appearance of artistic grandeur. The Stu∑ of Dreams This, then, is the culmination of Latrobe’s immigration series. A Breakfast Equipage first allowed him to work through the uncomfortable process of moving between two worlds— divested of his past, intimidated by his future, and contemplating the role of his art in the young United States. In Collection of Small Moonlights, Latrobe further explored the relationship between Europe and his new home, capturing his sense of displacement and envisioning retreat from civilization. In Three Small Landscapes, he focused on the Virginian landscape, representing his concerns about the nation’s stability. The image asks whether the human condition can improve over the centuries, an eventuality on which it casts doubts via the current “stormy weather” in Virginia and a future vision of the state in ruins. In Watercolor: Two views, Latrobe shifted in a more positive direction, pondering the implications of Beattie’s text for art in the United States. Finally, in Frontispiece, we see Latrobe embody his “comprehensive mind,” dreaming of his contribution to an enduring “Form sublime of polity” in his new country. In this last trompe l’oeil, the viewer is finally invited into the architect’s mind, making evident the personal concerns of his illusions. The space of his “comprehensive” genius is laid bare and allegorized. The Bank of Pennsylvania is the visible byproduct of the architect’s genius, yet the viewer understands it is not the final word on Latrobe’s potential. Here, the monumental and public nature of the image replaces the private

Illusions of Selfhood ·

and introspective aesthetic of his other trompe l’oeil, and speaks to the large-scale and highly public motivations of the architect soon to be instrumental in developing a vision of monumental public architecture for the young American republic. In creating Frontispiece, Latrobe may have self-consciously rendered it as illusion and doubted its fulfillment, yet the image still crafts a vision of style, an architectural philosophy, and a future professional calling he would seek to fulfill in his subsequent decades of life. In 1811, Latrobe articulated a related vision of art for the American public in a speech before the American Society of Artists. Speaking of the value of their work for a nation that fears art as a sign of aristocratic luxury, Latrobe commented: “if a conviction can be wrought, and di∑used throughout the nation, that the fine arts may indeed be pressed into the service of arbitrary power, and—like mercenary troops, do their duty well while well paid—yet that their home is in the bosom of a republic; then, indeed, the days of Greece may be revived in the woods of America, and Philadelphia become the Athens of the Western world.”fl‡ Latrobe emphasized that he believed creative practice could sustain the American republic. Importantly, art can communicate ideas directly to the public. Looking to Greek Art, Latrobe observed that it helped to embody, explain, and perpetuate liberty, while also o∑ering, in its ruin, a warning to future civilizations. He elaborated: “The Apollo of Phidias, the Venus of Praxiteles, the group of Laocoon, are in fact monuments not more of the arts, than of the freedom of Greece; monuments which are not more perfect as examples to artists, than as lessons to statesmen, and as warnings to every republic to guard well the liberty that alone can produce such wonders.”fl° Although many period authors and orators envisioned the future of American cities through an idealized lens of ancient European republics, the trajectory of Latrobe’s thoughts connects them to the epic illusions he made many years earlier while in Virginia. Latrobe here pro∑ered to his professional peers and colleagues a vision of the artist-hero, who uses his comprehensive mind to sustain the young nation. This analysis of Latrobe’s immigration series has considered these works as constituting a gradual process of artistic selfcreation. Through these pieces, Latrobe developed a mature American artistic persona, marketable to a broader audience.

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Indeed, by completing his Frontispiece on the cover of Designs of Buildings, Latrobe put his illusion directly in the service of marketing his skills. He hoped prospective clients might be convinced by his own uniquely valuable genius. The works that compose Latrobe’s immigration series are fundamentally illusions of selfhood. In this case, they are intensely private (helping Latrobe to work through the personal disruptions of immigration), self-consciously public (employing epic poetry, congratulating his own intelligence, and reflecting on international politics), and fundamentally about artistry, ultimately conveying a message about the significance of the artist’s “comprehensive mind.” Through trompe l’oeil, they touch on these weighty subjects while blurring the boundaries between reality and illusion. They are reflections of Latrobe’s actual emotions and also of his projected or theatrical presentations of himself. Just as Aeneas dons a public face to hide his sorrow from his followers, so Latrobe’s images intermix authentic self-representation with posturing. Due to this blending of illusion and authenticity, these deceptions hide a final question: does Latrobe believe in the heroic vision of art for the United States presented both in these trompe l’oeil and in his later oration? Are these works, fundamentally, a cunning self-marketing ploy, or are they spirited reflections on the power of art? The answer may be that they are both. Recall that Latrobe’s account of his daydream of the Venetian Republic concludes, “I cannot persuade myself that the illusion is much unlike the truth.”fl· Although he recognized his vision as complete fiction, he believed in it as soon as he conjured it up. Latrobe was a self-styled man of great “sensibility,” who could lose himself in flights of fancy and in visionary ideals. Even as setbacks, disappointments, and reality checks continued to threaten his concept of an art capable of embodying a “sublime form” of nationhood, he continued to daydream of himself as the heroic bard for the American landscape. When these dreams failed, he periodically succumbed to despondency and/or planned retreats to self-styled hermitages. Although his rational mind knew them to be deceptions, Latrobe the artist-dreamer may well have hoped his illusions of self and homeland, his watercolor castles in the air, would materialize . If not in the flesh, at least in his dreams, he embodied the elusive ideal of the artist-hero. 

Conclusion

At the close of 1798, Benjamin Henry Latrobe left Richmond to resettle in Philadelphia, thus ending his immigrant years in the United States. With the exception of several projects spanning his transition between these states (An Essay on Landscape and Designs of Buildings, for example), his relocation also signaled his abrupt abandonment of the epic mode of watercolor in which he had invested so much energy during his immigrant years. Gone from his sketchbooks were the deceptions, the serial landscapes, and the allegorical/figural references. Though he continued to produce landscape views, natural history studies, and genre scenes (in addition to a large body of architectural drawing), they seemed to lack the ambitious emphasis on ideas and argument present in many of his Virginian watercolors. Accordingly, it is fitting to consider here Latrobe’s cessation of his ambitious watercolor practice, which I will discuss through two lenses. First, I give biographical and contextual explanations for why Latrobe may have changed his approach to the medium. Second, I o∑er some reflections on the significance of Latrobe’s contributions to our study of watercolor and, more broadly, of art in the transatlantic world of the Age of Revolutions. The first explanation for Latrobe’s changing approach to watercolor is straightforward. Having relocated to Philadelphia, he soon found himself immersed in a life of much greater activity and satisfaction than what he had experienced in Virginia. His First Bank of Pennsylvania commission was a success and he also secured the extensive Philadelphia Waterworks project.⁄ In Philadelphia, he found a society with a greater propensity toward the intellectual community he had sought and he had greater access to the sort of cultural life he had once experienced in London and in Central Europe. After his marriage to Mary Hazlehurst, Latrobe attained happiness in both his personal and professional lives. This change of circumstances can, to a great degree, explain the shift in Latrobe’s watercolor habits. Ambitious watercolor required great investment of time and creative energy—neither of which he could a∑ord under his changed life circumstances. If his watercolor practice served a therapeutic role for him in Virginia, it may also be fair to theorize that such self-therapy was no longer necessary after 1799, or at least that it was not relevant to the same extent. Though many aspects of his life improved, Latrobe continued to experience the fickle hand of fortune that he had long opined on for the rest of his life. The narrative of his career after 1799 is riddled with problems: struggles with the federal government to attain proper compensation for his work, clashes with various students and clients, professional instability, and at least one additional and devastating bankruptcy. Personally, as well, Latrobe’s life was by no means easy. His first infant daughter with Mary died when she was a few months old— a loss that touched him greatly. Most tragically, his eldest son Henry Sellon Boneval Latrobe died suddenly of yellow fever in 1817, when he was in the advanced stages of the contract for the New Orleans Waterworks project, a design on which he had been working with his father. This set into motion a series of

Fig. 9.1 (detail): Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Washington Monument Proposal: Decorative Ceiling Motif, 1799–1800.

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events that led to Latrobe’s own voyage to New Orleans to finish the work, both because of his financial investment in the project and because he sought to solidify his son’s legacy. The result of this final emigration was Latrobe’s premature death from yellow fever, just a few days after he completed work on the project. Despite these familiar circumstances of misery that might have lent themselves to watercolor explorations, no known epic watercolors exist from these later years of his life. Latrobe left no written discussion of his changing perspective toward watercolor. Indeed, after 1799, he left few comments concerning the medium at all. Still, the creative arc that has been considered in this book can allow some further consideration of the reasons for his shifting views. Latrobe’s passion for watercolor during his immigrant years was driven by his experience of immigration. His Virginian

watercolors consider history and landscape alongside individual experience and aspirations. They think through profound experiences of place, space, and displacement. They also o∑er reflective meditations on such concepts as achievement, creativity, and heroism. As both an escape in Latrobe’s immigrant years and also his principal mental outlet, these watercolors became his space for considering new directions in which to focus his agency and achievement. Though it may be tempting to ridicule equally Latrobe’s earnest experimentation with the heroic “comprehensive mind” and his dramatic characterization of his own ruined body and mind, these guises of persona or emotion enabled him to capture and evaluate variants of his possible future self. Having achieved a greater degree of professional success and personal grounding in Philadelphia, no further experimentations were needed and this introspective mode of watercolor could be abandoned. Importantly, once in Philadelphia, Latrobe’s architectural practice took o∑ and he soon began to educate students. If, as seems plausible in his Designs of a Theatre and Designs of Buildings, Latrobe had fancied a professional direction in rendering or watercolor, such work could now be passed on to others within his architectural practice, following the model of the day in London’s architectural o≈ces. Though scholarship has not pursued the possibility, Latrobe’s students seem to have been trained as watercolorists, perhaps by Latrobe himself.¤ Having shifted to the role of principal designing architect, Latrobe’s working model would have required others to produce the requisite watercolor renderings to accompany his commissions. If this possibility came true, then aspects of Latrobe’s watercolor practice came to live on in a native-born generation of American architects, who learned at least some significant elements of the graphic conventions of his watercolors in order to render buildings and landscapes e∑ectively in the imaginations of their clients. That Latrobe’s ambitious watercolor practice came to be subsumed within his architectural

Fig. 9.1: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Washington Monument Proposal: Decorative Ceiling Motif, 1799–1800.

Conclusion ·

design can be seen in the example of his Washington Monument designs, dating to between December 14, 1799, and April 24, 1800 [Figs. 9.1–2] . In his renderings for a proposed pyramidal monument, Latrobe included a drawing of its four triangular ceiling panels, which he populated with allegorical scenes from Washington’s life. For many of the figures, he again selected models from the line drawing work of John Flaxman.‹ In his written description of the monument, the busy architect ignored the latent epic messages of his sketch, commenting solely: “The panels may be filled by representations, either in bas relief, or fresco painting, of the principal events of the life of Washington.”› Though he may have continued to dream in epic form, Latrobe no longer found it valuable to comment on, or lay indicative breadcrumbs for, deeper messages in his images. Instead, his epic imagery had become subsidiary to architectural form, here merely o∑ering

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a visual prompt for the viewer to imagine an allegorical cycle of scenes to be completed in painting or sculpture, but by the design of another artist. A similar approach is seen in his unspecific allusion to Flaxman in the interior decor for Philadelphia’s William Waln House.fi In neither instance did he seem to develop a content-driven program as he did in his earlier watercolors. Another, more pragmatic reality may have motivated a shift in Latrobe’s approach to the medium. During his years in Virginia, Latrobe employed watercolor as an outlet for his “morbid sensibility,” an outward expression of his emotions, angst, and generally dramatic persona. As has been considered here, the images he produced in Virginia were private in that they remained within his sketchbooks. But they were also public in that they were shared with friends and associates and likely used to drive conversation surrounding significant

Fig. 9.2: Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Washington Monument Proposal: Rendered Perspective, 1799–1800.

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cultural, political, or historical topics. As much as Latrobe may have created these pieces while working to assimilate in Virginian society, they were a clear sign of how he departed from the core tenets of the ideal American character (which in the period would have included having clear faith in the Republic, exhibiting rational behavior, and suppressing rather than e∑using emotion). It is highly unlikely that Latrobe, who was sociable and deeply desired to fit into American society, would have continued to create works of art that would have highlighted his di∑erences once he was more comfortably settled into American society. As the years passed, Latrobe experienced other instances in which he felt rejected from society, isolated, and melancholy. Perhaps examples exist of watercolors in which he continued in later years to use the medium as an outlet for such emotions. In the absence of such finds, though, it seems that Latrobe abandoned the more ambitious facets of the medium when their viable service to his persona had ceased. Much of this book has been dedicated to reintroducing Benjamin Henry Latrobe as a figure who crossed the American and European spheres and pushed the professional boundaries of architecture and watercolor. The many stakes of such claims need not be restated here. However, it is worth reflecting further on what this case study might allow in terms of a more integrative model of art historical scholarship. Disciplinary blinders have caused Latrobe’s watercolors to be ignored for many years. Latrobe cannot be properly understood within a nation-state model of art history, and his watercolors clarify how such silos might prevent a viewer from being “transported . . . at an instant” between one rich vein of influence and precedent and another. Similarly, though Latrobe self-consciously considered upending the hierarchy of the genres, his art has nevertheless been subjected to the rank-based prejudices of the discipline. Such prejudice has meant that scholars have not identified the ambitious content of Latrobe’s watercolors, seeing instead only the work of an amateur in lesser genres and a subsidiary medium. Even Latrobe’s connections to the Moravian Church, and the longstanding influence of this a≈liation on his work, has been deemphasized due to the scholarly propensity to downplay the impact of religion on art. Finally, the complexity of many of Latrobe’s watercolors has flown

beneath the radar because of a failure to reconcile archival evidence from one facet of his work (his journals, for example) with that available in his sketchbooks. With Latrobe’s serial landscapes, he left clear textual indicators to guide the spatial connections between the works, yet such interconnections have remained unnoted until this study. Epic Landscapes has walked an uncommon path within the discipline of art history and, even more so within the field of American Art. As one of the younger areas within the discipline, the field is still working to establish its canon and methodologies. In the service of this process, this study reintroduces a well-known figure who has, nevertheless, generally fallen o∑ the map of American art due in large part to the limitations discussed above. If so much has remained unknown about Latrobe’s creative practice, then it behooves us to return to other archives and collections related to other artists who may also have received short shrift in earlier generations of scholarship but whose work can be reintroduced via similar experimentations in methodology. Unlike American Art History, British Art History has long attended to watercolor in a serious fashion and has also developed a strong strain of scholarship devoted to the diaspora of its artists. Still, the challenge remains to consider artists who practiced in between identities. Someone like Latrobe, who was British, but also European, Moravian, and eventually American, cannot easily be traced within available models of scholarship. Situating Latrobe within the artistic sphere of London has been particularly challenging when attempting to take this rich set of influences into account. The periodization of this project is another facet of its contributions. Epic Landscapes examines Latrobe’s work in a period in which he was deeply caught up in the unrest of the Age of Revolutions. With its focus on the mid-1790s, this book considers years of great transitional significance on both sides of the Atlantic, and it does so through the witnessing historical eyes of a figure who was aware of the period’s significance and deeply internalized its transitions. Although it follows the travels of a single figure, Epic Landscapes has o∑ered a model for considering the 1790s as a period of travel, intermixing, and overlapping cultural influences. These themes intersect in fascinating ways with the socio-political developments of the era.

Conclusion ·

This book has grappled with five intense years of Latrobe’s life and creative practice, and it has again been limited in scope to those landscape watercolors (broadly defined) with ambitious content and/or innovative visual form. While these parameters might seem limited in scope for a monograph, they are a tribute to the depth and breadth of Latrobe’s oeuvre. Building on the invaluable work completed by previous scholars and, especially, the editorial team of the The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, this book has sought to open the door for art historians to join in exploring the richness of Latrobe’s large archive of texts and sketchbooks. Likewise, through its methodologies and interpretations of both texts and images, this book o∑ers fertile ground for scholars across the humanities. Rather than seeking to be comprehensive, I have pursued deep analysis of a limited selection of Latrobe’s works in the hopes that it may inspire further thinking about this significant artist. Through the many angles by which Latrobe’s work is interpreted in Epic Landscapes it may also be possible to more fully integrate him into interdisciplinary humanities studies and into larger narratives of art and culture at the end of the eighteenth century. Latrobe’s archives o∑er a final anecdote in which he takes leave of his immigrant sketchbooks. On June 18, 1800, a year and a half after moving to Philadelphia, Latrobe packaged up his sketchbooks to share with Robert Liston (1742–1836), then Britain’s diplomatic envoy to the United States. No record exists to explain why he decided to give Liston this special privilege, but the two clearly enjoyed a friendship during their simultaneous residence in Philadelphia.fl On the note enclosed with the precious cargo, Latrobe commented: “I should neither have the presumption, nor, as an artist jealous of his professional merits, the imprudence to commit the rude sketches contained in the six volumes herewith sent. But to Mr. and Mrs. Liston to whom I owe so much on the score of friendly and polite treatment, I commit them with the pleasure, and with the certainty of indulgent inspection.”‡ As a postscript, he added, “There is an index to most of the Books.”° Self-deprecating in his allusion to his “rude sketches” and carefully guarding his “professional merits,” Latrobe nonetheless shared these works with his expatriate friends. By not also providing his journals, Latrobe o∑ered the Listons an incomplete key to decoding his imagery. Nonetheless, he

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entrusted his sketches to two other experienced travelers of the cosmopolitan late eighteenth-century world. Liston had served as a diplomat in Spain, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire.· His wife Henrietta Marchant Liston had been raised in Jamaica.⁄‚ Liston had arrived in the United States in the same year as Latrobe. Having begun to distance himself from his own first immigrant years, Latrobe shared his sketchbooks with the Listons, who were on their own expatriate journeys. Likely, the three met to converse over the sketchbooks, but Latrobe’s initial missive does not o∑er any stringent direction to the Listons on what they should seek within his sketches. Perhaps they enjoyed the tour his sketches o∑ered of Virginia. They probably saw in his Atlantic views some familiar reminiscences of their own ocean voyages. Perhaps they delighted in identifying his allusions to Flaxman. In puzzling over his illusions, they may have found many familiar clues, even as they struggled to assemble a holistic understanding of their messages. Whatever the actual nature of the Liston’s engagement with Latrobe’s sketchbooks, this exchange o∑ers a fitting moment of closure to this study. Latrobe’s sketchbooks were his companions in his years of immigrant travel. They o∑ered him solace and an emotional homeland when the sites surrounding him were foreign. Having come into his own in Philadelphia, Latrobe could distance himself su≈ciently from this work to leave it in the hands of others. Though the sketches carry the intimate outlines of his own experiences, Latrobe could nonchalantly write them o∑ as “rude sketches” and a professional liability in one of his habitual instances of posturing and image management. Yet, here we see the sketchbooks moving on to their next role in Latrobe’s life and legacy. Their epic images, which present their own account of his journey and his observations, were now given the opportunity to speak for themselves. No longer actively needed for Latrobe’s purposes of companionship or therapy, the sketchbooks could begin their task of speaking to others, of fostering the imagination, creating memories, and communicating experiences. Though now disassembled and confined to museum storage, for viewers ready to o∑er their “indulgent inspection,” this oeuvre still speaks powerfully, though hopefully now improving, rather than risking, the professional reputation of their maker. 

Acknowledgments This project has accrued debts over many long years of work. Many have generously supported my work on this book, whether at archives, conferences, or in a myriad of other contexts. While many have helped to strengthen this book, all of its faults, of course, remain my own. My graduate advisors, whose generosity with time, research resources, and intellectual inspiration formed the kernel of this book and its methodologies, deserve first mention. Rachael DeLue converted me to the field of American Art, inspired me with a passion for landscape, and has pushed my thinking in many ways over years of mentorship. Paul Kruty drew me to American Architecture, taught me the fascination of architectural rendering, and has served as a close reader and generous mentor throughout. He and his wife Jane Block not only embraced the professional advisor role but have also welcomed my husband Víctor and me into their family. Excellent meals, music, conversation, and even some fieldwork together with them, have shaped me both personally and professionally. My dissertation committee—Max Edelson, Dianne Harris, and David O’Brien—each shaped the project through years of coursework and thoughtful reading. My interdisciplinary approach to landscape studies, early American art, and architectural history began in their classrooms. David deserves special thanks for his years of generous and thoughtful mentorship, and readiness to talk through any professional challenge that arises. This research has been generously supported by a number of organizations, without the support of which Epic Landscapes would not exist. A Wyeth Grant through CAA, a publication grant through the Paul Mellon Centre, and resources through Dean Richard Smith of Roanoke College have supported the significant image permissions and production costs of the volume. Research fellowships at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Winterthur Museum and Country Estates were integral for the final research and editing of the manuscript. In addition, a Wimmer Family Grant through the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts at Duquesne University allowed me to travel to Hërrnhut, Germany, to complete research in the Moravian Archives that was transformative for my understanding of Latrobe in Europe. My development of Epic Landscapes began in earnest during my tenure as the Joshua C. Taylor Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. At the dissertation stage, this work was also generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and a McNeill Dissertation Fellowship at Winterthur. Internal support from the University of Illinois, Auburn University at Montgomery, and Duquesne University funded di∑erent aspects of extensive fieldwork and archival research. I have benefited from scholarly communities at the YCBA, Winterthur and the Smithsonian.

It would be impossible to name every individual whose conversation or advice touched me at each of these institutions. Several, though, deserve special mention. At the YCBA, Amy Meyers took my project under her wing, generously o∑ering wise counsel both about the form of the manuscript and its publication. Tim Barringer, Martina Droth, Lisa Ford, Gillian Forrester, Jules Prown, and Scott Wilcox each shared their expertise and talked through sticky aspects of the research. At Winterthur, Rosemary Krill, Emily Guthrie, and Helena Richardson supported my research and helped me feel at home. Anne Verplanck, initially my mentor there, has become a long-term supporter of this project and provided material help in a number of ways over the years. George Bourdeau, Martin Brückner, and Michelle McDonald each were generous senior fellows during my predoctoral stay at Winterthur. George has continued to be a wise friend and supporter in the intervening years. Kate Fama enriched my postdoctoral research months there. At the Smithsonian, Cindy Mills, Bill Truettner, and David Ward each o∑ered guidance that helped to shape this book, and Amelia Goerlitz oversaw the fellows’ stimulating intellectual environment. My Smithsonian cohort of fellows was an incredible community and all shared thoughts on aspects of this project. Of these, Dana Byrd, Anna Dezeuze, Amanda Douberly, Kate Lemay, and Nenette Luarca-Schoaf deserve special mention. The wider academic community has been generous with me and I owe many debts to a large network of colleagues. These include: Denise Baxter-Bell, Wendy Bellion, Judy Bullington, Je∑rey Cohen, Simon Cordery, Stacy Cordery, Lisa Davidson, Laura Engel, Kathy Foster, Lewis Gould, Allison Ksiazkiewicz, Jason LaFountain, Anna Marley, Therese O’Malley, Angela Miller, Virginia Price, Chris Quinn, Amelia Rauser, Orlando Ridout, Janice Simon, Janet Smith, Paul Staiti, John Van Horne, Emma Vanderpool, Alan Wallach, and Barbara Wolanin. David Pinnegar and Anne-Noelle Pinnegar welcomed me to Hammerwood Lodge and generously shared materials for this book. I have been especially humbled by the generosity of research support o∑ered at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, PA, London, and Herrnhut, Germany. In particular, Professor Rüdiger Kröger and Olaf Nippe provided their deep expertise and enabled me to uncover significant new materials during a brief, but intense, visit to their collections. Julia Oestreich and her team at the University of Delaware Press have shepherded this book with dedication. I am especially grateful for her collaboration in applying for the publication grants that have made it possible to publish this book in its current form. Two anonymous reviewers o∑ered thoughtful commentary and assisted in tightening the manuscript. Many academic friends have contributed as intellectual sounding boards and integral support to the book-writing process. Elaine Frantz and Jotham

Parsons o∑ered deep wisdom at many levels, both personal and professional, during the intense writing years and throughout the search for a press. Their friendship helped to sustain me to see this through to conclusion. Rachel Stephens has been an invaluable intellectual sounding board and generously read several early chapters. For humor, trouble-shooting, and beyond, I would like to thank: Alima Bucciantini, Andrew Hairstains, Philipp Stelzel, Suna Cagaptay, and Zeynep Teynes-Ehle. Finally, the completion of this book is tribute to the strong support of a loving extended family and life-long friends. They have housed and fed me, whether on far-flung research trips or closer to home. My parents, Thomas and Anne Sienkewicz, have been tireless supporters of this work. They have helped me think through problems of all types, encouraged me to dream big, and labored alongside me over editing and revisions. They have also served as willing child-care, traveling from Amsterdam to London and beyond in order to ensure that I could present my work and gain feedback. Regretfully, my grandfather, Richard Waterman, did not live to see the book published. I completed most of the writing while staying in his cabin on Damariscotta Lake in Maine. During these long summers of work, he helped me keep motivated with daily check-ins on my work, chatted about aspects I was working on, and greatly enriched my life. I am so grateful to have had these special intervals with him in his final years. Long dog walks and conversations with my uncle, Carl Waterman, also provided a valuable outlet. Mary Beth and Tracy San Filipo o∑ered a homeaway-from home o∑ and on during two years of writing and grant-seeking. Eddie Sienkewicz, Toni Sienkewicz, and Christina Gallo all shared their homes with me on research trips to various points along the Eastern Seaboard. Viv Edwards and Chris Morriss o∑ered a home base near London and Viv also generously read the manuscript and o∑ered feedback. Jhenya Sokolova pursued Latrobe with me and has checked in on the work across continents over the years. For their companionship and loving support during various phases of this project, I’d also like to thank: Mike Christatos, Lynda Godkin, Ken Hickey, Concepcion Martínez, Marcela Martínez, Nancy St. Ledger, Roy San Filipo, Rich ard Sienkewicz, Jessica Zaiken Sienkewicz, Jacquelyn Urban, Bill Urban, Deb Waterman, and Jack Waterman. My husband, Víctor M. Martínez, has been my intellectual companion and tenacious supporter across all these years. He has always encouraged me to aim high and follow the best, not always the quickest, research path—guidance that has improved this book immeasurably. Our daughter, Dorothy Ophelia, arrived in the final years of editing and revision. She has been a significant motivating force in its final stages and become my tiny sidekick as I’ve traveled to present the work. Hopefully some day she will enjoy reading it.

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Endnotes Abbreviations for Latrobe Collections MDHS: Benjamin Henry Latrobe Papers, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore MAB: Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA UA: Unity Archives, Unitätsarchiv, Moravian Archives, Hernnhut, Germany Abbreviations for Published Sources DA: Michael Fazio and Patrick Snadon, The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Hamlin: Talbot Hamlin, Benjamin Henry Latrobe New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. PBHL: The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, consisting of the following volumes: Corr 1, Corr 2, or Corr 3: Benjamin Henry Latrobe. The Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Vol. 1: 1784–1804; Vol. 2: 1805–1810; Vol. 3: 1811–1820. Edited by John C. van Horne and Lee W. Formwalt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Maryland Historical Society, 1984. VAJ1 or VAJ2: The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1795–1798. Edited by Edward C. Carter II, with Angeline Polites, Lee W. Formwalt, and John C. Van Horne. Vol. 1: 1795–1797, Vol. 2: 1797– 1798. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Maryland Historical Society, 1977. Special note: Latrobe’s An Essay on Landscape was published in Vol. 2, 468–531. Many references to this manuscript are contained throughout this book and are indicated as VAJ2 and the appropriate page number given in order to provide easy reference access for readers. A high-resolution, digitized version of the manuscript has now also been made available by the Library of Virginia through their Digital Collections Portal. J3: The Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe 1799– 1820: From Philadelphia to New Orleans, Vol. 3. Edited by Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Horne, and Lee W. Formwalt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Maryland Historical Society, 1980. AD 1 or AD 2: Je∑rey A. Cohen and Charles E. Brownell, The Architectural Drawings of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Vol. 2: Part I & II. The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Series II: The Architectural and Engineering Drawings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Maryland Historical Society and the American Phi lo sophical Society, 1994. LVA: Latrobe’s View of America, 1795–1820: Selections from the Watercolors and Sketches. Edited by Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Horne, and Charles E. Brownell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for The Maryland Historical Society, 1985. MF: The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe: Microfiche Edition. Edited by Edward C. Carter II. Clifton, NJ: Published for The Maryland Historical Society by James T. White & Co., 1976.

Introduction 01 Corr 1: 85. 02 By 1798, Scandella had preceded Latrobe to Philadelphia and a fascinating correspondence ensued (of which only Latrobe’s end survives). Scandella tragically died of yellow fever in 1799, shortly before he had planned to sail home. Notes of his untimely death were published on both sides of the Atlantic. See, inter alia, “Medical Obituary,” Medical Repository (October 1, 1798): 226. 03 Latrobe arrived in the United States less than a decade after the ratification of the Constitution. My interpretation of his words and understanding of his society draws on excellent recent scholarship similarly focusing on the rhetorical and material worlds of this period, including: Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 04 The principal source for Latrobe’s watercolors remains Latrobe’s View of America, 1795–1820: Selections from the Watercolors and Sketches, henceforth LVA. Other significant discussions of the corpus or of individual images are: Alexander Nemerov, “The Rattlesnake: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Place of Art in America” in Amy R. W. Meyers and Lisa Ford, Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 226–53; and Kathleen A. Foster, Captain Watson’s Travels in America: The Sketchbooks and Diary of Joshua Rowley Watson, 1772–1818 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for The Barra Foundation, 1997), 268–71. Numerous of Latrobe’s watercolors have been published in a wide range of publications, but without interpretive discussion. 05 Julia Sienkewicz, “Citizenship by Design: Art and Identity in the Early Republic” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2009). 06 Corr 1: 85. Latrobe lamented, “You see, my dear friend, how the politicomania has seized me even.” 07 Ibid. Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (London: Benjamin Motte, 1726) would have been a well-known if somewhat outdated social commentary. 08 Ibid. 09 Ibid. 10 Julia Sienkewicz, “Heartrend[er]ing: Mourning, Loss, and Male Sensibility in the Watercolors of Benjamin Henry Latrobe,” in The Social Worth of Tears: Emotional Economy in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Lorenzo Rustighi and Julia Sienkewicz (Paris: Honoré Champion, forthcoming). 11 VAJ2: 477. 12 Though fascinating, these have received little attention. See Charles E. Brownell, “An Introduction to the Art of Latrobe’s Drawings,” in LVA, 28–32. See also Julia Sienkewicz, “John Flaxman Redux: Copying, Homage, and Allusion in the

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Sketches of Benjamin Henry Latrobe,” British Art Journal XIX: 1 (Winter 2018/2019): 1–9. Recent conversation with Allison Ksiazkiewicz has led me to the relevance of geological drawing, particularly with respect to its connections to cartography, as a possible reference point for Latrobe’s practice. It is possible that comparisons to Latrobe’s work may exist in this field. See the Abbreviations for Published Sources for the individual elements of the multivolume series of the Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (PBHL) that are frequently cited within this text. The PBHL remains the invaluable cornerstone of any research related to Latrobe. These archival volumes are enriched by detailed editorial essays, invaluable footnotes, and the combined intellectual energy and research abilities of a multi-person research team. Two other books are central sources for project: Talbot Hamlin, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, henceforth Hamlin, and Michael W. Fazio and Patrick A. Snadon, The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, henceforth DA. Selected book-length sources, though all engaging with a later period in Latrobe’s life, include: Leonard K. Eaton, Houses and Money: The Domestic Clients of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (Dublin, NH: W. L. Bauhan, 1988); Lee W. Formwalt, Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Development of Internal Improvements in the New Republic, 1796–1820 (New York: Arno Press, 1982); Paul Norton, Latrobe, Je∑erson, and the National Capitol (New York: Garland Publishers, 1977); Mark Reinberger, “The Baltimore Exchange and Its Place in the Career of Benjamin Henry Latrobe” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1988); William Sener Rusk, “William Thornton, Benjamin H. Latrobe, Thomas U. Walter, and the Classical Influence in Their Works” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1933); and Abe Wollock, “Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Activities in the American Theatre, 1797–1808” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1962). Recent scholarship in American art, which has sought to expand the transatlantic interpretation of the field and to reconsider the transition from Colonies to Republic, has helped me to refine my approach to Latrobe. In addition to sources specifically cited elsewhere, I would like to highlight: Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Sarah Monks and David Peters Corbett, Anglo-American: Artistic Exchange Between Britain and the USA (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014); Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and Susan Rather, The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016). Readers should begin with the texts included in the list for Published Sources heading the endnotes.

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17 Interested readers should begin with the AD series within the PBHL as well as Fazio and Snadon’s DA. 18 The MDHS holds thirteen of Latrobe’s sketchbooks. Of these, this book is concerned only with Sketchbooks I–III, the material that encompasses Latrobe’s Atlantic crossing and Virginian residence. A fourteenth, and much more modest, sketchbook is in the collection of the Library of Congress and is the only surviving sketchbook known to me from Latrobe’s British period. Papers of Osmun Latrobe, MMC-0875, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. This sketchbook contains architectural notes and discussions of building materials. 19 J3: 7. 20 The Moravian community in which Latrobe was raised had a long and robust tradition of selfdocumentation. Extant community diaries and individual (auto-)biographical accounts are witness to the value placed on such work. Doubtless, this was a significant aspect of Benjamin Latrobe’s insistence that his son Benjamin Henry maintain a journal. Latrobe’s brother Christian was also a diarist, though only one volume of his journals is known ( Journal of Christian Ignatius Latrobe, GB 133 Eng MS 1244, Special Collections, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester). It is somewhere in between the community diary model and the formula of Latrobe’s American diaries, and it may give some sense of what Latrobe’s European diaries might have looked like. 21 J3: 7. 22 For a broader discussion of Classical culture, see Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

01 02 03

04

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06 07

Chapter 1 Atlantic Purgatory Latrobe’s caption notes it is a “hazy morning.” VAJ1: 66. Their exact date of arrival is uncertain. On March 12, 1796, they were stuck just o∑ the coast of Virginia. The ship is variously recorded as Elisa or Eliza. See Finlay’s American Naval and Commercial Register I:31 (March 18, 1796): 2. The handwriting here is Latrobe’s but it is impossible to know exactly when he wrote the text. The source is Virgil, Aeneid, Book I, line 203, in The works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics and Aeneid: adorn’d with a hundred sculptures, trans. John Dryden (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1697). Latrobe writes the text only in Latin. Latrobe testified that his mother was so devastated by Lydia’s loss that she died shortly thereafter. See Latrobe (henceforth BHL) to Henry Antes, April 8, 1798, Corr 1: 83. Ibid. DA, 11–13. See also Hamlin, 49–53. Latrobe’s bankruptcy was recorded in numerous London newspapers, with mentions beginning December 4, 1795, and concluding in December 1796. See inter

08 09 10 11

12 13

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

alia: “Bankruptcy Enlarged,” Lloyd’s Evening Post (London, England), No. 5990 ( January 15–18, 1796); “Bankrupts to Surrender,” Lloyd’s Evening Post, No. 597 (December 4–7, 1795); “Creditors Meet,” Morning Advertiser (London, England) (March 5, 1796); “Leasehold House, Grafton-Street, Fitzroy Square, To be Sold by Auction by Mr. Devenish, By Order of the Assignee of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a Bankrupt,” Daily Advertiser (London, England), No. 21207 (November 19, 1796); “Meeting of Creditors,” Public Ledger (London, England), No. 10 (December 15, 1795) 860. The auction of Latrobe’s house on Grafton Street was advertised widely, appearing in at least eight di∑erent issues of several publications. Aeneid, Book I, lines 198–209. BHL to Scandella, January 24, 1798, Corr 1: 73. On the pianoforte, see VAJ1: 26. For a sample of the classed conflicts on board, see VAJ1: 14. Scholars debate the relationship of Vergil’s poem to Augustus’s political propaganda, but this book takes no position in these debates. Richard F. Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xiv. Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 2. Standard overviews of Augustus’s political platform include: Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988). Leading up to the Revolution, this was a key concern of political satirists in Britain, many of whom sided against the Crown and Parliament in its treatment of the colonists. Political cartoons abounded that played on this precise question. See Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). On January 11, 1796, Latrobe recorded: “I have read through since we left the Downs, Hume’s History of England, all Smollett’s and Fielding’s Novels which Mr. Taylor has, some parts of Voltaire’s Works, and several other small volumes. I have now undertaken Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman empire,” VAJ1: 35. Aeneid, Book VI, lines 290–321. Journal entry of November 26, 1795, VAJ1: 4. Ibid., 4–6. VAJ1: 6. Ibid. Ibid. On November 27, 1795, for example, he referred to John Hamilton Moore’s writing, comparing his own observations to Moore’s, see VAJ1: 5 n4. Ibid., 6. VAJ2: 486. The views of Little York discussed in Chapter 4 divide the two sets of views of Hastings. VAJ2: 490–91. Ibid., 491.

29 All quotations in this and preceding paragraph, ibid., 485. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 486. 33 Ibid., 490. 34 Ibid., 491. 35 Ibid. 36 There are numerous examples of Latrobe conducting observation-based scientific study during his voyage. These can be found both in images and texts in LVA and in VAJ1. 37 VAJ2: 491. 38 Ibid., 492–93. 39 VAJ1: 8, 9. 40 Ibid., 8, 11. 41 Ibid., 11. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 12. 44 Ibid., 11. 45 Ibid., 14. 46 Ibid., 15. 47 E.g., on December 8, 1795, when Latrobe quotes Shakespeare’s Othello (Act 5, Scene 2, lines 341–42), VAJ1: 14. 48 VAJ1: 9. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 15. 51 Ibid., 20. 52 Ibid. 53 This phrase is drawn from Latrobe’s note written on the border of his watercolor, see LVA, 49. 54 VAJ1: 27–29. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Atlas as a mountain was also considered, though more briefly, by Homer in The Odyssey. See J. H.W. Morwood, “Aeneas and Mount Atlas,” The Journal of Roman Studies 75 (1985): 51–59. 58 Vergil, Aeneid, Book IV, line 229. 59 Dryden, Aeneis, Book IV, lines 246–51. 60 Latrobe’s text spilled into the margins of the sketchbook and has now been cut with the disassembly of the sketchbook. 61 LVA, 52. 62 VAJ1: 28. 63 His further remarks and calculations have been transcribed in Ibid., 31–32. 64 Ibid., 28. 65 Ibid. 66 For sources on such military imagery, see: Kathleen A. Foster, Captain Watson’s Travels in America: The Sketchbooks and Diary of Joshua Rowley Watson, 1772–1818 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for The Barra Foundation, 1997); and Bruce Robertson, “Venit, Vidit, Depinxit: The Military Artist in America,” in Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830, ed. Edward Nygren (Washington, DC: Cororcan Gallery of Art, 1986), 83– 104. See also Kelly Presutti’s discussion of John Thomas Serres, presented at the recent “Landscape Now!” Conference at the Paul Mellon Centre for

Endnotes ·

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78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

British Art. See http://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac .uk/whats-on/landscape-now. VAJ1: 31. Ibid., 29. The catalog entry for Breakfast Equipage in LVA describes it as an “exercise of wit,” and suggests that it o∑ered the artist a welcome distraction from the “miserable voyage,” 56. Wendy Bellion characterizes its contents as bearing “formal and iconographic similarities to eighteenth-century deceptions,” and its meaning as concerning “the architect’s shipboard existence,” in “Likeness and Deception in Early American Art” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2001), 169–70. LVA, 56. For a transcription of Latrobe’s itemized caption, see ibid. Ibid. For Latrobe’s many, frequent ailments during the trip see, inter alia, VAJ1: 7. On February 18, 1796, the Eliza encountered the Sally, a Philadelphian ship en route from New York to Havana. The crew procured a stash of “the latest New York Papers” from the captain of the Sally, and Latrobe was disturbed to see that “no account has been received in America from Europe later than the date of our departure.” This exacerbated Latrobe’s feelings of isolation and separation from any markers of civilization. See VAJ1: 60. Latrobe’s inclusion of playing cards connects Breakfast Equipage to the long tradition of this subject matter in British medley prints, about which, see Mark Hallett, “The Medley Print in Early Eighteenth-Century London,” Art History 20:2 ( June 1997): 214–327. This figure is identified as a sailor in LVA, 56. No particular evidence exists to support or contest this identification. The attire appears fitting for a Moravian youth. It has been suggested that this final sheet may “represent an open volume of Latrobe’s journal,” and that in a “sly touch of wit,” the only comprehensible part of the text reads “random writing,” ibid. VAJ1: 24. Generally, Latrobe’s references to individuals of African descent are more sympathetic. VAJ1: 57. Ibid. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 67. Finlay’s American Naval and Commercial Register I:31 (March 18, 1796): 2. Latrobe dated his First View of Virginia to March 3, 1796, and Breakfast Equipage to March 4, 1796, see LVA, 56–59.

Chapter 2 Latrobe in a European Context 01 Hamlin, 542. 02 J3: 7. 03 Another lost wagon in 1815 resulted in further devastating losses of letters. Corr 1: xiv–xv.

04 Hamlin, 23. 05 AD 1: 63. 06 Latrobe’s Moravian upbringing receives only three pages of superficial discussion. DA, 5–7. 07 Vernon H. Nelson, “An Admirable Draughtsman: Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Moravian Background,” Unitas Fratrum No. 51/52 (2003): 115–30. Special thanks to Jason LaFountain for making me aware of this article. 08 In this regard, the e∑orts of Jennifer Roberts, Tim Barringer, and the ongoing e∑orts of the Terra Foundation are especially notable. 09 For information concerning the history and contours of this religious community, see J. Taylor Hamilton and Kenneth G. Hamilton, History of the Moravian Church: The Renewed Unitas Fratrum, 1722–1957 (Bethlehem, PA: Interprovincial Board of Christian Education, Moravian Church in America, 1967). 10 The eldest son was Christian Ignatius (1758–1836), followed by the daughter Anna Louisa Eleanora (1761–1824). Younger siblings included John Frederic Latrobe (1769–1845), Justinia Latrobe (who died in infancy), Mary Agnes Latrobe, and Justinia Elizabeth Latrobe. This list was gathered by Vernon Nelson and is preserved in the Vernon Nelson Papers (henceforth MAB). 11 Pia Schmid, “Moravian Memoirs as a Source for the History of Education,” in Self, Community, World: Moravian Education in a Transatlantic World, eds. Heikki Lemp and Paul Peucker (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2010), 172. 12 VAJ2: 497. 13 Ibid. 14 The Nazareth Hall collection is held between the MAB and the Winterthur Library and Country Estates, Winterthur, DE. 15 “Diary of the Congregation at Fulneck of July and August 1776,” in R.13.D.9.d, UA. 16 Entry for September 17, 1776, “Diary of the Congregation at Fulneck of September 1776,” ibid. 17 For his movement among these three locations, see “Editorial Note, Moravian Education,” in Corr1: 6–8. 18 VAJ2: 497. 19 Schachmann’s estate (Königshayn) is now open for touring. On Schachmann, see Ernst-Heinz Lem per, Carl Adolph Gottlob von Schachmann (Görlitz-Zittau: Verlag Gunter Oettel, 2001). On Latrobe and Schachmann, see Hamlin, 13–15. Chris tian’s youthful visits to Königshayn are recorded in the unpublished journal of Christian Ignatius Latrobe GB 133 Eng MS 1244. Special Collections, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. 20 Numerous examples of sketches along these lines can be seen in the collections of the Unitätsarchiv, especially within the stammbücher. See also Schachmann’s own picturesque tourist publication: Beobachtungen Ueber Das Gebirge bey Koenigshayn in der Oberlausiz (Dresden, 1780). 21 Nelson, “An Admirable Draughtsman,” 119. 22 Ibid.

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23 Ibid. Nelson refers to Reichel as Carl, and Cohen and Brownell refer to him as Charles in AD 1 and AD 2. A portion of the Nazareth Hall at Winterthur provides examples of the type of work completed by Moravian students under Reichel. He was principal of the school for seventeen years beginning in 1785, see AD 1: 59. 24 Nelson, “An Admirable Draughtsman,” 119. 25 Ibid., 120. 26 I thank Prof. Kröger for his generosity in helping to clarify these complex relationships. 27 Latrobe testifies to this origin for the image. It is unclear whether he had the original in his possession or painted it from memory. It is also possible that this is inaccurate and he copied the scene from a print. 28 VAJ2: 483–84. 29 Ibid., 484. 30 Ibid., 483. 31 Ibid. 32 From the robust literature on picturesque travel in Europe, some excellent overview sources for Latrobe’s moment include: Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon, Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Susan Lamb, Bringing Travel Home to England: Tourism, Gender, and Imaginative Literature in the Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009); Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘from an antique land ’ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Paul Smethurst, Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840 (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 33 VAJ2: 484. 34 Ibid., 484–85. 35 The rock formation and other scenes from Schachmann’s estate can also be found in the sketchbooks of the Fruau∑ Collection at the MAB. See Vol. 1, Album 1. 36 Although the image is not signed, Kröger attributes it, based on the association of this work with other pieces by Quandt, as well as the documented relationship of the classmates. In an unpublished manuscript shared with the author, “Die Kunstakademie in Großhennersdorf: Ein Beitrag zue Kunsterziehung in der Brüdergemeine im 18. Jahrhundert,” Kröger has dug deeply into the artistic training in the region. 37 Benjamin Latrobe’s involvement with the development of Fairfield can be traced back at least five years prior to its construction. In June 1779, he held meetings concerning the resettlement of the congregation. See “Diary of the Congregation in Duckenfield for May & June 1779,” R.13.D.7.b, UA. Gillian Darley has addressed Latrobe’s role in these drawings from a Moravian perspective in “The Moravians: Building for a Higher Purpose,” Architectural Review CLXXVII (April 1985): 45–49. 38 This site was constructed to relocate the Congregation of Duckenfield. 39 AD 1: 58, 59.

262 · Endnotes

40 “Diary of the Congregation in Duckenfield,” entries for June 7 and 8, 1784. 41 Ibid. 42 AD 1: 63. The Editors of the PBHL attribute the discrepancy of titles to the relative chronology of the drawings—but the established details of the buildings makes it certain that all were completed after June 1784, when the community had already received the name of Fairfield. 43 Not all of these sheets have survived, but the numeration of Nos. 1–12 clearly corresponds to individual sheets devoted to specific buildings. 44 The congregation shop was also a corner lot, but only a single elevation was given. 45 AD 1: 67. Though accurate in noting the spirit of Latrobe’s rendering, the editors overreach in attributing the design of the community to Latrobe. 46 Each Moravian congregation and school maintains its own records and only some are replicated for the centralized archives. 47 Corr 1: 9. For the most thoroughly documented discussion of the sequence of events that informed Latrobe’s attitude and led to this statement, see the “Editorial Note, Moravian Education,” in ibid., 3–10. 48 J3: 225–26. 49 Several sources document Latrobe’s membership in this organization. For his initiation, see Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England) Issue 5046 ( June 11, 1789). 50 For discussion of his father’s death and blessing, see Christian Ignatius Latrobe, “Some account of our dear departed Br. Benj. LaTrobe’s last illness,” R 13 D 9 d, UA.R. 22 137, Item 5, UA. 51 In the Congregation diaries, he is not referred to as “Brother,” which is the designation used for members of the community, and the absence of the term is striking since its usage is consistent. For evidence of Latrobe being treated as outside the faith, see, for example: “Diarium of the Fulneck Congregation,” July 18, 1786, when the diary notes “Mr. Benjamin LaTrobe Junr and Charles Nicholson arrived here from London on a Visit.” On August 1, 1786, when he left the community, he was likewise referred to as “Mr. Benjamin LaTrobe.” 52 VAJ2: 497. 53 Coade Stone was a trendy product, which widely entered the market during Latrobe’s years in the architectural sphere of London. Some sources about the Coade firm and its products are: Dan Cruickshank and Peter Wyld, London: the Art of Georgian Building (New York: Architectural Press and Architectural Book Publishing Company, 1975); Alison Kelly, “Coade Stone in Georgian Architecture,” Architectural History 28 (1985): 71–101; Kelly, Mrs. Coade’s Stone (Upton-upon-Severn: Self Publishing Association Ltd., 1990); Philippa Lewis, House: British Domestic Architecture (New York: Prestel, 2011); and Jeanne Marie Teutonico, Architectural Ceramics: Their History, Manufacture, and Conservation (London: James & James, 1996) 54 In this period, the vase was in the Italian collection of the Borghese family. Piranesi produced at least

55 56

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59 60 61

62

63

64

two prints of it. See Vasi, Candelabri. . . . ed Antichi (Rome, 1778). For a focused study of this text, as received in Britain, see: David Udy, “Piranesi’s Vasi, the English Silversmith and his Patrons,” The Burlington Magazine 120, 909 (1978): 820, 822–35, 837. The Coade catalog listed these reliefs as “Bacchanalian Figures from the Borghesean Vase,” with dimensions of 4' 2" in length, by 2' 3" in height. See Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory, A Descriptive Catalog of Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory at King’s Arms Stairs, Narrow-Wall, Lambeth: Opposite White-Hall Stairs. With Prices A≈xed (London: 1784), 10. This textual catalog can be cross-referenced with the visual trade catalog, including over seven hundred designs: Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory, Coade’s Lithodipyra, or, Artificial Stone Manufactory: for all kind of statues, capitals, vases, tombs, coats of arms, & architectural ornaments, &c, &c (London: 1784). Many thanks to David Pinnegar for sharing this image with me and permitting me to publish it. Little is known about the provenance of the image, but the mention of the cart carrying stone and the image’s site in East Grinstead were both shared with David Pinnegar and may reflect documentation that was once available in a larger sketchbook. This scene is especially close to the work of Friedrich Renatus Fruau∑, a contemporary of Latrobe’s, whose prolific oeuvre is well represented in both the MAB and the UA. Many of the plates contained in Christian Latrobe’s travel memoir of his trip to South Africa were created from his original watercolors. Several of his watercolors also survive in the collection of the UA. Christian Ignatius Latrobe, Journal of a visit to South Africa in 1815 and 1816 with some account of the Missionary Settlements of the United Brethren, near the Cape of Good Hope (London: L. B. Seeley and R. Ackermann, 1818). The three original watercolors related to Christian’s travel in South Africa in the UA are MS 340.9.a-c. See Corr 1: 9–10; Hamlin, 13–14. See DA, 17–82; AD 1: 46–48. See Papermaking and the Art of Watercolor in Eighteenth-Century Britain, eds. Theresa Fairbanks Harris and Scott Wilcox (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 2006), esp. Wilcox, “Sandby, Whatman, and Watercolor: An Introduction,” 1–21, and Stephen Daniels, “A Prospect for the Nation,” 23–59. See John Bonehill, “Catalogue Plates and Entries,” in Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, eds. Stephen Daniels and John Bonehill (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009), esp. 208. Bonehill’s source for this information is G. H. Bell, ed., The Hamwood Papers of the Ladies of Llangollen and Caroline Hamilton (London: Macmillan and Co., 1930), 109. It is also conceivable these images are based on prints, though we have no known instances of Latrobe using prints as a mature artist. Throughout the Essay, Latrobe mentions such trips—including a 1787 hunting trip to Yorkshire,

65 66 67 68

69

70 71 72

73 74

75 76 77

78

79 80 81

82 83

a trip to Bohemia with Count George Einsiedel of Reibersdorf, and, later, his tours of Virginian historical sites. VAJ2: 482. Ibid. Ibid., 480. Brian Lukacher defines the useful related term of “poetic” history painting, which incorporates an architectural sensibility, in his book Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 88. Samuel and Nathaniel Buck, Buck’s Antiquities: or Venerable Remains of Above Four Hundred Castles, Monasteries, Palaces, &c. &c, in England and Wales, with near one hundred views of Cities and Chief Towns (London: Robert Sayer, 1774). Ibid., i. Ibid., viii. There is an extensive literature concerning the exhibition watercolor in Britain and its transformation of the landscape genre. For specific discussion about the rise of the exhibition watercolor, see, inter alia: Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600– 1800 (London: The British Museum Press, 2000); Michael Spender, The Glory of Watercolour: The Royal Watercolour Society Diploma Collection (London: David & Charles, 1987); Greg Smith, The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist: Contentions and Alliances in the Artistic Domain, 1760– 1824 (Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2002); and Andrew Wilton and Anne Lyles, British Watercolours, 1750– 1880 (Munich: Prestel, 2011). See Charles Brownell, “An Introduction to the Art of Latrobe’s Drawings,” LVA, 17–40. See John Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 75–120, esp. 75–77. Ibid., 134. Ibid. Robert N. Essick, William Blake at the Huntington: An Introduction to the William Blake Collection in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery San Marino, California (San Marino, CA: Harry N. Abrams Inc., in Association with the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1994), 38. James Macpherson, Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem (London: T. Becket and P A De Hondt, 1762). As originally published, the title page lists the author as “Ossian the Son of Fingal” and the translator “from the Galic Language” as James Macpherson. Ibid., 217. Brownell, “The Art of Latrobe’s Drawings,” LVA, 35–36. Julia Sienkewicz, “Heartrend[er]ing: Mourning, Loss, and Male Sensibility in the Watercolors of Benjamin Henry Latrobe,” in The Social Worth of Tears: Emotional Economy in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Lorenzo Rustighi and Julia Sienkewicz (Paris: Honoré Champion, forthcoming). Macpherson, Fingal, 217–18. Iliad, Book 24, lines 200–80.

Endnotes ·

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Chapter 3 A Solitary Traveler in the American Woods Journal entry of October 19, 1797, VAJ2: 310. Ibid., 309. Edward C. Carter, II, et al. remarked that, “The story of Tommy Rhodes and his transformation into the German Baron von Rothe is presumed to be true,” ibid., 322 n24. Journal entry of October 13, 1797, VAJ2: 306. Latrobe’s observation has subsequently been corroborated by scholars, who have seen many similarities between the culture of the young United States and its primary European prototype. See Richard Lyman Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Journal entry of October 13, 1797, VAJ2: 304. Ibid., 305. Ibid., 374. See Chapter 6. J3: 7. Edward C. Carter, “Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764– 1820): Architect, Engineer, Traveler, and Naturalist,” LVA, 10. Ibid. VAJ1: 137. Latrobe’s switch to an epistolary format for his journal did not last, though it was common format in his day. Both Thomas Cooper and Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur published their tour books as letters. Without listing all such texts with which Latrobe may have been familiar, comparisons can be found in two selected volumes of accounts from Latrobe’s period: Abroad in America: Visitors to the New Nation 1776–1914, eds. Marc Pachter and Frances Wein (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company for the National Portrait Gallery, 1976), and Jane Louise Mesick, The English Traveller in America: 1785–1835 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1922). VAJ1: 75. Here Latrobe refers to Thomas Cooper, Some Information Respecting America Collected by Thomas Cooper (London: J. Johnson, 1794). Cooper, Some Information Respecting America, 95–96. Ibid., 20. Latrobe’s contact with slaves must sometimes be inferred, but all his discussions of slavery are critical. There is no evidence that he ever owned slaves in Virginia, but he surely depended on their labor. He represented a number of slaves among his sketches and recorded several accounts concerning incidents with or the history of the slave population. Ibid., iv. Ibid., 4. VAJ1: 75. For an overview of the theoretical perspectives toward art and the senses in this period, see Julia

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25 26

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Sienkewicz, “Citizenship by Design: Art and Identity in the Early Republic” (PhD diss., University of Illinois, 2009), Chapter 1. For a discussion of other instances in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers strug gled to describe the American landscape, see Rachael Z. DeLue, “Elusive Landscapes and Shifting Grounds,” in Landscape Theory, eds. Rachael Z. Delue and James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2008): 3–14. See Latrobe’s journal entry of June 17, 1796, VAJ1: 145–57. Ibid., 145. In his criticism of the aesthetics of American farms, Latrobe was not alone. Thomas Cooper, for example, called the farms in the United States “slovenly.” For his full characterization, see Cooper, Some Information Respecting America, 51–52. Ann Bermingham’s discussion of the shifting political valence of the picturesque circa 1795 is valuable in considering Latrobe’s comments. See “System, Order, and Abstraction: The Politics of English Landscape Drawing around 1795,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 77–101. VAJ1: 149. Ibid., 152. Latrobe was referring to Ann Ward Radcli∑e (1764–1823), the prolific British novelist, playwright, and aesthete. Ibid., 153. This stanza may be Latrobe’s own re writing of a poem he attempts to recall. He notes his inaccuracy, “the verses are quite di∑erent but the idea is the same” (ibid.), and he includes the stanza for its content, not its verse. He claims the stanza was republished by Richard Payne Knight in his Landscape: A Didactic Poem (London, 1789) from the work of “some Poetaster.” Carter, et al. identified the likely source as William Mason, An Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers (London, 1773). See VAJ1: 153 n20. No similar verse is actually cited by Knight. Latrobe may have connected the poem with Knight because of another publication or conversations. The two shared a friendship with Charles Burney and may have been acquainted. VAJ1: 149. Journal entry of April 7, 1796, ibid., 89–90. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Washington’s Island belonged to Bushrod. Bushrod Washington was George Washington’s nephew, a prominent Virginian lawyer, who eventually served on the Supreme Court and also inherited Mount Vernon from George and Martha Washington. Since both George and Bushrod Washington feature in this book, I distinguish between them by referring to the nephew as Bushrod and the uncle as Washington. Latrobe purchased the property in January 1798. While he refers to it as “Washington’s Island,” John Van Horne and Charles Brownell

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note that it was more properly known as Broad Rock Island and is now called Belle Isle, see LVA, 72. A quarry was already located on or near the island in 1791, see Thomas S. Berry, “The Rise of Flour Milling in Richmond,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 78:4 (Oct. 1970): 396. For Je∑erson’s involvement with the Virginia State Capitol, see inter alia, I. T. Frary, Thomas Je∑erson, Architect and Builder (Richmond, VA: Garreet and Massie, 1931); Hugh Howard, Thomas Je∑erson, Architect: The Built Legacy of our Third President (New York: Rizzoli, 2003); and Mark R. Wenger, “Thomas Je∑erson and the Virginia State Capitol,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 101, No. 1, Special Issue: In the Modest Garb of Pure Republicanism: Thomas Je∑erson as Reformer and Architect ( Jan. 1993): 77–102. For biographical details of Latrobe’s troubles during this period, see Hamlin, 93–94, 124–26. For Latrobe’s letter, see Corr 1: 72–74. Letter of January 24, 1798, Corr 1, 72. The roots of this tradition can be traced to antiquity, including Cincinnatus, Cicero, and Tiberius. More recently, Voltaire advocated a similar mentality. In the United States, George Washington, Thomas Je∑erson, and others of the Revolutionary War generation used retirement as both a lifestyle and a political ploy. Corr 1: 72. Journal entry of March 23, 1796, VAJ1: 76. Journal entry of May 17, 1796, in which he extracted material from a letter to Colonel Blackburn, ibid., 127. Latrobe’s use of the term undeceiving is interesting in and of itself. It also draws him into the same spheres of thought analyzed as a central theme in Wendy Bellion’s discussion of Philadelphia culture in Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). VAJ1: 127. Ibid. For further information about Belvidere, see LVA, 120. Letter of April 23, 1796, VAJ1: 102. See LVA, 108. For the earlier version from Latrobe’s sketchbooks, see LVA, 108–9. See Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1991). See Latrobe’s journal entry of July 19, 1796, VAJ1: 161–73. Ibid., 172. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 167. Ibid. Ibid. Published in David Hume, History of England by Hume and Smollett with a continuation by the Reverand W. S. Hughes, Vol. VIII (1775; London: A. J. Valfy, 1834), 112.

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58 Horace, Odes (Book 3, 3.1). The writings of Horace are among the best-known texts of the British eighteenth century. Latrobe’s familiarity with this ode is unsurprising. He would likely have had multiple opportunities to discuss it in school and in society. For Horace’s prominence, see, e.g.: Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. 11–12. 59 This, of course, was a political decision in and of itself. Though admired by many, Washington was also a true political figure and could be contentious. For the impact of one such significant inter lude on the history of art, see Paul Staiti, “Gilbert Stuart’s Presidential Imaginary,” in Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early America, eds. Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 162–93. 60 It appears, for example, in David Hume’s The History of England (London, 1688), discussing the unjust sentence of capital punishment meted out on Cornelius De Wit. See Chapter 25, page 40. 61 “To a Truly Great Man,” National Gazette (May 23, 1793). 62 The text that brought Horace’s ode into lasting association with Washington was Henry Lee’s funeral oration for Washington, delivered in December 1799, reprinted as George Washington: A Funeral Oration on his Death (London: Printed by J. Bateson, 1800). 63 History of England by Hume and Smollett with a continuation by the Reverand W. S. Hughes, Vol. VIII (1775; London: A. J. Valfy, 1834), 112. 64 VAJ1: 162–63. 65 Ibid., 163. 66 Ibid., 165. 67 Ibid., 164–65. 68 Ibid., 165. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 168. 71 Ibid., 166. Here, Latrobe refers to Radcli∑e’s The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance; interspersed with some pieces of poetry (London, 1794). 72 These sketches are all reproduced alongside Latrobe’s journal account of his visit in VAJ1. 73 Therese O’Malley, Keywords in American Landscape Design (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 2010), 18. 74 Sketchbook 1, Image caption, VAJ1: np, colored plates notation. 75 “An Introduction to the Art of Latrobe’s Drawings” in LVA, 23. 76 Ibid., 24. 77 Ibid., 22. 78 VAJ1: 168. 79 For a more extensive discussion of Latrobe’s images after Flaxman, see Julia Sienkewicz, “John Flaxman Redux: Copying, Homage, and Allusion in the Sketches of Benjamin Henry Latrobe,” British Art Journal XIX: 1 (Winter 2018/2019): 1–9.

80 This is actually a reference to Book 3, line 429, a mistake in Flaxman’s citation. 81 Iliad, Book 3, line 429–34. 82 See Iliad Plate 13: Hector Chiding Paris, LVA, 32. 83 Latrobe mentions him only as “The young la Fayette.” His name was George Washington G. Motier Lafayette, the son of the Marquis de Lafayette. Latrobe documents a tutor who traveled with Lafayette, but since this man (Felix Frestal) was elderly, he was therefore not among Latrobe’s figures. See VAJ1: 168–69.

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Chapter 4 Learning to Read the Stones Two useful sources on Norfolk’s Revolutionary era history are Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2007), and Thomas C. Parramore, Peter C. Stewart, and Tommy Bogger, Norfolk: the First Four Centuries (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994). Sketchbook 1, image notations, LVA, 66. As a vista from within a domestic interior, this scene has interesting ties to Thomas Sandby’s View of Boxhill [Fig. 2.28]. I am preparing an article to give larger context to Latrobe’s visual engagement with novels. The in-preparation manuscript is currently titled “‘In Pursuit of Delightful Misery’: Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Literary Watercolors.” See, for example, his poem “Ode to Solitude” as well as his transcription of Lydia’s poem on the death of the bricklayer at Hammerwood Lodge, his own The Journey to the Bower, written for Lydia, and the exchange of poems on the death of a bear from Latrobe’s Pennsylvania property; VAJ1: 185–86, VAJ2: 297–304. VAJ1: 200. Ibid., 519. From the large corpus of literature addressing these themes, useful sources include: Marcello Barbanera and Alessandra Capodiferro, La forza delle Rovine (Milan: Electa, 2015); Michael Carter, Peter N. Lindfield, and Dale Townshend, Writing Britain’s Ruins (London: British Library, 2017); Nina L. Dubin, Futures & Ruins: EighteenthCentury Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010); Arthur Flett, “Ruins: The Development of a Theme in Eighteenth Century British Landscape Painting, c. 1760–1800” (PhD Diss., Indiana University, 1981); Michael Makarius, Ruins (Paris: Éditions Flammarion and Rizzoli International Publi cations, 2004); and Peter Wagner, ed., The Ruin and the Sketch in the Eighteenth Century (Trier, Germany: Wissenchaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008). On the cult of sensibility to which this relates, see inter alia: G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

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1992); John Barrell, “‘The Dangerous Goddess’: Masculinity, Prestige, and the Aesthetic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Cultural Critique 12: Discursive Strategies and the Economy of Prestige (Spring 1989): 101–31; Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Lawrence Klein, “The Third Early of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18:2 ( Winter 1984–1985): 186–214; Claude Julien Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997); and Daniel Wickberg, “What is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” The American Historical Review 112:3 ( June 2007): 661–84. See, for example, VAJ1: 83, 86. Ibid., 83. The phrase “enormous faith of millions made for one” is used to indicate the blind social trust of a monarchy in the leadership of a single individual. See, for example, the phrase as used in “On the British Constitution,” by John Adams, published in Volume 3 of The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1865). J. Taylor Hamilton and Kenneth Gardiner Hamilton, History of the Moravian Church: The Renewed Unitas-Fratrum, 1722–1957 (Bethlehem, PA: Interprovincial Board of Christian Education, Moravian Church in America, 1983), 225–27. VAJ1: 83. Latrobe omitted the “est” from his phrase. Lucan, De Bellum Civile, Book 9, lines 964–99. Quotations of Lucan come from Lucan: The Civil War Books, I–X, trans. James Du∑ (London: Heinemann, 1928), 576–79. Lucan’s Civil War is also known as the Pharsalia. Lucan, De Bellum Civile, Book 9, lines 964–79. Classical scholars have variously interpreted Lucan’s passage and its intent. One compelling interpretation is that Lucan presents Caesar as rewriting Roman history and carrying out the transition from Republic to Empire. See A. Rossi, “Remapping the Past: Caesar’s Tale of Troy (Lucan ‘BC’ 9.964–999),” Phoenix 55, No. ≥ (Autumn–Winter 2001): 313–14. Sketchbook I, image caption, LVA, 64. Ibid. Ibid., 68. VAJ1: 75. LVA, 158. The primary compositional di∑erence between the two views of Yorktown lies in the di∑erent styles of sailing vessels that Latrobe includes in his final watercolor image. The original pencil sketch is located in Sketchbook IV. VAJ2: 489. Ibid., 487. Visitors to Yorktown may see sections of the footprint of this building today, but it has long since

Endnotes ·

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been demolished. Cornwallis’s Cave, though, is still available for tourist visits and is little changed. VAJ2: 488. Ibid., 489. Ibid. Ibid. All quotations here are drawn from the English translation of The Libation Bearers by H.W. Smyth (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1926), and available through The Theoi Classical E-Texts Library, www.theoi.com/Text/AeschylusLibation.html. Ibid.,lines 1010–17. Ibid.,lines 1018–20. Ibid.,lines 1021–28. VAJ1: 87. Ibid. Ibid., 87–88. BHL to Robert Goodloe Harper, April 24, 1800, Corr 1: 160. For a discussion of the architectural space represented, see Carl Lounsbury, “Beaux-Arts Ideal and Colonial Reality: The Reconstruction of Williamsburg’s Capitol, 1928–1934,” reprinted in Essays in Early American Architectural History: A View from the Chesapeake, ed. Carl Lounsbury (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 218–39. Latrobe is known to have visited Williamsburg more than once; he returned there in July 1797. This particular sketch is undated, and it could have been completed around the time of Latrobe’s visits to Williamsburg, or at a later date. The statue of Botetourt was moved on several occasions, including after its sale in 1797 to the College of William and Mary, so Latrobe’s selection of the backdrop for the work is not something on which too much evidence can be predicated without further knowledge as to the exact movements of the statue and their correspondence with Latrobe’s own travels. The full name of the subject was Norbone Berkeley, Baron de Botetourt (1718–1770). This posthumous portrait was completed by Richard Hayward in Britain and shipped to Virginia. The statue was commissioned in 1771, in recognition of Botetourt’s service as governor of Virginia between 1768 and 1770. See LVA, 96–99. For a discussion of the architectural inaccuracies of Latrobe’s representation of the Williamsburg interior, see Lounsbury, “BeauxArts Ideal and Colonial Reality,” 230. LVA, 98. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Corr 1: 160. A Revolutionary War veteran and member of Congress, Harper (1765–1825) had a relationship of many years with Latrobe. For a discussion of their relationship, along with an overview of Harper’s biography, see Corr 1: 161, fn 1. Joan Coutu, Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006): 230–31. Coutu notes that the statue represents

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Botetourt holding the Virginia Charter in one hand and boasting a liberty cap in the other. Ibid., 231. Corr 1: 160. VAJ1: 87 n25. The words in brackets have been inserted to fill gaps in the damaged journal page. Some were suggested by the editors of the PBHL, but “damage” instead of “outrage” is my own suggestion. Corr 1: 160. See LVA, 100, for further details regarding the family and the house. VAJ1: 181. Ibid., 182–83. Ibid., 247. Chapter 5 Stage Tricks for Landscape VAJ2: 519. Ibid., 469. The date of completion is taken from the postscript Latrobe added on April 7, 1799. Ibid., 530–31. Alexander Spotswood, Susan’s father, was the lieutenant governor of Virginia, and owned a large plantation named Germanna on the Rapidan River. For further information about Germanna, see Barbara Burlison Mooney, “‘True Worth is Highly Shown in Liveing Well’: Architectural Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Vol. II, Catalog entry “Germanna” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1991), [n.p.]. The Editors of the PBHL suggest there was a romantic interest. See VAJ2: 457. Abraham Brooks Van Zandt, ‘The Elect Lady’: a Memoir of Mrs. Susan Catharine Bott (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1857), 26. Ibid. VAJ2: 517. Ibid. In his use of the term “amateur” to distinguish his practice from his profession, Latrobe followed a shift in the term contemporary with his London residence. See Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: The British Museum Press, 2000), 7. Kathleen Foster notes, “we must give credit to the wonderful vitality and coherence of Britain’s ‘amateur’ culture and refresh our sense of the powerful part it played in the nation’s great age of landscape painting,” Captain Watson’s Travels in America: The Sketchbooks and Diary of Joshua Rowley Watson, 1772–1818 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for The Barra Foundation, 1997), 271. The other two are the focuses of Chapters 6 and 7. “Editorial note,” VAJ2: 465. Ibid., 494. Ibid., 531. For more on amateurism, see Foster, Captain Watson, 270. Latrobe’s combination of amateur status with ambitious stylistic and national concerns is not contradictory, as amateurs and professional artists alike contributed to these concerns in Britain. See Sloan, ‘A Noble Art,’ 80.

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16 Frank H. Sommer III deems the manuscript “the first technical work on painting written in the United States”; see “Review: The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe 1795–1798,” Winterthur Portfolio 14:1 (Spring 1979): 96. Therese O’Malley identifies in it Latrobe’s belief that “the new American environment demanded a new landscape treatment,” suggesting the manuscript should be considered within the history of landscape design, viz “Appropriation and Adaptation: Early Gardening Literature in America,” Huntington Library Quarterly 55:4 (Summer 1992): 421, 423. Elsewhere, O’Malley comments, “Latrobe’s essay on landscape painting is, for garden historians, a fundamental text on early republican aesthetics. In it he ties together landscape aesthetics as expressed in gardens and paintings,” in Keywords in American Landscape Design (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 2010), 18. The editors of the Latrobe papers state that it “is one of the earliest drawing books to be penned in this country. Latrobe wrote his commentary with the assurance of a man who knew his subject; he illustrated his text with proficient original drawings, many of which show American scenes,” VAJ2: 465. 17 VAJ2: 468. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 475. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 473, 465. For an analysis of art assuming this possessive, panoramic viewpoint, see Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830–1865 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 24 VAJ2: 475. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 475, 477. 28 Ibid., 477. 29 Ibid., 473. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 471. 32 Ibid., 473. 33 Ibid., 471 34 Ibid., 472. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 480. 37 Ibid., 482. 38 Ibid., 485. 39 Ibid., 487. 40 Ibid., 499. 41 Ibid., 499–500. 42 Ibid., 500. 43 Ibid. 44 In her neoclassical attire, this figure can be compared to the women of Mount Vernon as represented in Latrobe’s sketchbooks (though without the Flaxman reference). For discussion of the neoclassicism in these figures, see LVA, 29–34.

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45 See Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 46 In the Virginia Journals, the editors suggest this poem is “a pastiche” from Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden, to which Latrobe later refers. VAJ2: 466 n2. 47 Ibid., 469. 48 Ibid., 497. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 493. 51 Ibid., 511. 52 Ibid., 510–11. 53 A fascinating period comparison written in New York City by another (Scottish) émigré, Archibald Allison’s “On the Art of Sketching,” is in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art. Folio A 2011 16: Archibald Allison “Lessons on Drawing, Watercolors and Miniatures.” 54 VAJ2: 479. 55 Ibid. 56 The editors of the PBHL have identified the count as Karl Friedrich von Pfeil (1735–1807). See ibid., 482 n19. 57 Ibid., 483. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 500. 60 Ibid., 503. 61 Ibid., 505. 62 Ibid. Later he corrects himself, noting that the plant does not grow in Virginia. See Ibid., 531. 63 See ibid., 505 n10, 531. This is the only instance of which I am aware in which Latrobe copied a natural history sketch. 64 Ibid., 505. 65 The editors of the PBHL identified these lines as being from Darwin’s Botanic Garden, Part II, “The Loves of the Plants,” Canto I, lines 139–50. See Erasmus Darwin, Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts (London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1791). Latrobe’s excerpt is substantively accurate, though containing minor lapses. See VAJ2: 506 n11. 66 VAJ2: 507. 67 Ibid., 508. 68 Ibid., 531. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 493. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 493–94.

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Chapter 6 Performing Spaces ADE Unit 2885 no. 4, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. The columns and shading draw the attention of Charles Brownell and Je∑rey Cohen to the visual qualities of this rendering, AD 1: 145. Ibid., 147. Cohen and Brownell date the “incomplete set of presentation drawings” to between December 1,

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1797, and January 8, 1798, corresponding with the frontispiece, AD 1: 126. Latrobe states that he finished the plans on January 6, 1798, VAJ2: 332–33. But a January 24, 1798, letter to Giambattista Scandella attests that Latrobe was still at work on the design; see Corr 1: 71–72. On January 22, 1798, the project was advertised for stock subscription and, presumably, the booklet was circulated by this date. See AD 1: 126–32. AD 1: 80. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 99. Ibid. See also Howard C. Rice, Jr., “A French Source of Je∑erson’s Plan for the Prison at Richmond,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 12:4 (December 1953): 28–30. Thomas Je∑erson, The Writings of Thomas Je∑erson, ed. H.A. Washington (New York: John C. Riker, 1853), 47. Cohen and Brownell agree that Je∑erson did not accuse Latrobe of plagiarism, AD 1: 99. Ibid. Latrobe was surveyor to the London police between 1792 and 1795, gaining extensive exposure to buildings for incarceration. Through his father he was acquainted with John Howard, the English prison reformer. Cohen and Brownell identify at least three contemporary prison architects whose projects Latrobe may have visited. See ibid., 99, 101; Corr 1: 74. AD 1: 101. Ibid. Ibid. See Corr 1: 42 n3. BHL to James Wood, January 25, 1797, Corr 1: 42 n3. BHL to James Wood, May 12, 1797, ibid., 45. Ibid. BHL to Robert Mills, July 12, 1806, Corr 2: 243. Ibid. The conclusion of Latrobe’s involvement in the penitentiary is complicated and representative of his subsequent behavior. He left Virginia without completing his obligations and even owed the commissioners money. He intended to return to the work, but instead became absorbed in his work in Philadelphia. He believed his role in the project should only be one of periodic supervision, while the state should be responsible for employing an “intelligent” person for day-to-day oversight, which led to some of his ongoing disagreements with state o≈cials. For further information, see BHL to James Wood, Feb. 23, 1799, Corr 1: 125–28. VAJ1: 272. AD 1: 101. Ibid., 112. Extensive records regarding the building’s construction and subsequent alterations are held in the Library of Virginia, Records of the Virginia Penitentiary, 1796–1991 (bulk 1906–1970), Accession #41558. See also William H. Gaines, Jr., “The ‘Penitentiary House,’” Virginia Cavalcade 6, no. 1

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(Summer 1956): 11–17; and Charles E. Peterson, “Virginia Penitentiary, 1796,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians ( JSAH ) 12, no. 4 (December 1953): 27–28. Engravings of the building by G. Able Blouet were published shortly after its completion in F.A. Demetz and G. Abel Blouet, Rapports à M. le Comte de Montalivet sure les pénitenciers des États-Unis (Paris: Impr. Royal, 1837), 2nd section, 41, and plates 17–18. AD 1: 103. For succinct details about West’s career in Virginia and South Carolina, see Susanne K. Sherman, “Thomas Wade West, Theatrical Impresario, 1790– 1799,” The William and Mary Quarterly 9:1 ( January 1952): 10–28. For context, see Douglas S. Harvey, The Theatre of Empire: Performance in America, 1750–1860 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010); Philip C. Kolin, ed., Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1983); Brooks McNamara, The American Playhouse in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); Suzanne K. Sherman, Comedies Useful: A History of the American Theatre in the South, 1775–1812, ed. Lucy B. Pilkington (Williamsburg, VA: Celest Press, 1998); and Martin Staples Schockley, The Richmond Stage, 1784–1812 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977). Sherman, “Thomas Wade West,” 24. Beyond individuals involved in the Richmond Theater, no specific connections have been identified. Sherman, “Thomas Wade West,” 10–11. Ibid., 15. Ample evidence is available for this, both in his journals and in the Burney archives held in the Burney Family Collection, which document the friendship of Latrobe and Christian with members of the family, and their shared musical pursuits. See OSB MSS3, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Sherman, “Thomas Wade West,” 14. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 25. Sherman does not provide evidence for asserting that West commissioned Latrobe. This model of “commissioning” plans is not unheard of in Latrobe’s career, but was not his favored paradigm. However, it is doubtful Latrobe would approve a scenario in which a major building would be credited to him, but constructed in his absence. AD 1: 127. Ibid.; Corr 1: 66. Cohen and Brownell assert that the building was commissioned jointly by West and Bignall. Bignall, however, died in 1794. See Sherman, “Thomas Wade West,” 23. AD 1: 127. “Richmond Theater Proposal,” The Observatory; Or, a View of the Times, June 14, 1798, reprinted in Corr 1: 67. VAJ2: 332–33. Ibid. Ibid.

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Sherman, “Thomas Wade West,” 25. Ibid. AD 1: 126. Ibid., 127. For the discussion of this booklet, see AD 1: 132– 34. Some pages have Arabic, others Roman, numeration. Ibid. This signature emphasizes the ancestral name Boneval, which Latrobe generally employs to emphasize his French heritage—an ironic, or perhaps especially meaningful, gesture given the visual message of the vignette it accompanies. Henry Steele Commager, “Horace’s ‘Carmina’ 1:37,” Phoenix 12, No. 2 (Summer 1958): 47–57. BHL to Scandella, January 24, 1798, Corr 1: 69. Ibid. The phrase is found in Act 1, Scene 8 of the play. For the original Italian, see Pietro Metastasio, Opere, ed. Mario Fubini (Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1968), 21. For Latrobe referring to Hasse, see Corr 1: 540. An underlying tie exists between this opera and many of Latrobe’s Classical references—the life story of Atilius Regulus is primarily known through the Odes of Horace. The several references to Horace in Latrobe’s Virginian period and his reference to Horace via Metastasio, indicate his deep, dedicated thinking on the lessons and concerns of Classical literature. AD 1: 126. Cohen and Brownell use the date of a handbill on the scene to intuit that Latrobe intended the theater to be built hastily, ibid., 131. Title page, Designs of Buildings; reprinted also MF, Sheet 310. The phrase included in brackets was added later by Latrobe in superscript. Latrobe was slightly inaccurate in dating the Richmond Theater fire, which occurred on January 23, 1798, three days after the performance of his Apology on January 20. See Sherman, “Thomas Wade West,” 25 and Corr 1: 75–76 n12. Latrobe’s journal notations, correspondence with Scandella, and final note (“Begun Dec 2, 1897, finished January 8th, 1798” at the bottom of the title page) indicate the manuscript and conceptual vision for the theater were completed in an intense month of work, spanning from December 1797 through January 1798. AD 1: 126. See also VAJ2: 332–33. Ibid. See Hamlin: 86–89, 129–30. Reprinted in The Journal of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, ed. J.H.B. Latrobe (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 1876): 84–85. Ibid., 84. BHL to Thomas Je∑erson, March 28, 1798, Corr 1: 81–82. See BHL to Scandella, January 24, 1798, Corr 1: 68–76. Ibid., 71–72. VAJ2: 356. Ibid., 382–83.

71 The partial block capitals reflect Latrobe’s writing. Cohen and Brownell discuss this date in AD 1: 126. 72 See Douglas Harvey, “Theater and Empire: A History of Assumptions in the English-Speaking Atlantic World, 1700–1860” (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2008), 264; Harvey, The Theatre of Empire: Performance in America, 1750–1860 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010); W.W. Pasko, ed., Old New York: A Journal Relating to the History and Antiquities of New York City, Vol. 1. (New York: W.W. Pasko, 1890), 225. 73 Harvey notes that Vivat Respublica is the “standard salutation of American Company Announcements,” see “Theater and Empire,” 264. 74 Pasko, Old New York, 225. 75 Harvey, “Theater and Empire,” 79–122. 76 David Steinberg, “A Quiet Years’ Clash over Art, Painters, and Publics,” in Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early America, eds. Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 48–88. 77 See, inter alia, John Richard Moores, Representations of France in English Satirical Prints, 1740–1832 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Claire Trévien, Satire, Prints, and Theatricality in the French Revolution (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016). 78 For Latrobe’s concerns about the execution of the French king see, for example, “Portrait of Louis XVI: Late King of France,” trans. B.H. Latrobe [from the original by an unstated Frenchman], Morning Chronicle Issue 7507 ( June 26, 1793). 79 Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Edited by J. H. B. Latrobe (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 1876), 247. 80 For a detailed discussion of the proper sequence of these drawings, see AD 1: 132. 81 The earliest Flaxman-Wedgwood stoneware collaborations were between John Flaxman, Sr., and Wedgwood, beginning in 1775. The younger Flaxman began submitting designs to Wedgwood in the same year and continued to do so throughout the 1790s. 82 AD 1: 131. 83 After he moved to Philadelphia, Latrobe collaborated with George Bridport (1783–1819), and the research that has been done into their work together can illuminate some of what Latrobe may have been introducing with the presence of this figure. This figure cannot be Bridport, as he arrived in the United States at a later point. For information on Bridport, see Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley and Pe∑y A. Olley, Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House (New Haven, CT: Philadelphia Museum of Art with Yale University Press, 2016), 74–82. 84 AD 1: 142. 85 Ibid. 86 See, among other sources: Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civi-

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lization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Stephanie Pratt, American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005); Jules David Prown, Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); William H. Truettner, Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Scott B. Vickers, Native American Identities: From Stereotype to Archetype in Art and Literature (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). An unfinished page contains a cursory sketch of the old Richmond Theatre, reproduced in AD 1: 126. For a detailed discussion of each sheet in the booklet in terms of the information it conveys about the proposed building complex, see AD 1: 126–51. See Greg Smith, The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist: Contentions and Alliances in the Artistic Domain, 1760–1824 (Hants, UK: Ashgate, 2002), esp. 79–80. On the conflict between a watercolorist’s reputation and the imperatives of a draftsman, see ibid., 76. Chapter 7 Castles in the Air Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, “Architectural Drawings for Houses and a Church,” henceforth Designs of Buildings, ADE Unit 2886. The most extensive account of its contents is contained in AD 1: 80–98. AD 1: 80. Ibid. Ibid., 82. DA, 210–11. This text is written on the second page of the booklet. It has also been transcribed in its entirety in AD 1: 80. Ibid. Ibid. Latrobe’s original text stresses the word “fancy” by means of an elaborately scrolled underline. Frank H. Sommer III, “Review: The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe 1795–1798,” Winterthur Portfolio 14:1 (Spring 1979): 94. Another flying female figure by Flaxman may have helped to inspire Latrobe’s final embodiment of this figure. See Flaxman’s Iliad Plate 10: Venus Wounded in the Hand Conducted by Iris to Mars. For Io’s opening monologue, see lines 561–88. This text is from Aeschylus, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926). Ibid., line 815. Corr 1: 69. BHL to Scandella, February 22, 1798, VAJ2: 357. Ibid. Latrobe, Designs of Buildings. Latrobe’s Pennock text from his Designs of Buildings has also been reprinted in Corr 1: 147–50. Fazio and Snadon remark, “One could hardly imagine a less desirable situation in which to find a newly arrived professional man: practicing architecture in order to win a bet!” DA, 212.

268 · Endnotes

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43

44 45

46 47

Latrobe, Designs of Buildings. Ibid. Ibid. Underlined in the original. Ibid. Ibid. These drawings have been analyzed extensively. See AD 2: 86; and DA, 209–65. AD 2: 86 Ibid., 87. DA, caption to Color Plate 8. My perception of the color palette di∑ers from Cohen and Brownell’s description, perhaps due to them having consulted the transparency copy preserved at the Library of Congress versus the original, which I viewed. They describe the ground story interior doors, for example, as “orangebrown: AD 1: 88. Cohen and Brownell criticized this detail as out of harmony with the room, noting: “the detailed richness of the central panel also seems at odds with the general sobriety of the other surfaces,” ibid. Ibid. Despite these visual similarities, I have not identified an exact Flaxman model for either figure. Latrobe, Designs of Buildings, verso of Shockoe church plan, which is also the final sheet in the booklet that contains writing. The remaining ten sheets of paper are included, but were never filled. At the time, Volney’s best-known work was already available in English translation: The ruins: or A Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, trans. Benjamin Jones (Philadelphia: James Lyon, 1799). Based on his travels to the United States, he would later publish Tableau du climat et du sol des États-Unis d’Amérique (Paris: Chez Courcier, 1803). See Corr 1: 72. See Cohen and Brownell for their consideration of this mysterious house, AD 1: 81. VAJ2: 383. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Latrobe also includes a similar Garden temple/milkhouse in his volume. This design is less complete. The garden temple/retreat is a better example. The two designs are likely related and have been discussed by Cohen and Brownell as a pair, see AD 1: 169–76. BHL to Scandella, February 26, 1798, VAJ2: 357. Ibid., 359. Ibid., 357. Ibid. The addition of the word “myself ” is my own. Latrobe wrote “as to make one of,” a phrase that is missing an object and is logically completed by my edit. Corr 1: 68. Both Cohen and Brownell, and Fazio and Snadon discuss the disagreements and hypotheses concerning the structure, which will not be reviewed further here. See AD 1: 114–19. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 116–17.

48 49 50 51

52

53

54 55 56

57 58 59 60

61

DA, 247. Ibid. DA, xiv. See Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley and Pe∑y A. Olley, Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House (New Haven, CT: Philadelphia Museum of Art with Yale University Press, 2016), 27–31, 46–47. Cohen and Brownell describe the Doric portico as “stern but enriched by the vivid marble figure and the crisp range of guttae beneath its frieze,” AD 1: 119. Fazio and Snadon further identify what they describe as the “stoutly-proportioned Doric portico” as derived from the Temple of Apollo at Delos. See DA, 253. This is a time-honored tradition with origins in the Ancient Roman world. See, for example, Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor, Neil Leach (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 117–55. On shade as an arcade’s sole purpose, see DA, 249. See Latrobe, Plans of Chamber and Basement Stories, Designs of Buildings; see also AD 1: 119. AD 2: 123. Fazio and Snadon identified the hall as one of the “functional problems” of Latrobe’s house, rather than one of its strengths. Specifically, they complained, “an enormous amount of space is given over to the front porch and rotunda,” DA, 249. AD 2: 123. AD 1: 123. DA, 252. Cohen and Brownell attribute Latrobe’s comment in 1809 to First Lady Dolly Madison, that “the dining room is properly the picture room,” Corr 2: 711; also quoted in AD 2: 123. AD 1: 123, 125.

5 6 7

8

9 10

11

12 13 14

15

16

1

2

3

4

Chapter 8 Illusions of Selfhood This image, which was not published in LVA, has received no previous critical attention, though it was published by Hamlin. In my dissertation, “Citizenship by Design: Art and Identity in the Early Republic” (University of Illinois, 2009), I discussed it with the title Thither He Hi’ed Enamour’d of the Scene, drawn from the first line of text on the image. I change the title here to concur with Latrobe’s index to his sketchbooks. James Beattie, The Minstrel; or The Progress of Genius, 3rd edition (London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1774). For the title of the image, Latrobe writes “Potomac,” but writes “Potowmac” in both captions. Both are period spellings. Bellion positions Latrobe as outside her narrative about American deception painting, characterizing him as British and positioning him with his “countrymen” in an introductory section about the importation of European ideas to Philadelphia. Wendy Bellion, “Likeness and Deception in Early

17

18 19

20

21 22 23

American Art” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2001), 168. Ibid., 170. LVA, 162. Bellion has demonstrated that the accepted term in the United States during the Early Republic was “deception painting.” See “Likeness and Deception,” 1. Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 3, 9. Bellion, “Likeness and Deception,” 25. For the comparison to Bickham, I would especially like to thank Scott Wilcox. Bickham issued several publications to which Latrobe would surely have had access. See George Bickham, The Museum of the Arts; or, the Curious Repository (London: Bickham, [n.d.]); and Bickham, The Universal Penman; or, the Art of Writing (London: Bickham, 1743). Richard Taws, “Trompe-l’Oeil and Trauma: Money and Memory after the Terror,” Oxford Art Journal 3:2 (2007): 355–56. For further discussion, see Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 143–77. Taws, “Trompe-l’Oeil and Trauma,” 355–56. Ibid., 365. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); and Celeste Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel van Hoogstraten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Dror Wahrman, Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Wendy Bellion, “Illusion and Allusion: Charles Willson Peale’s Staircase Group at the Colum bianum Exhibition,” American Art 17:2 (Summer 2003): 18–39. Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schi∑erer (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, 2002), 28. Ibid. For sources on the relationship between this phrase and Roman statecraft, see Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Garnsey, Food and Society in Classical Antiquity: Key Themes in Ancient History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Charles Este (with Karl Lenni, Frederick Calvert Baron Baltimore, and Lazzarro Spallanzani), A Journey in the Year 1793 through Flanders, Brabant, and Germany to Switzerland (London: J. Debrett, 1795). Ibid., 1. Ibid., 338. Ibid.

Endnotes ·

24 This dating reflects a corrective of my previous analysis of these images in “Citizenship by Design,” in which I relied on Brownell. 25 This mention of mummies and mummy oil refers to the practice of making materials out of ground mummy flesh. Latrobe refers either to a medicinal oil or to the brown pigment used by artists mixed into oil paint. This use of mummies was outdated by the late eighteenth century and Latrobe may have consciously used this reference to imply the author’s outdated manner. See Brian M. Fagan, The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt (New York: Scribner, 1975); G. M. Languri and J. J. Book, “Between Myth and Reality: Mummy Pigment from the Haf kensch Collection,” Studies in Conservation 50:3 (2005): 161–78; Philip McCouat, “The Life and Death of Mummy Brown,” Journal of Art in Society, www .artinsociety.com; Donald Reid, Whose Pharoahs?: Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); and S. Woodcock, “Body Colour: the Misuse of Mummy,” The Conservator 20:1 (1996): 87–94. 26 This text was first published in LVA, 162. My transcription reflects my own edits and corrections. 27 For these military figures and campaigns, see T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787– 1802 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Lee W. Eysturlid, The Formative Influences, Theories, and Campaigns of the Archduke of Austria (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000); Guglielmo Ferrero, The Gamble: Bonaparte in Italy, 1796–1797 (London: Greenhill Books, 1994); Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); and Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries: The Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army, 1792–1814 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 28 For sources concerning British treatment of the French Revolution, see Stuart Andrews, The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99 (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late EighteenthCentury England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Emma Vincent Macleod, A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars Against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802 (Brookfield, CT: Ashgate, 1998); and Mark Philp, The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 29 For American commentary on the French Revolution, see Peter Burley, Witness to the Revolution: American and British Commentators in France, 1788– 94 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989); and Simon P. Newman, Viue d’Amérique: la Révolution Française jugée par les Americains (Paris: FranceEmpire, 1989). 30 On the “XYZ A∑air,” see inter alia: William R. Nester, The Hamiltonian Vision, 1789–1800: The

31 32

33 34

35

36 37

38

39

40 41 42 43 44 45

Art of American Power during the Early Republic (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012); and William C. Stinchcombe, The XYZ A∑air (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). LVA, 162. Latrobe anticipates the nostalgia of the log cabin that developed wholeheartedly in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Some sources on the cliché of the log cabin as symbol of Americanness include Jan Cohn, The Palace or the Poorhouse: The American House as a Cultural Symbol (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1979); and Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). For the relevant passage, see the opening quotation of this book. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover, 1914), 38–42; Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 2–6. For further discussion of these works, see Julia A. Sienkewicz, “John Flaxman Redux: Copying, Homage, and Allusion in the Sketches of Benjamin Henry Latrobe,” British Art Journal XIX: 1 (Winter 2018/2019): 1–9. Both the letter and its recipient may be complete fabrications. Canvasbacks are a regional type of wild duck, though Latrobe’s reference could be to one of several species. See Henry W. Henshaw, “American Game Birds,” National Geographic 28 ( July–December 1915): 105–58. For one consideration of such fears about the decline of civilization into savagery, consider Edmund Burke’s worry that the French Revolution was going to trigger just such a collapse. For a discussion of this, see Daniel I. O’Neill, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civilization and Democracy (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 195–226. A good discussion of the application of John Locke’s theories about land rights can be found in Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. 132–67. Special thanks to David Ward for this observation. For more on Latrobe’s literary images, see Sienkewicz, “‘In Pursuit of Delightful Misery.’” VAJ1: 200. For further discussion of this text, and for the longer excerpt, see Chapter 4. Beattie, The Minstrel, Book II, Stanza VII. Latrobe drew a wavy line across this text, and a small curving doodle beneath it. After many years of research, I was finally able to make this identification in the last weeks of final edits on this book. Many thanks to Lisa Davidson and Orlando Ridout (in memoriam), who helped to consider known properties in my early years of the search. If this identification is correct, the historic house of this property is located at 21315

46 47 48

49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65

66 67

68 69

269

Georgia Avenue in an unincorporated part of the county, though much reduced in its acreage. For a brief overview of the history of the property, see Clare Lise Kelly, Places from the Past: The Tradition of Gardez Bien in Montgomery County, Maryland, 10th Anniversary Edition (Silver Spring: The Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, 2011), 7, 16, 56, 60, 66, 89, 97–98. In Latrobe’s lifetime, this property was in the Davis family, either belonging to Ephraim Davis or to his son Thomas Davis III (the latter expanded the house considerably in 1807). VAJ2: 375. Journal entry of Sept. 17, 1799, VAJ2: 7. The engraving of this painting was completed by James Watson and published in 1775. The portrait was painted in 1773 and caused somewhat of a stir for featuring Voltaire among the damned. See “The Beattie Portrait” and Peter Murray, “The Source of Reynolds’s ‘Triumph of Truth,’” both in The Aberdeen Review 30 (1942–1943, 1943–1944): 224–26; 227–29. Best known among these is Joseph Wright of Derby’s oil of Edwin, which was issued as a print by John Raphael Smith in 1778. Latrobe could have been familiar with the original oil, which was exhibited, or with the print. See the preface to the 1823 edition of The Minstrel (London: John Sharpe, 1823), vi. Ibid. See James Beattie, James Beattie’s London Diary, 1773, ed. Ralph S. Walker (Aberdeen, Scotland: The University Press, 1965), 47. Ultimately, Beattie’s death left his epic unfinished, personal tragedies having derailed an initially prolific career. Beattie, The Minstrel, Book I, Stanza 6: 4. Ibid., Stanza LX: 31. Ibid., Book II, Stanzas I–II: 1–2. Ibid., Stanza IX. All quotations in this paragraph are drawn from the opening of the hermit’s soliloquy, Stanzas XIX–XX, Book II. Ibid., Stanza XXII. Ibid., Stanza XLV. Ibid., Stanza XLIX. Ibid., Stanzas LIII–LIV. Ibid., Stanza LVI. BHL to Scandella, January 24, 1798, Corr 1: 69. See a parsing of the original from Edmund Randolph’s A Vindication of Mr. Randolph’s Resignation (Philadelphia, 1795) in Corr 1: 75 n5. Armina Wright, Joseph Wright of Derby: Bath and Beyond (London: Philip Wilson Publishers for the Holburn Museum, 2014), 82–83. As transcribed in AD 2: 80. Anniversary Oration: Pronounced Before the Society of Artists of the United States, by Appointment of the Society on the Eighth of May, 1811 (Philadelphia: Published by Bradford & Inskeep, J. Maxwell, Printer, 1811), 16. Ibid., 10. Corr 1: 69.

270 · Endnotes

Conclusion 01 For recent research on the latter project, see Laura Turner Igoe, “The Opulent City and the Sylvan State: Art and Environmental Embodiment in Early National Philadelphia” (PhD diss., Temple University, 2014). 02 Both William Strickland (1788–1854) and Robert Mills (1781–1855) produced landscape views suggestive of such training, which were issued as prints. 03 The Flaxman imagery in these four panels is extensive. Thus far, I have been unable to parse a cohesive interpretive message from Latrobe’s use of Flaxman here. But the epic imagery, combined

with the iconographical elements in the scenes (including bits of ruins and boats on rivers), suggest significant visual, and possibly conceptual, ties to Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors. 04 Enclosure: to Henry Lee, April 24, 1800, Corr 1: 163. 05 Interestingly, here Latrobe worked with George Bridport, a European-trained architectural decorator, on the interior scheme for the house and may have left the development of a conceptual program to his collaborator. For Latrobe’s mention of Flaxman, see BHL to Bridport, August 7, 1808, Corr 2: 647–48. For discussion of the commission, see Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley and Pe∑y A. Olley, Classical Splendor:

06

07 08 09 10

Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House (New Haven, CT: Philadelphia Museum of Art with Yale University Press, 2016), 31, 50–52. Since both were resident in the city, and since Latrobe made few journal entries in these years, the friendship is little documented, other than the brief note from Latrobe to Liston, now preserved in the Sir Robert Liston Papers in the Library of Congress. Corr 1: 164. Ibid. Ibid., 164 n1. Ibid.

Selected Bibliography Primary Sources and Published Archival Sources Aeschylus, Choephoroi/The Libation Bearers. Translated by H. W. Smith. Loeb Classical Library, 1926. Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor, and Neil Leach. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011. Allison, Archibald. “On the Art of Sketching.” Folio A 2011 16, “Lessons on Drawing, Watercolors, and Miniatures.” Yale Center for British Art. Anon. “Portrait of Louis XVI: Late King of France.” Translated by B[enjamin] H[enry] Latrobe. Morning Chronicle. Issue 7507. June 26, 1793. Beattie, James. James Beattie’s London Diary, 1773. Edited by Ralph S. Walker. Aberdeen: The University Press, 1965. —. The Minstrel; or The Progress of Genius. 3rd Edition. London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1774. Bickham, George. The Museum of the Arts; or, the Curious Repository. London: Bickham, [n.d.] Bickham, George. The Universal Penman; or, the Art of Writing. London: Bickham, 1743. Brockaway, Rev. Thomas [att.] The European Traveller in America in Three Letters to his friend in London. [1785] Reprinted by G. K. Hall & Co., 1972. Buck, Samuel and Nathaniel Buck. Buck’s Antiquities: or Venerable Remains of Above Four Hundred Castles, Monasteries, Palaces, &c, &c, in England and Wales, with near one hundred views of Cities and Chief Towns. London: Robert Sayer, 1774. Burney Family Collection, OSB MSS3, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory, Coade’s Lithodipyra, or, Artificial Stone Manufactory: for all kind of statues, capitals, vases, tombs, coats of arms, & architectural ornaments, &c, &c (Lambeth and London: 1784).

—. A Descriptive Catalog of Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory at King’s Arms Stairs, NarrowWall, Lambeth: Opposite White-Hall Stairs. With Prices A≈xed (Lambeth and London: 1784. Cooper, Thomas. Some Information Respecting Amer ica Collected by Thomas Cooper. London: J. Johnson, 1794. Craig, W. M. An Essay on the Study of Nature in Drawing Landscape. London: Printed by W. Bulman and Co., 1793. D’Arblay, Madame Frances Burney. Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (Née Frances Burney). Edited by Charlotte Barrett. Preface by Austin Dobson. Vol. I. London: Macmillan and Col., 1904. Darwin, Erasmus. Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts. Part I: Containing the Economy of Vegetation. Part II: The Loves of the Plants. With Philosophical Notes. London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1791. Demetz, F. A. and G. Abel Blouet, Rapports à M. le Comte de Montalivet sure les pénitenciers des ÉtatsUnis. Paris: Impr. Royale, 1837. “Diary of the Congregation in Duckenfield for May & June 1779.” R.13.D.7.b Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität Herrnhut. “Diary of the Congregation at Fulneck of July and August 1776.” R.13.D.9.d Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität Herrnhut. Dryden, John. The Works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneid: Adorn’d with a hundred sculptures. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1697. Este, Charles, et al. A Journey in the Year 1793 through Flanders, Brabant, and Germany to Switzerland. London: J. Debrett, 1795. Farington, Joseph. The Diary of Joseph Farington. Edited by Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1978.

Horace. Odes and Epodes.Edited and translated by Niall Rudd. Loeb Classical Library 33. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Hume, David. The History of England. London, 1688. Je∑erson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. London: Printed for John Stockdale, opposite Burlington-House, Piccadilly, 1787. —. The Writings of Thomas Je∑erson. Edited by H. A. Washington. New York: John C. Riker, 1853. Knight, Richard Payne. Landscape: A Didactic Poem. London: 1789. Latrobe, Benjamin Henry. Anniversary Oration: Pronounced Before the Society of Artists of the United States, by Appointment of the Society on the Eighth of May, 1811. Philadelphia: Published by Bradford & Inskeep, J. Maxwell, Printer, 1811. —. The Architectural Drawings of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Edited by Je∑rey A. Cohen and Charles E. Brownell. Vol. 2: Part I & II. The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Series II: The Architectural and Engineering Drawings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Maryland Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society, 1994. — . The Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Vol. I: 1784– 1804; Vol. 2: 1805–1810; Vol. 3: 1811–1820. Edited by John C. van Horne and Lee W. Formwalt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for The Maryland Historical Society, 1984. —. Designs of Buildings Erected or Proposed to be Built in Virginia by B. Henry Latrobe Boneval from 1795 to 1799. “Architectural Drawings for Houses and a Church”: ADE Unit 2886. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. —. Designs of a Building proposed to be erected at Richmond in Virginia, to contain A Theatre, Assembley-Rooms, and an Hotel. 1798–1799. ADE Unit 2885 no. 4. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

270 · Endnotes

Conclusion 01 For recent research on the latter project, see Laura Turner Igoe, “The Opulent City and the Sylvan State: Art and Environmental Embodiment in Early National Philadelphia” (PhD diss., Temple University, 2014). 02 Both William Strickland (1788–1854) and Robert Mills (1781–1855) produced landscape views suggestive of such training, which were issued as prints. 03 The Flaxman imagery in these four panels is extensive. Thus far, I have been unable to parse a cohesive interpretive message from Latrobe’s use of Flaxman here. But the epic imagery, combined

with the iconographical elements in the scenes (including bits of ruins and boats on rivers), suggest significant visual, and possibly conceptual, ties to Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors. 04 Enclosure: to Henry Lee, April 24, 1800, Corr 1: 163. 05 Interestingly, here Latrobe worked with George Bridport, a European-trained architectural decorator, on the interior scheme for the house and may have left the development of a conceptual program to his collaborator. For Latrobe’s mention of Flaxman, see BHL to Bridport, August 7, 1808, Corr 2: 647–48. For discussion of the commission, see Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley and Pe∑y A. Olley, Classical Splendor:

06

07 08 09 10

Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House (New Haven, CT: Philadelphia Museum of Art with Yale University Press, 2016), 31, 50–52. Since both were resident in the city, and since Latrobe made few journal entries in these years, the friendship is little documented, other than the brief note from Latrobe to Liston, now preserved in the Sir Robert Liston Papers in the Library of Congress. Corr 1: 164. Ibid. Ibid., 164 n1. Ibid.

Selected Bibliography Primary Sources and Published Archival Sources Aeschylus, Choephoroi/The Libation Bearers. Translated by H. W. Smith. Loeb Classical Library, 1926. Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor, and Neil Leach. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011. Allison, Archibald. “On the Art of Sketching.” Folio A 2011 16, “Lessons on Drawing, Watercolors, and Miniatures.” Yale Center for British Art. Anon. “Portrait of Louis XVI: Late King of France.” Translated by B[enjamin] H[enry] Latrobe. Morning Chronicle. Issue 7507. June 26, 1793. Beattie, James. James Beattie’s London Diary, 1773. Edited by Ralph S. Walker. Aberdeen: The University Press, 1965. —. The Minstrel; or The Progress of Genius. 3rd Edition. London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1774. Bickham, George. The Museum of the Arts; or, the Curious Repository. London: Bickham, [n.d.] Bickham, George. The Universal Penman; or, the Art of Writing. London: Bickham, 1743. Brockaway, Rev. Thomas [att.] The European Traveller in America in Three Letters to his friend in London. [1785] Reprinted by G. K. Hall & Co., 1972. Buck, Samuel and Nathaniel Buck. Buck’s Antiquities: or Venerable Remains of Above Four Hundred Castles, Monasteries, Palaces, &c, &c, in England and Wales, with near one hundred views of Cities and Chief Towns. London: Robert Sayer, 1774. Burney Family Collection, OSB MSS3, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory, Coade’s Lithodipyra, or, Artificial Stone Manufactory: for all kind of statues, capitals, vases, tombs, coats of arms, & architectural ornaments, &c, &c (Lambeth and London: 1784).

—. A Descriptive Catalog of Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory at King’s Arms Stairs, NarrowWall, Lambeth: Opposite White-Hall Stairs. With Prices A≈xed (Lambeth and London: 1784. Cooper, Thomas. Some Information Respecting Amer ica Collected by Thomas Cooper. London: J. Johnson, 1794. Craig, W. M. An Essay on the Study of Nature in Drawing Landscape. London: Printed by W. Bulman and Co., 1793. D’Arblay, Madame Frances Burney. Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (Née Frances Burney). Edited by Charlotte Barrett. Preface by Austin Dobson. Vol. I. London: Macmillan and Col., 1904. Darwin, Erasmus. Botanic Garden: A Poem in Two Parts. Part I: Containing the Economy of Vegetation. Part II: The Loves of the Plants. With Philosophical Notes. London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1791. Demetz, F. A. and G. Abel Blouet, Rapports à M. le Comte de Montalivet sure les pénitenciers des ÉtatsUnis. Paris: Impr. Royale, 1837. “Diary of the Congregation in Duckenfield for May & June 1779.” R.13.D.7.b Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität Herrnhut. “Diary of the Congregation at Fulneck of July and August 1776.” R.13.D.9.d Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität Herrnhut. Dryden, John. The Works of Virgil containing his Pastorals, Georgics, and Aeneid: Adorn’d with a hundred sculptures. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1697. Este, Charles, et al. A Journey in the Year 1793 through Flanders, Brabant, and Germany to Switzerland. London: J. Debrett, 1795. Farington, Joseph. The Diary of Joseph Farington. Edited by Kenneth Garlick and Angus Macintyre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1978.

Horace. Odes and Epodes.Edited and translated by Niall Rudd. Loeb Classical Library 33. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Hume, David. The History of England. London, 1688. Je∑erson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. London: Printed for John Stockdale, opposite Burlington-House, Piccadilly, 1787. —. The Writings of Thomas Je∑erson. Edited by H. A. Washington. New York: John C. Riker, 1853. Knight, Richard Payne. Landscape: A Didactic Poem. London: 1789. Latrobe, Benjamin Henry. Anniversary Oration: Pronounced Before the Society of Artists of the United States, by Appointment of the Society on the Eighth of May, 1811. Philadelphia: Published by Bradford & Inskeep, J. Maxwell, Printer, 1811. —. The Architectural Drawings of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Edited by Je∑rey A. Cohen and Charles E. Brownell. Vol. 2: Part I & II. The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Series II: The Architectural and Engineering Drawings. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Maryland Historical Society and the American Philosophical Society, 1994. — . The Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Vol. I: 1784– 1804; Vol. 2: 1805–1810; Vol. 3: 1811–1820. Edited by John C. van Horne and Lee W. Formwalt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for The Maryland Historical Society, 1984. —. Designs of Buildings Erected or Proposed to be Built in Virginia by B. Henry Latrobe Boneval from 1795 to 1799. “Architectural Drawings for Houses and a Church”: ADE Unit 2886. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. —. Designs of a Building proposed to be erected at Richmond in Virginia, to contain A Theatre, Assembley-Rooms, and an Hotel. 1798–1799. ADE Unit 2885 no. 4. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

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—. An Essay on Landscape, explained in tinted drawings. 2 vols. Manuscript No. 25060. Library of Virginia. —. The Journal of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Edited by J. H. B. Latrobe. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 1876. — . Latrobe’s View of America, 1795–1820: Selections from the Watercolors and Sketches, Edited by Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Horne, and Charles E. Brownell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for The Maryland Historical Society, 1985. — . The Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe: Microfiche Edition, Edited by Edward C. Carter II. Clifton, NJ: Published for The Maryland Historical Society by James T. White & Co., 1976. —. Sketchbook of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Papers of Osmun Latrobe, MMC-0875, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. —. The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1795–1798. Edited by Edward C. Carter II, with Angeline Polites, Lee W. Formwalt, and John C. Van Horne. Vol. I 1795–1797, Vol. 2 1797–1798. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Maryland Historical Society, 1977. Latrobe, Christian Ignatius. Journal of a visit to South Africa in 1815 and 1816 with some account of the Missionary Settlements of the United Brethren, near the Cape of Good Hope. London: L. B. Seeley and R. Ackermann, 1818. — . Journal of Christian Ignatius Latrobe. GB 133 Eng MS 1244. Special Collections, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK. —. La Trobe, C. I. Letters to My Children: Written at Sea During a Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, in 1815. Edited and with an introduction by J. A. La Trobe. London: Seeleys, 1861. [Posthumous Edition] —. “Some account of our dear departed Br. Benj. LaTrobe’s last illness.” R 13 D 9 d, UA.R. 22 137, Item 5. Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität Herrnhut. Lee, Henry. George Washington! A Funeral Oration on his Death. London: Printed by J. Bateson, 1800. Lucan, De Bellum Civile/The Civil War Books I–X. Translated by James Du∑. London: Heinemann, 1928. Macpherson, James [a.k.a. Ossian] Fingal an Ancient Epic Poem. London: T. Becket and P A De Hondt, 1762. Mason, William. An Heroic Epistle to Sir William Chambers. London: 1773. Metastasio, Pietro. Opere. Edited by Mario Fubini. Milano-Napoli: Ricciardi, 1968. N.A. “Br. John Hartley.” The Messenger: A Magazine of the Church of the United Brethren. Rev. T. L. Badham, Editor. XI: New Series 327–35, 281–85. London: J. Birthrey, 1874.

Pasko, W. W., Editor. Old New York: A Journal Relating to the History and Antiquities of New York City. 2 Vols. New York: W. W. Pasko, 1890. Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Vasi, Candelabri . . . ed Antichi. Rome, 1778. Radcli∑e, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance; interspersed with some pieces of poetry. London: 1794. Randolph, Edmund. A Vindication of Mr. Randolph’s Resignation. Philadelphia, 1795. “Records of the Virginia Penitentiary, 1796–1991 (bulk 1906–1970).” Accession #31558. Library of Virginia. “Richmond Theater Proposal” The Observatory; Or, A View of the Times. June 14, 1798. Schachmann, Carl Adolph Gottlob von. Beobachtungen Ueber Das Gebirge bey Koenigshayn in der Oberlausiz. Dresden, 1780. Van Zandt, Abraham Brooks. ‘ The Elect Lady’: A Memoir of Mrs. Susan Catharine Bott. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1857. Vitruvius. The Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. New York: Dover, 1914. Secondary Sources Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape, Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760– 1800. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1989. Andrews, Stuart. The British Periodical Press and the French Revolution, 1789–99. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Arneil, Barbara. John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Ayres, Philip. Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Baetjer, Katharine, et al. Glorious Nature: British Landscape Painting, 1750–1850. New York: Hudson Hills Press in Association with the Denver Art Museum, 1993. Baker, Christopher. English Drawings and Watercolours, 1600–1900, National Gallery of Scotland. Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland, 2011. Barbanera, Marcello and Alessandra Capodiferro. La forza delle Rovine. Milan: Electa, 2015. Barker, Hannah. Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Barrell, John. “ ‘The Dangerous Goddess’: Masculinity, Prestige, and the Aesthetic in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Cultural Critique 12: Discursive Strategies and the Economy of Prestige (Spring 1989): 101–31.

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Cohen, Michèle. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 1996. Cohn, Jan. The Palace or the Poorhouse: The American House as a Cultural Symbol. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1979. Coltman, Viccy. Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760–1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Commager, Henry Steele. “Horace’s ‘Carmina’ 1:37” Phoenix 12, No. 2 (Summer 1958): 47–57. Coombs, Katherine. British Watercolours: 1750–1950. London: Victoria & Albert Publishing, 2012. Copley, Stephen and Peter Garside, eds. The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape, and Aesthetics Since 1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Coutu, Joan. Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Craciun, Adriana. British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Crooke, J. Mourdant. “The Arcadian Vision: Neoclassicism and the Picturesque” in Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination, edited by G. W. Clarke, 43–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Cullen, Jim. The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Cummings, Abbott Lowell. “The Beginnings of American Landscape Painting.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. New Series 11:3 (Nov. 1952): 93–99. Daniels, Stephen. Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. — with Susanne Seymour and Charles Watkins. “Landscaping and Estate Management in Later Georgian England.” Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1992. — and John Bonehill, eds. Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009. — . Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England. New Haven, CT: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1999. Darley, Gillian. “The Moravians: Building for a Higher Purpose.” Architectural Review. CLXXVII (April 1985): 45–49. DeLue, Rachael Z. and James Elkins. Landscape Theory. New York: Routledge, 2008. Doll, Dan and Jessica Munns, eds. Recording and Reordering: Essays on the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Diary and Journal. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006.

Dubin, Nina L. Futures & Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010. Eaton, Leonard K. Houses and Money: The Domestic Clients of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Dublin, NH: W. L. Bauhan, 1988. Ebert-Schi∑erer, Sybille, ed. Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, 2002. Essick, Robert N. “Visual/Verbal Relationships in Book Illustration” in British Art 1740–1820: Essays in Honor of Robert R. Wark, edited by Guilland Sutherland, 169–204. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1992. —. William Blake at the Huntington: An Introduction to the William Blake Collection in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery San Marino, California. San Marino, CA: Harry N. Abrams Inc., in Association with the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1994. Essick, Robert and Jenijoy LaBelle. Flaxman’s Illustrations to Homer. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977. Eysturlid, Lee W. The Formative Influences, Theories, and Campaigns of the Archduke of Austria. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Fabricant, Carole. “The Aesthetics and Politics of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art and Aesthetics, edited by Ralph Cohen, 49–81. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Fagan, Brian M. The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt. New York: Scribner, 1975. Faherty, Duncan. Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776–1858. Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007. Faroult, Guillaume, Christophe Leribault, Guilhem Scherg. Antiquity Revived: Neoclassical Art in the Eighteenth Century. Paris: Gallimard and Musée du Louvre, 2011. Fazio, Michael W. and Patrick A. Snadon. The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Ferrero, Guglielmo. The Gamble: Bonaparte in Italy, 1796–1797. London: Greenhill Books, 1994. Festa, Lynn. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Flett, Arthur. “Ruins: The Development of a Theme in Eighteenth Century British Landscape Painting, c. 1760–1800.” PhD Diss. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1981. Folkenflik, Robert. “The Artist as Hero in the Eighteenth Century.” The Yearbook of English Studies 12, Special Issue: Heroes and the Heroic (1982): 91–108. Formwalt, Lee W. Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Development of Internal Improvements in the New Republic, 1796–1820. New York: Arno Press, 1982.

Foster, Kathleen A. Captain Watson’s Travels in America: The Sketchbooks and Diary of Joshua Rowley Watson, 1772–1818. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for The Barra Foundation, 1997. Frary, I. T. Thomas Je∑erson, Architect and Builder. Richmond, VA: Garreet and Massie, 1931. Fryd, Vivien Green. Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Fyfe, Gordon. Art, Power and Modernity: English Art Institutions, 1750–1950. London: Leicester University Press, 2000. Gaines, William H. Jr. “The ‘Penitentiary House,’” Virginia Cavalcade 6, no. 1 (Summer 1956): 11–17. Garnsey, Peter. Famine and Food Supply in the GraecoRoman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. —. Food and Society in Classical Antiquity. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Gaudio, Michael. Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Guernsey, Daniel. The Artist and the State, 1777– 1855: The Politics of Universal History in British and French Painting. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2007. Hallett, Mark. “The Medley Print in Early Eighteenth-Century London.” Art History 20:2 (1997): 214–327. Hamilton, J. Taylor and Kenneth G. Hamilton. History of the Moravian Church: The Renewed Unitas Fratrum, 1722–1957. Bethlehem, PA: Interprovincial board of Christian Education, Moravian Church in America, 1967. Hamlin, Talbot. Benjamin Henry Latrobe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. Hardie, Martin. Water-colour Painting in Britain. Vol. I: The Eighteenth Century. London: B T Batsford, Ltd, 1966. —. Water-colour Painting in Britain. II. The Romantic Period. New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1967. Hargraves, Matthew. ‘Candidates for Fame’: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791. New Haven and London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by the Yale University Press, 2005. Harris, Theresa Fairbanks and Scott Wilcox, eds. Papermaking and the Art of Watercolor in Eighteenth-Century Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Yale Center for British Art, 2006. Harvey, Douglas S. “Theater and Empire: A History of Assumptions in the English-Speaking Atlantic World, 1700–1860.” PhD Diss. Lawrence: University of Kansas, 2008.

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— . The Theatre of Empire: Performance in Amer ica, 1750–1860. London: Pickering and Chalto, 2010. Harwood, Edward S. “Luxurious Hermits: Asceticism, Luxury and Retirement in the EighteenthCentury English Garden.” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes Vol. 20, No. 4 (Winter 2000): 265–96. Hawes, Louis. Presences of Nature: British Landscape, 1780–1830. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1982. Hemingway, Andrew and William Vaughan. Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hemming, Charles. British Landscape Painters: A History and Gazetteer. London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1989. Herrmann, Luke. British Landscape Painting of the Eighteenth Century. London: Faber & Faber, 1973. Ho∑er, Peter Charles. Sensory Worlds in Early America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Howard, Hugh. Thomas Je∑erson, Architect: The Built Legacy of Our Third President. New York: Rizzoli, 2003. Hutton, J. E..“Fairfield 150 Years Ago.” The Moravian Messenger ( July 1935): 76–77. Isaac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740– 1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1982. Kelly, Clare Lise. Places from the Past: The Tradition of Gardez Bien in Montgomery County, Maryland. 10th Anniversary Edition. Silver Spring, MD: The Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, 2011. Kelly, James C. and William M. S. Rasmussen. The Virginia Landscape: A Cultural History. Richmond: The Virginia Historical Society, 2000. Ketner, Joseph D. II, and Michael J. Tammenga. The Beautiful, The Sublime, and the Picturesque: British Influences on American Landscape Painting. St. Louis, MO: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1984. Kirtley, Alexandra Alevizatos and Pe∑y A. Olley, Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House. New Haven, CT: Philadelphia Museum of Art with Yale University Press, 2016. Klein, Lawrence E. “An Artisan in Polite Culture: Thomas Parsons, Stone Carver, of Bath, 1744– 1813.” The Huntington Library Quarterly 75:1 (2012): 27–51. —. “The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness.” Eighteenth-Century Studies. 18: 2 (Winter 1984–85): 186–214. Kolin, Philip C., ed. Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1983 Lamb, Susan. Bringing Travel Home to England: Tourism, Gender, and Imaginative Literature in the Eighteenth Century. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009.

Languri, G. M. and J. J. Book. “Between Myth and Reality: Mummy Pigment from the Hafkensch Collection.” Studies in Conservation 50:3 (2005): 161–78. Leask, Nigel. Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840: ‘from an antique land.’ New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lemp, Heikki and Paul Peucker, eds. Self, Community, World: Moravian Education in a Transatlantic World. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2010. Lemper, Ernst-Heinz. Carl Adolph Gottlob von Schach mann. Görlitz-Zittau: Verlag Gunter Oettel, 2001. Looby, Christopher. “The Constitution of Nature: Taxonomy as Politics in Je∑erson, Peale, and Bartram.” Early American Literature 22, No. 3 (1987): 252–71. Lounsbury, Carl. Essays in Early American Architectural History: A View from the Chesapeake. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Lovell, Margaretta. Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Lukacher, Brian. Joseph Gandy: An Architectural Visionary in Georgian England. London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Maccubbin, Robert P. and Peter Martin. British and Amer ican Gardens in the Eighteenth Century. Williamsburg, VA: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1984. Macleod, Emma Vincent. A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars Against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802. Brookfield, CT: Ashgate, 1998. Makarius, Michael. Ruins. Paris: Éditions Flammarion and Rizzoli International Publications, 2004. Martin, Peter. The Pleasure Gardens of Virginia: from Jamestown to Je∑erson. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1991. McDonnell, Michael A. The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2007. McInnis, Maurie and Louis Nelson, eds. Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. McNamara, Brooks. The American Playhouse in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. McCouat, Philip. “The Life and Death of Mummy Brown.” Journal of Art in Society, www.artinsociety.com. Mee, John. Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Mesick, Jane Louis. The English Traveller in America: 1785–1835. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1922.

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Selected Bibliography ·

Wahrman, Dror. Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Wark, Robert. Drawings by John Flaxman in the Huntington Collection. San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1970. Watts, Edward. Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Wenger, Mark R. “Thomas Je∑erson and the Virginia State Capitol.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 101, No. 1 Special Issue: In the Modest Garb of Pure Republicanism: Thomas Je∑erson as Reformer and Architect ( Jan 1993): 77–102. Wickberg, Daniel. “What is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New.” The American Historical Review 112:3 ( June 2007): 661–84.

275

Wilcox, Scott, Gillian Forrester, Morna O’Neill, and Kim Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 2001. Wilton, Andrew. The Art of Alexander and John Robert Cozens. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1980. — and Anne Lyles. British Watercolours, 1750– 1880. Munich: Prestel, 2011. — and Anne Lyles. The Great Age of British Watercolours, 1750–1880. London: Prestel-Verlag for the Royal Academy of the Arts, 1993. —. “Sublime or Ridiculous? Turner and the Problem of the Historical Figure.” New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 2. Special Issue: The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations (Winter, 1985): 343–76. Wagner, Peter, ed. The Ruin and the Sketch in the Eighteenth Century. Trier: Wissenchaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008.

Winterer, Caroline. The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Witke, Joanne. William Blake’s Epic: Imagination Unbound. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Wollock, Abe. “Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Activities in the American Theatre, 1797–1808.” PhD Diss. Champaign: University of Illinois, 1962. Woodcock, S. “Body Colour: The Misuse of Mummy.” The Conservator 20:1 (1996): 87–94. Wright, Armina. Joseph Wright of Derby: Bath and Beyond. London: Philip Wilson Publishers for the Holburn Museum, 2014. Wyke, Maria, ed. Julius Caesar in Western Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2006. Yokota, Kariann Akemi. Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Alexandria, Virginia, 242 allegory, 23, 153, 164, 190, 195, 199–200, 207, 218, 243, 249–50 Allison, Archibald, 266n53 Alpers, Svetlana, 231 Alps, The, 176 amateur artist and amateurism, 11, 14, 65, 141–42, 146, 153, 154, 158, 229, 256, 262n72, 265n10, 265n15 Amelia County, Virginia, 94–95 America, 16, 76, 79, 86–90, 92, 121, 123, 132–37, 151, 190, 195, 201, 221, 235, 251, 261n74 history of, 82, 87, 123, 126, 135–37, 232 Revolutionary, 117–18, 121, 136, 230, 263n38, 264n1, 265n45 See also American South; United States of America American architecture and architects, 15, 164, 213, 249, 254 art and art history, 14, 46, 256, 260n15, 263n59 artist(s), 143, 159, 251, 256, 260n15 audience, 143, 155, 157, 193–94, 201–2, 204, 231, 234, 251 history, 123, 136, 232 houses and homes, 204, 213, 219, 222, 235, 269n32 identity and character, 11, 43, 45, 88, 91–92, 94, 102, 114–15, 117, 118, 149, 159, 227, 231, 256 landscape, 43, 88, 91, 120–21, 141–43, 148–49, 158, 199, 222, 225–27, 235, 239, 251, 263n21 politics and ideals, 12, 86, 89, 118–19, 134, 234, 237 society, 195, 232, 237, 251, 256 See also Virginia: domestic architecture of

American Revolution 11, 17, 22, 79, 90, 118, 121–23, 126–27, 129, 132 134–37, 181–84, 260n15 American South, 87–88, 96, 156, 173, 249 American theater, 172–73, 182–86 Norfolk Theatre, 172–73 Old American Company, 173, 182 See also Richmond Theater and Richmond Theater Proposall Amicis (Unknown [Quandt?]), 51, 52 Anchises, 22, 120, 122 ancient cultures, 22, 26, 39, 76, 79, 82, 219 history, 19, 40, 42–43, 88, 123 literature, 14, 19, 21–22, 108, 137 See also Classical culture anemone See Sea Anemone Anniversary Oration (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 251, 269n67 Antes, Anne Magaretta, 46 Antes, Henry, 260n5 Anti-Federalists, 88–89 antiquarian and antiquarianism, 25, 65, 74–75 Apollo, 68, 122, 251 Apology, The (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 179–80, 231, 267n59 Appomattox River, Virginia, 89–90 architect, persona of, 189, 194, 199, 207 architect’s imagination, 163, 172, 190, 193–95, 199–200, 207, 212, 222–23, 248–50 prison architects, 165, 266n13 “Architect’s Imagination, The,” 10, 198, 199, 248 See also allegory

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Aberdeen, Scotland, 244 Achilles, 81, 83 Adamesque taste, 204 Adams, John, 234 Aegisthos/Aegisthus, 131–32 Aeneas, 21–22, 33, 36–37, 39, 42, 118, 120, 122, 232, 249–51 Aeneid (Vergil), 20–22, 37, 39, 82, 118, 260n4, 260n11 Aeschylus, 131–32, 186–88, 199–200 Aeschylus, Plate 5, Io’s Dreams ( John Flaxman), 199 Aeschylus, Plate 16 The Appeal of the Theban Ladies ( John Flaxman), 186 Aeschylus 26: Orestes over the Dead Bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus ( John Flaxman), 131 Choephoroi, 131 Oresteia, 131–32, 175 aesthetics and aesthetic theory and literature, 35–36, 39, 88–89, 94, 103–4, 106, 120–21, 142, 151, 244, 263n24 Africa, 79, 200, 261n79, 262n58 See also South Africa African Americans, 91, 100, 161, 188, 261n79 Agamemnon, 131–32 Age of Revolutions, 11, 13 184, 235, 238–39, 253, 256 agriculture, 26, 89, 92, 103, 151, 237 Airy Plain(s), 95–96, 98–99, 100, 101 Alberti, Leon Battista, 235, 268n53, 269n34 Albion, 76 Albion’s Angel, 79

Selected Bibliography ·

Wahrman, Dror. Mr. Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Wark, Robert. Drawings by John Flaxman in the Huntington Collection. San Marino, CA: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1970. Watts, Edward. Writing and Postcolonialism in the Early Republic. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Wenger, Mark R. “Thomas Je∑erson and the Virginia State Capitol.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography Vol. 101, No. 1 Special Issue: In the Modest Garb of Pure Republicanism: Thomas Je∑erson as Reformer and Architect ( Jan 1993): 77–102. Wickberg, Daniel. “What is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New.” The American Historical Review 112:3 ( June 2007): 661–84.

275

Wilcox, Scott, Gillian Forrester, Morna O’Neill, and Kim Sloan. The Line of Beauty: British Drawings and Watercolors of the Eighteenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 2001. Wilton, Andrew. The Art of Alexander and John Robert Cozens. New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, 1980. — and Anne Lyles. British Watercolours, 1750– 1880. Munich: Prestel, 2011. — and Anne Lyles. The Great Age of British Watercolours, 1750–1880. London: Prestel-Verlag for the Royal Academy of the Arts, 1993. —. “Sublime or Ridiculous? Turner and the Problem of the Historical Figure.” New Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 2. Special Issue: The Sublime and the Beautiful: Reconsiderations (Winter, 1985): 343–76. Wagner, Peter, ed. The Ruin and the Sketch in the Eighteenth Century. Trier: Wissenchaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2008.

Winterer, Caroline. The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Witke, Joanne. William Blake’s Epic: Imagination Unbound. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Wollock, Abe. “Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s Activities in the American Theatre, 1797–1808.” PhD Diss. Champaign: University of Illinois, 1962. Woodcock, S. “Body Colour: The Misuse of Mummy.” The Conservator 20:1 (1996): 87–94. Wright, Armina. Joseph Wright of Derby: Bath and Beyond. London: Philip Wilson Publishers for the Holburn Museum, 2014. Wyke, Maria, ed. Julius Caesar in Western Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2006. Yokota, Kariann Akemi. Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Alexandria, Virginia, 242 allegory, 23, 153, 164, 190, 195, 199–200, 207, 218, 243, 249–50 Allison, Archibald, 266n53 Alpers, Svetlana, 231 Alps, The, 176 amateur artist and amateurism, 11, 14, 65, 141–42, 146, 153, 154, 158, 229, 256, 262n72, 265n10, 265n15 Amelia County, Virginia, 94–95 America, 16, 76, 79, 86–90, 92, 121, 123, 132–37, 151, 190, 195, 201, 221, 235, 251, 261n74 history of, 82, 87, 123, 126, 135–37, 232 Revolutionary, 117–18, 121, 136, 230, 263n38, 264n1, 265n45 See also American South; United States of America American architecture and architects, 15, 164, 213, 249, 254 art and art history, 14, 46, 256, 260n15, 263n59 artist(s), 143, 159, 251, 256, 260n15 audience, 143, 155, 157, 193–94, 201–2, 204, 231, 234, 251 history, 123, 136, 232 houses and homes, 204, 213, 219, 222, 235, 269n32 identity and character, 11, 43, 45, 88, 91–92, 94, 102, 114–15, 117, 118, 149, 159, 227, 231, 256 landscape, 43, 88, 91, 120–21, 141–43, 148–49, 158, 199, 222, 225–27, 235, 239, 251, 263n21 politics and ideals, 12, 86, 89, 118–19, 134, 234, 237 society, 195, 232, 237, 251, 256 See also Virginia: domestic architecture of

American Revolution 11, 17, 22, 79, 90, 118, 121–23, 126–27, 129, 132 134–37, 181–84, 260n15 American South, 87–88, 96, 156, 173, 249 American theater, 172–73, 182–86 Norfolk Theatre, 172–73 Old American Company, 173, 182 See also Richmond Theater and Richmond Theater Proposall Amicis (Unknown [Quandt?]), 51, 52 Anchises, 22, 120, 122 ancient cultures, 22, 26, 39, 76, 79, 82, 219 history, 19, 40, 42–43, 88, 123 literature, 14, 19, 21–22, 108, 137 See also Classical culture anemone See Sea Anemone Anniversary Oration (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 251, 269n67 Antes, Anne Magaretta, 46 Antes, Henry, 260n5 Anti-Federalists, 88–89 antiquarian and antiquarianism, 25, 65, 74–75 Apollo, 68, 122, 251 Apology, The (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 179–80, 231, 267n59 Appomattox River, Virginia, 89–90 architect, persona of, 189, 194, 199, 207 architect’s imagination, 163, 172, 190, 193–95, 199–200, 207, 212, 222–23, 248–50 prison architects, 165, 266n13 “Architect’s Imagination, The,” 10, 198, 199, 248 See also allegory

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Aberdeen, Scotland, 244 Achilles, 81, 83 Adamesque taste, 204 Adams, John, 234 Aegisthos/Aegisthus, 131–32 Aeneas, 21–22, 33, 36–37, 39, 42, 118, 120, 122, 232, 249–51 Aeneid (Vergil), 20–22, 37, 39, 82, 118, 260n4, 260n11 Aeschylus, 131–32, 186–88, 199–200 Aeschylus, Plate 5, Io’s Dreams ( John Flaxman), 199 Aeschylus, Plate 16 The Appeal of the Theban Ladies ( John Flaxman), 186 Aeschylus 26: Orestes over the Dead Bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus ( John Flaxman), 131 Choephoroi, 131 Oresteia, 131–32, 175 aesthetics and aesthetic theory and literature, 35–36, 39, 88–89, 94, 103–4, 106, 120–21, 142, 151, 244, 263n24 Africa, 79, 200, 261n79, 262n58 See also South Africa African Americans, 91, 100, 161, 188, 261n79 Agamemnon, 131–32 Age of Revolutions, 11, 13 184, 235, 238–39, 253, 256 agriculture, 26, 89, 92, 103, 151, 237 Airy Plain(s), 95–96, 98–99, 100, 101 Alberti, Leon Battista, 235, 268n53, 269n34 Albion, 76 Albion’s Angel, 79

276 · Index

architecture and architectural, 12, 14–15, 17, 46, 48, 50, 83, 86, 89, 113–14, 136, 158, 162–63 171, 173–74, 190, 194, 199, 201–2, 214, 256, 262n53, 264n13 decoration, 178–79, 188–89, 212, 260n5, 270n5 elevations, 54, 58–59, 61, 71, 168–69, 171, 172, 191–92, 201, 204, 211, 214 history, 15, 74, 213 imagination, 163, 172, 190, 194–95 inaccuracies, 265n39 notes and designs, 260n18 painter, 189–90 projects, 43, 73, 163, 164, 193, 195, 197, 249 rendering, 12, 14, 48, 50, 52, 57, 61, 64–67, 69, 71, 75, 83, 95–96, 113, 121, 129, 161, 163–64, 168–70, 171–72, 187–90, 193, 195, 197, 203–7, 211, 212–14, 217, 219–20, 222–23, 247, 254–55, 262n45, 266n2 rendering as marketing, 168, 171, 175, 177, 193, 197, 219, 222 sensibility, 262n68 subscription in, 174 See also buildings; domestic architecture archives See Moravian archives Ariadne, 69 Arindal, 81–82 aristocracy and aristocrats, 135, 216, 237, 246 Armin, 79, 81–83 Ars Poetica (Horace), 180 Artemis, 69 artifice See deception Artificial Stone Manufactory See Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory artist and artistic training, 11–13, 24–25, 41–42, 48, 52, 57, 64, 69, 71, 75–76, 79, 82–83, 100, 114–15, 129, 143, 144–46, 148–51, 158, 173, 183, 187–88, 194, 199, 212, 220, 230–31, 235, 240, 243, 247, 250–51, 255–57, 261n69, 261n36, 262n63, 264n15, 269n25 artist-architect, 141, 164, 227 artist-author, 158, 236 artist-dreamer, 251 artist emigrant, 20, 32 artist-hero, 141, 250–51 artistic genius, 154 artistic license, 149 artistic self-creation, 251 artistic self-portrait, 247 epic artist, 41, 114, 175 rendering, 14, 17, 29–30, 41, 75, 80, 88, 111, 123, 127, 129, 137, 141, 143, 152, 154, 156, 159, 189–90, 240, 243 See also American artist(s); comprehensive mind Asia, 79 Assaracus, 122 Athena, 113, 218 Athens, 251 Atilius Regulus (Pietro Metastasio), 176, 177, 267n50

Atlantic Ocean, 11, 14, 21, 25, 32, 36, 39–42, 82–83, 87, 90–91, 94, 96, 102, 119, 149, 159, 231, 234–36, 234–39, 244, 256, 259n2 scenes, 82, 106 sketchbook and journal of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 20, 23, 24, 41, 43, 82, 87, 91, 106, 123, 137, 231, 257 voyage of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 15, 17, 19–43, 87, 239, 260n18 world, 12, 15, 17, 45–46, 82, 89–94, 96, 118–19, 127, 132, 173, 177, 184, 233–34, 235, 239, 253, 256 See also transatlantic and transatlanticism Atlas (mountain and Titan), 36–37, 39, 40, 261n57 Attic kouros, 161 Augustus, 22, 102, 114, 122, 134, 259n11 See also Octavian Austria, 233 autobiography, 141–142, 152, 157, 159, 165, 227, 231, 247 Autobiography (Thomas Je∑erson), 165 avant-garde artistic practices, 46, 75, 104–6, 143, 168, 195, 222, 250 theatrical practices, 173 Ayres, Philip, 22 Azores, 35–36, 37–38, 39–41 Bacchanalian Figures, 69, 262n54 Bacchanalian Figures from the borghesean Vase ( John Bacon and Eleanor Coade [att.]), 69 Bacon, John, 67, 69 Bacon, John, and Eleanor Coade [att.], Bacchanalian Figures from the borghesean Vase, 69 Ballroom (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 160 (detail), 190, 191, 191–94 Baltimore, Frederick Calvert Baron, 268n20 Bank of Pennsylvania, 198, 201, 249–50 bankruptcy, 13, 15, 20, 41, 45, 64, 83, 246, 253, 260n7 Banks, Henry, 89, 95–99 Barberini Faun, 68 Barby, Germany, 48, 52, 63 Baron von Rothe See Rothe, Baron von; Rhoades, Tommy Bath, Virginia, 102 Bathing Machine, The (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 26, 30 battles and battlefields, 25–26, 113, 121, 123, 132, 176, 233 Battle of Hastings, 26 See also wars Bay of Naples, 143, 144–45, 146 Beacheyhead, England, 25, 33 Beattie, James, 225, 240–41, 243, 244–48, 245, 250, 267n2, 269n52 See also Minstrel, The Belle Island See Washington’s Island Bellion, Wendy, 228–29, 231, 261n69, 263n42, 268n4, 267n7

Bellum Civile (Lucan), 122, 175, 264n12 Belvidere, 94, 95, 96 Berkeley, Governor Sir William, 135–36 Berkeley, Norbone See Botetourt, Norbone Berkeley, Baron de Berthelsdorf, Germany, 48 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 48 Bexhill, England, 25 Bickham, George, 267n10 Study, 230 Bignall, John, 173, 266n40 Blackburn, Colonel, 263n41 Blacklock, Thomas, 102–3 Bladensburg, Maryland, 242 Blake, William, 76, 79, 83 Plate I Frontispiece, America. A Prophecy, 78 Blouet, G. Abel, 265n27 boats and boatmen, 26, 34–35, 39–40, 42, 89, 91, 99–101, 109, 123–25, 128, 135, 146, 203–4, 233, 270n3 See also ships; vessels, sailing Bohemia, Germany, 50–51, 54, 262n64 Boneval, B. Henry Latrobe, 175, 197, 248, 267n52 See also Latrobe, Benjamin Henry booklets See illustrated manuscripts and booklets Borghese family, 262n54 Borghese(an) Vase, 67, 68, 69, 262n54 Botanic Garden (Erasmus Darwin), 156, 266n46, 266n65 Botetourt, Norbone Berkeley, Baron de, 133, 134–35, 265n38, 265n39 Bott, Susan Catharine (Spotswood), 140 Boxhill, Surrey, England, 71, 72, 73, 264n2 Boxley, Kent, England, 70, 71 Boys (O)economy House See Oeconomy House Breakfast Equipage set out for the Passengers of the Eliza, the Captain and Mate in all 9 Persons, March 4th, 1796 being the compleat set (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 19, 21, 41–42, 177, 178, 181, 226, 228–29, 248, 250, 261n85 Brethren, The See Moravian Church and community Bridport, George, 267n83, 270n5 Britain, 11, 14–15, 22–36, 46, 51, 69–70, 83, 85–86, 88–89, 93–94, 106, 118, 121, 140, 154, 158, 182, 195, 233, 237, 245, 257, 259n15, 262n54, 264n15 See also England British built environment, 24, 26, 74, 91 community in Virginia, 86 Empire, 24, 245–46 heritage, 86 history, 74, 85 landscape artists and paintings, 30, 89–90, 262n72, 265n39, 265n10, 265n15 seacoast, 24–29, 30–33, 36, 43, 148 Broad Rock Island See Washington’s Island Brobdingnag, 13

Index ·

Brownell, Charles E., 52, 82, 109–10, 112, 161, 163–64, 166–67, 171, 174–75, 187–188, 190, 197–98, 201, 204, 207, 210, 213, 218–20, 233–34, 261n23, 263n34, 266n2, 266n4, 266n11, 266n13, 266n40, 267n58, 267n71, 268n27, 268n28, 268n34, 268n39, 268n45, 268n52, 268n60, 269n24 Brusati,Celeste, 231 Buck, Samuel and Nathaniel, 74 Buck’s Antiquities, 74–76 East Prospect of Kirksted Abbey new Horncastle in the County of Lincoln, The, 75 Bugniet, Pierre Gabriel, 166 buildings and building projects, 24, 26, 32, 48, 52, 55–58, 60–66, 69, 71, 73–76, 79, 86, 90, 94, 96, 98, 105–7, 109, 117, 124, 127, 129, 133, 135–36, 148, 158–59, 161–76, 177, 182–223, 226, 234, 237, 239–40, 247–51, 253–55, 260n18, 262n42, 262n43, 264n24, 266n13, 265n27, 266n40, 266n88 See also architecture and architectural; domestic architecture Burke, Edmund, 269n38 Burney, Charles, 263n27 family, 266n34 Caesar, Julius (C. Julius Caesar) 24–26, 33, 43, 117, 122–23, 141, 235, 264n15 Calvert, Frederick, 268n20 canvasback ducks, 237, 268n17 capriccio, 146 Carter, Edward C., 87, 263n27 Carthage, 37, 176 cartouche, 48–49, 55, 57 landscape vignette title cartouche ( Johann Gottfried Schulz), 49 title cartouche, detail No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 59 title cartouche detail, Plan of the new Congn. Place At Droylsden (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 57 title vignette, detail Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 64 castles, 30, 50, 104, 148, 197, 199, 223, 236 in the air, 223, 236, 250 Central Europe, 46, 51–52, 64, 121, 253 culture of, 155 Chalk Cli∑s or Downs, England, 24 Charles II, Archduke of Austria, 233 Charleston, South Carolina, 172 Charon, 146 Chassebœuf, Count Constantin-François See Volney, Compte de Choephoroi (Aeschylus), 131 See also Libation Bearers Church of the United Brethren, 46, 63 See also Moravian Church and community Church Point Creek, Virginia, 98 Cicero (M. Tullius Cicero), 263n38 Cincinnatus (L. Quinctius Cincinnatus), 263n38 citizenship, 22, 42, 230

civilization, as civilized or developed society, 101, 108, 114, 121, 123–25, 127, 130, 137, 180, 221, 235, 237, 244–45, 261n74 American, 82 British, 82, 91 clash of, 132 decline or corruption of, 24, 79, 82–83, 120, 132, 184, 235–36, 239, 244, 269n38 development or rise of, 22, 74, 137, 222, 235, 239 future, 251 human, 12–13, 123–29, 132, 135, 145, 184, 239, 243–45 modern, 25–26 retreat from, 250 (see also retreat from public life) Roman, 21–22 Trojan 22, 83 Virginian, 94, 239 Civil War (Lucan). See Bellum Civile civitas, 22 Classical, culture, 69, 180, 182, 260n22 history, 36, 39 influence, 12, 21–22, 36, 49, 65, 69, 82, 108, 114, 161, 212, 218, 223 languages, 13, 15, 47 literature and themes, 16, 36, 39, 137, 219, 249, 267n56 reception, 16, 21–23, 33, 36, 39, 69, 81, 102–5, 110–14, 122–23, 130–32, 137, 175–77, 182, 184, 199–200, 218, 231–32, 249 scholars, 264n15 tradition, 168, 193, 218, 222 See also ancient cultures Classicism and Classical style, 22, 48, 58, 96, 130–31, 153, 249, 260n22 Cleopatra, 175–77, 184 Cleopatra Ode (Horace’s Ode I, 37), 175, 177 clients, 89, 171, 197, 202–3, 204, 210–11, 213, 222, 253–54 Clytemnestra, 131–32 Coade, Eleanor, 67, 69 Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory, 67, 262n54 Coade Stone, 66–67, 69, 262n53 Cobbett, William, 179 See also Porcupine, Peter Cockerell, Samuel Pepys, 71 Cohen, Je∑rey, 52, 161, 163–64, 166–67, 171, 174–75, 187–88, 190, 197–98, 201, 204, 207, 210, 213, 218–20, 261n23, 266n2, 266n4, 266n11, 266n13, 266n40, 267n58, 267n71, 268n27, 268n28, 268n34, 268n39, 268n45, 268n52 Collection of Small Moonlights (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 226–27, 228, 229, 232, 234–36, 238–39, 250 Collier, Edward, 231 comedy, 179, 186, 193, 207 comprehensive mind, artist’s, 13, 240–47, 254 Congregation House and Inn, 55, 59, 60 See also Fairfield, England Cooper, Thomas, 88–89, 263n13, 263n24 Cornwallis, Charles, 1st Marquess, 121, 123, 129, 135–36 “Cornwallis’ Cave” (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 127, 128, 129, 264n24

277

correspondence, epistolary, and letters, 19, 173 See also Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, writings of Country Scenes Against a Background of Script [Squally Weather James River] (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 227 See also Three Small Landscapes Coutu, Joan, 134, 265n46 Cranz, Johann David, 51–52 Creusa, 21 Crèvecoeur, Michel Guillaume Jean de, 263n13 C.S. Nullum est Sine Nomine Saxum, 122 cult of sensibility See sensibility, cult of Curious Repository See Study (George Bickham) Custis, Eleanor, 110, 112–14, 243 cyclical theory of history, 83, 108, 118, 123, 127, 137, 184, 235, 239 Cyclops, 21 Czech Republic, 47 Dante Alighieri (Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri), 118 Daphne, 68 Darwin, Erasmus, 156, 266n46, 266n65 Daura, 81 Davis, Ephraim, 269n45 Davis, Thomas III, 269n45 Deal, England, 24 deception painting, 41, 79, 118, 139, 149, 229–31, 236–39, 247, 250–51, 253, 261n69, 267n4, 267n7 rhetorical or text-based, 21, 228, 231 See also trompe l’oeil; illusion Dee, Henry, 270n4 Demetz, R. A., 265n27 democracy and democratic ideals, 86, 94, 118, 213, 237 depression, mental, 13, 64, 81, 120, 137, 239 See also melancholy; morbid sensibility Designs of a Building proposed to be erected in Virginia See Designs of a Theatre Designs of a Theatre, 160, 172–77, 178, 179–84, 185–87, 188–90, 191–92, 193–200, 232 Designs of Buildings, 10 (detail), 164, 196, 198, 201–2, 203, 204, 205–6, 207, 208–12, 213, 214–17, 219–21, 222–23, 226, 251, 253–54, 267n1, 267n16, 267n27, 267n31 Designs of Buildings Erected or Proposed to be Built in Virginia See Designs of Buildings Detail, Bedroom Alcove (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 210 Detail, showing Section 1–3, Garden/Temple Retreat (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 208–10 Devenish, Mr., 260n7 Devonshire, England, 89 De Wit, Cornelius, 263n60 diaries, 16, 25, 43, 47, 85–86, 127, 226, 260n20, 262n51 See also Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, writings of

278 · Index

Dido, 37 Dionysus and Dionysian revelry, 67–69 displacement, sense of, 17, 87–90, 223, 248, 250, 254 See also exile; immigrant(s) and immigration Dobie, Samuel, 164 domestic architecture, 94–96, 197–98, 204, 207, 213, 222, 264n2 estates, 51, 54–56, 58, 96–97, 101, 103, 105, 108, 114, 118, 135, 155, 209 mansions, 94, 96, 98–99, 105–6, 109, 114, 133–37, 169, 213–14 plantations, 86, 96, 101–2, 104, 135, 151, 242 See also Belvidere; Boxhill; East Grinstead; Greenspring; Hammerwood Lodge; Mount Vernon; Pennock House; Tayloe House Doura, 82 Dover, England, 23, 24, 30–33, 43, 101, 117, 120 Downs, England, 260n16 drawing manuals, 157, 266n53 Dresden, Germany, 51, 122 Droilsden/Droylsden, 52, 54–58 See also Fairfield Dryden, John, 21 Duckenfield, England, 52, 261n38 Dunmore, Lord ( John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore), 121 East Coade Stone Panel, 67 East Flank, Tayloe House (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 215 East Grinstead, England, 44 (detail), 45, 70, 71, 262n56 East Prospect of Kirksted Abbey new Horncastle in the County of Lincoln, The (Samuel Buck), 75 East Temple Façade, 66 education, 12, 19, 21, 30, 45–49, 52, 63, 83, 88, 92, 94, 121, 140, 198, 247 classical, 21, 194 Edwin, 243–47, 269n49 Einsiedel, Count George of Reibersdorf, 50, 262n64 Electra, 131 elegy, 83, 175 Elevations detail Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den] (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 56 Eliza, 18 (detail), 19–21, 23–24, 26, 28–30, 32–33, 34–35, 36, 40, 42–43, 83, 86, 203, 260n3, 261n74 Elizabeth River, Virginia, 117, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125–26, 202–3 emigrants and emigration, 15, 24, 28, 32–33, 86, 89, 173, 200–201, 222, 234–36, 266n53 enchantment/inchantment, 50, 201, 225 England, 24–27, 30, 49, 52, 63, 73, 82, 89–91, 93, 102–3, 135, 140, 148, 150, 173, 233, 250, 259n16 history of, 263n60 See also History of England; Britain envisioning, act of, 43, 188, 194, 223, 251

epic form, 13, 43, 87, 111, 118, 122–23, 141, 152, 199, 201, 222, 239, 243–44, 249–51, 253, 255, 257 hero and heroism, 19, 23, 76, 123, 159, 250 history, 115 images and allusions, 76, 102, 250–51, 255, 257, 270n3 journey, 142, 249 poems, 13–14, 34, 43, 76, 79, 95, 118, 141, 156, 250–51, 255, 266n46, 266n65, 269n52 watercolors, 250, 254 See also Bellum Civile; Fingal; Iliad; Minstrel, The; Odyssey Essay on Landscape (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 25, 26–29, 30, 31, 50, 51, 71, 73, 74, 127, 128–30, 139, 140, 141–43, 144–46, 149, 150–57, 158–59, 169, 201, 222, 240, 243, 249, 264n16 Este, Charles, 231, 268n20 Eteocles, 186 European history, 127, 180, 195, 221 intellectuals 85, 173 republics, 251 wars, 233–34 unrest/social turmoil, 11, 89, 231–35 Exact view of the great East Window of the Abbey, which now leads into the Church, Kirkstall Abbey, An, (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 74 exile, 83, 200, 245 See also displacement, sense of; immigrant(s) and immigration expatriate See emigrant and emigration Faial island, Azores, 39 Fairfield, England, 48, 52, 53–60, 61, 62–64, 65, 73, 261n37, 261n42 Fairlight, England, 24 fancy and fantasy, 13, 61, 71, 73, 76, 94, 120, 139–40, 145–46, 149, 151, 153, 199, 207, 222, 229, 236, 247–51, 267n8 See also imagination; reveries farce, 179–80, 185, 193–94, 207 fate and fortune, 21, 29, 33–34, 39, 47, 96, 105, 113, 121, 132, 156, 185, 200, 231, 235, 244, 247–48, 253 Fauchet, Citizen, 246 Fayal Island, Azores, 39 Fazio, Michael W., 46, 198, 201, 204, 213, 216, 219, 264n17, 267n45, 268n52, 268n56 Federal City See Washington, D.C. federal government, U.S., 11, 176, 179, 253 Federalists, 88–89 Ferguson, Mr., 202 Fielding, Henry, 260n16 Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem ( James Macpherson), 79, 81–83, 262n78 First Phase, Plan II, Virginia State Penitentiary Project (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 169 First View of the Coast of Virginia (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 19, 20, 43, 261n85

Flavian Amphitheater, 158, 188 Flaxman, John, 14, 76, 79–83, 104, 105, 110, 112–14, 131–32, 181, 186, 193–94, 197–99, 249, 255, 258, 263n79, 265n44, 267n81, 270n3 Aeschylus, Plate 5, Io’s Dreams, 199 Aeschylus, Plate 16 The Appeal of the Theban Ladies, 181, 186 Aeschylus 26: Orestes over the Dead Bodies of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, 131 Iliad Plate 7: Venus Disguised Inviting Helen to the Chamber of Paris, 110 Iliad Plate 8: Venus Presenting Helen to Paris, 114 Iliad Plate 38: Iris Advises Priam to Obtain the Body of Hector, 81 Folkestone, England, 24 forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit (Vergil), 43, 231 See also memory fortune See fate and fortune France, 13–14, 33, 94, 158, 222–35 Revolutionary France, 234 Frederic the Second, King of Prussia, 102 Frederic(k)sburg, Virginia, 242 French Revolution, 11, 22, 76, 132, 135, 151, 176, 183, 230, 233–34, 269n28, 269n29, 269n38 Freneau, Phillip, 102 Frestal, Felix, 263n83 friends and friendship, 47, 51–52, 83, 85, 87–88, 92–95, 101, 120, 134, 140, 153, 155, 158–59, 162, 176, 236–38, 242, 246, 255, 257–58, 259n6, 263n27, 266n34, 270n6 Front of the Stage (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 162 frontispiece, 10 (detail), 78–79, 153, 177, 183–85, 189, 198, 199–201, 207, 222–23, 226–28, 247–51, 266n4 Frontispiece, An Essay on Landscape (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 153 Frontispiece from Designs of Buildings or Proposed to be Built in Virginia by B. Henry Latrobe Boneval from 1795 to 1799 (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 10 (detail), 198, 207 Fruau∑, Friedrich Renatus, 48, 59, 261n32 Fulneck, England, 47–48, 52, 58–60, 61, 62–64, 65, 73 See also Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck funeral oration for George Washington (Henry Lee), 263n62 Gandy, Joseph, 65, 195 garçons philosophes, 211 See also hermits and hermitages; Philosophière; retreat from public life gardens and gardening, 48, 57, 103–5, 151, 156, 202, 214, 219–20, 222, 264n16 Garden Temple/Retreat 201, 208–10, 211–12, 268n39 Gattle, George, 236–37 Gaugain, Thomas, James Beattie, 243

Index ·

genre(s) artistic, 19, 71, 118, 141, 143, 177, 220, 225, 229–31, 247, 262n72 scenes, 12, 17, 70, 100, 113, 256 hierarchy of, 143, 153, 229, 256 See also medium, watercolor Georgetown, Washington, D.C., 242 Germanna, Virginia, 264n3 Germany, 47–48, 50, 71, 85, 94, 122, 140, 155, 231 Gibbon, Edward, 22, 36, 40, 239, 260n16 Gilpin, William, 182 Gnadenfrey, Silesia (now Pi¬awa Górna, Poland), 48 Gorlitz, Germany, 48 Gracie, Mr., 202 Great Britain See Britain great chain of being, 30, 141, 155–58 Greco-Roman underworld, 146 Greek archaic models, 218 architecture, 187, 204 myth and mythology, 69, 156; tragedy, 130 See also Homer Green, J. W., 179 Green, Mrs., 179 Greenspring, 135, 136, 137 Greenspring, home of William Ludwell Less, James City County, Virginia (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 135, 136 Greenwood Park, 242, 269n45 ground plans, 54–56, 58, 214 Ground Plan of Mr. Tayloe’s House in the Foedera[l] City (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 214 Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus, A (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 177, 178, 176, 180–84, 189, 193–95, 207, 228 guillotine, 89, 183, 194–95 Gulliver, 13 Hadfield, George, 69, 161 Haiti, refugees from revolution, 169 Hallam, Lewis, Jr., 173 Hamilton, Alexander, 179–80 Hamlin, Talbot, 45–46, 242, 259n14, 267n1 Hammerwood Lodge, 65, 66–67, 69–71, 99, 219, 264n4 Hampton, Virginia, 90, 226–27, 228, 229, 230, 232–34, 238–39, 250 Harper, Robert Goodloe, 134, 265n36 Harpers Ferry, Virginia, 179 Harvey, Douglas S., 182, 267n73 Harvie, Colonel John, 209, 248 Hasse, Johann Adolf, 176, 267n56 Hastings, England, 25–26, 27–28, 29, 32, 101, 107, 120, 148, 236, 260n26 Havre de Grace, Maryland, 241 Haywood, Richard, 265n39 Hazlehurst, Mary, 253 See also Latrobe, Mary Elizabeth Hazlehurst Head Piece, Study, Tragedy Begging, and Farce Snatching the Mask from Comedy (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 185, 186, 188, 193–94, 207

Heartley, John, 48 Hector, 79–81, 83, 122–23 Hecuba, 83 Helen of Troy, 110–15 hermits and hermitages, 210, 243–47, 251 See also retreat from public life Hernnhut(h), 48–49 heroes and heroism, 12, 21–22, 39, 43, 76, 79, 82–83, 101–2, 108, 113–15, 118, 120, 123, 130, 132–34, 137, 175–76, 180–84, 186, 201, 218, 235–36, 254 Hesione’s rock, 122 hierarchy of genres See genre history and historical perspective, 22–24, 25, 29, 47, 50, 73, 83, 88, 109, 118–21, 123, 129, 131–32, 135–37, 141, 143, 145, 153, 183–84, 230–31, 233–34, 244, 254 fashion, 150 landscape as, 221, 254 literary, 193 theatrical, 193 See also cyclical theory of history; painting, history History of England (David Hume), 103, 259n16, 230n57, 263n60 Hogarth, William, 149 Homer, 79, 81–82, 110, 113, 119, 250 Iliad, 102, 110, 114 Odyssey, 115, 260n57 Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus), 102–5, 115, 175–77, 180–81, 184, 186, 193, 195, 263n58, 263n62, 267n56 Ars Poetica, 180 Ode I, 175, 177 Ode III, 3.1, 102–3, 105, 137 Horncastle, England, 74–75 See also Kirkstall Abbey Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 135 Howard, John, 266n13 Hume, David, 103, 260n16, 263n57, 263n60 ideology, 105, 115, 117, 120, 130, 133, 168, 176 Iliad (Homer), 80–83, 110, 112, 116, 123 Iliad Plate 7: Venus Disguised Inviting Helen to the Chamber of Paris ( John Flaxman), 110 Iliad Plate 8: Venus Presenting Helen to Paris ( John Flaxman), 114 Iliad Plate 38: Iris Advises Priam to Obtain the Body of Hector ( John Flaxman), 81 illusion, 41–42, 57, 105, 163, 173, 176–77, 184, 190–92, 194, 200, 227, 229–31, 235–36, 238, 240, 244, 247–51, 257 See also deception illustrated manuscripts and booklets, 16, 163, 160–68, 172, 174–75, 186, 188, 192–93, 195, 197–99, 201–3, 210, 222–23, 232, 248, 266n4, 267n50, 267n88, 267n6, 268n31 imagination, 13, 33, 79, 109–10, 113, 143, 145, 148, 190, 194, 199, 207, 222, 248, 254, 257 See also fancy and fantasy; reveries

279

immigrant(s) and immigration, 11–12, 15–17, 19–20, 22–23, 28–29, 42–43, 85–87, 89–90, 94, 114–15, 118, 127, 134, 137, 141–42, 158–59, 163–64, 174, 200, 222, 226, 229, 231–32, 238, 249–49, 251, 253–254, 257 immigrant artist, 115, 163–64 immigrant experience, 12, 86, 90, 127 immigrant identity, 85, 163 immigration series, 226–27, 232, 251 See also Breakfast Equipage set out for the Passengers of the Eliza, the Captain and Mate in all 9 Persons, March 4th, 1796 being the compleat set; Collection of Small Moonlights; Country Scenes Against a Background of Script [Squally Weather James River]; Frontispiece from Designs of Buildings or Proposed to be Built in Virginia by B. Henry Latrobe Boneval from 1795 to 1799; Three Small Landscapes. Rainy Weather; Watercolor: Two Views inchantment See enchantment/inchantment Indian Mother Mourning Her Child: An Illustration for Ned Evans, An (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 236 Inferno (Dante Alighieri), 118 Iris, 81–83 Isle of Wight, England, 31, 33 Italy, 92, 146, 154, 158, 218, 233 Jamaica, 257 James Beattie (Thomas Gaugain), 243 James City County, Virginia, 136 See also Greenspring James River, Virginia, 90–91, 93, 95–96, 139, 140, 158, 211, 226, 236, 238–39 Jamestown, Virginia, 135 January 6th, Δ past 7 o’clock a.m., View of the Azores nearest Island supposed to be St. Michael (afterwards [known] to be . . . ) (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 37 Je∑erson, Thomas, 108, 164–65, 179, 192, 263n35, 263n38, 266n11 Autobiography (Thomas Je∑erson), 166 John Tayloe House See Tayloe House Jourdan, Jean-Baptiste, 229–31 journalism, 233–34 journal of Christian Ignatius Latrobe See Latrobe, Christian Ignatius: journal of journals See Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, works of Jove, 21–22, 80, 103, 113 See also Jupiter Jupiter, 39 See also Jove justum virum (Horace), 102, 105, 137 keeping, concept of, 148–49 Kelly, Colonel, 201 Kent, England 71–72 Kirkstall Abbey (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 73, 74, 148–49, 154

280 · Index

Kirksted Abbey, 75 knacks (watercolor techniques), 139–43, 148, 159, 168, 222, 239, 249 Knight, Richard Payne, 90, 261n27 Königshayn, 51, 122, 261n19 Kröger, Rüdiger, 48, 261n26, 261n36 Ksiazkiewicz, Allison, 259n13 Lafayette, George Washington G. Motier, 112, 263n83 Lafayette, Marquis de, 263n83 Lancashire, England, 58–59, 89 Lander, Frederick, 48 landscape, 12–13, 16–17, 24–32, 43, 47, 50–52, 55, 57, 65, 71, 73–74, 76, 83, 86–91, 96, 100–109, 114–15, 117–21, 123–24, 126–30, 136–37, 139–46, 148–59, 169, 199, 219–22, 225, 227, 229, 238, 242, 249, 253–54, 262n72, 263n21, 265n10, 270n3 aesthetics, 100, 264n16 British theory, 89–90 cultivated, 244–45 design and designers, 17, 48, 103, 115, 151, 204, 211, 213–14, 264n16 European, 126 European theory, 142 form in, 146, 148 garden, 48 genre, 1443, 262n72 history, 16, 24, 74 natural or naturalistic, 49, 90, 103–4, 120, 122, 145, 151, 153, 158, 223, 247, 249 painting, 146, 264n16 painting in the United States, 87 park, 90 pendant views, 29, 32, 91 plantation, 86, 101 rendering techniques: 106, 148 revolutionary, 123 ruined, 119 scenes, 71, 95, 108–9, 238 serial views, 14, 87, 95, 102–9, 123–27, 228, 253, 256 studies, 142, 146 technique and theory, 89–90, 142, 152, 182, 263n21 treatise, 142 watercolor, 65, 87, 143, 157–58, 257 See also Essay on Landscape Landscape: A Didactic Poem (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 253n27 Landscapes 1–4 (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 146 landscape vignette title cartouche from Plan von der Leitung des Roehrwassers vom Berthelsdorfer Gerritorio nach Hernhuth ( Johann Gottfried Schulz), 48, 49 Land’s End, England, 33 Laocoon, 251 Latin language, 20, 43, 45, 48, 103, 168, 180, 182, 184, 194, 231, 260n4 Latrobe, Anna Louisa Eleanor, 261n10

Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, architectural commissions, designs and renderings of, 12, 52–70, 161–64, 171, 193–95, 222–23 See also Bank of Pennsylvania; Droilsden; Fairfield; Fulneck; Garden/Temple Retreat; Hammerwood Lodge; Pennock House; Richmond Theater Proposal; Tayloe House; Virginia Pententiary; Washington Monument; Waln House Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, artwork of Ballroom, 160 (detail), 190, 191, 192–94 Bathing Machine, The, 26 Breakfast Equipage set out for the Passengers of the Eliza, the Captain and Mate in all 9 Persons, March 4th, 1796 being the compleat set, 21 Collection of Small Moonlights, 226–27, 228, 229, 232, 234–36, 238–39, 250 “Cornwallis’ Cave,” 129 Detail, Bedroom Alcove, 210 Detail: Plan and sections of the Dining Room, 220–21 Detail, showing Section 1–3, Garden/Temple Retreat, 211–12 Dover, as seen from the Eliza, 23 East Flank, Tayloe House, 215 Elevations detail Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den], 56 Exact view of the great East Window of the Abbey, which now leads into the Church, Kirkstall Abbey, An, 74 First Phase, Plan II, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 170 First View of the Coast of Virginia, 20 Frontispiece, An Essay on Landscape, 153 Frontispiece from Designs of Buildings or Proposed to be Built in Virginia by B. Henry Latrobe Boneval from 1795 to 1799, 10 (detail), 198 Front of the Stage, 162 Garden/Temple Retreat, Sheet 1–3, 201, 208–9, 210–12 Greenspring, home of William Ludwell Less, James City County, Virginia, 136 Ground Plan of Mr. Tayloe’s House in the Foedera[l] City, 214 Groupe of Theatrical Apparatus, A, 177, 178, 180, 179–83, 189, 193–95, 207, 228 Head Piece, Study, Tragedy Begging, and Farce Snatching the Mask from Comedy, 185, 186, 188, 193–94, 207 January 6th, Δ past 7 o’clock a.m., View of the Azores nearest Island supposed to be St. Michael (afterwards [known] to be . . . ), 37 Kirkstall Abbey, 74 Landscapes 1–4, 146 map of the Pennock Property, 203 Mason vignette, The, 156 Moonlight scene at Hastings, England, 28 Nelson House and Fortifications, Yorktown, 127, 129 Niemsch Peasants at Rest, 155 No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire, 58 Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 60, 64

Oft by the Setting Moon, 80 Outlines of a group for another drawing of Mount Vernon, 111 Pennock House: Second Floor Plan and Elevation, 205 Pennock House Plans, ground and chamber stories, 205 Pico, one of the Azores at 8 o’clock a.m., January 6th, bearing NNW about 10 or 11 Leagues Distant, 38 Pico di Azores with one of the boats used among the Western Isles, 38 Plan and sections of the Dining Room, Tayloe House, 219 Plan of Part of the City of Richmond Showing the Situation of the Proposed Building, 192 Plan of the new Cong. Place at Droilsden, 53 Plans Relative to the new Cong. At Droilsden, Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den], 54 Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den], 54–55 Ravenstones at Saddleworth vignette, The, 154 Rocks on the James River, 140 Saxon stile of the West entrance, 74 Sea Anemone, 29 Second Phase, Plan I, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 170 Section Looking North, Tayloe House, 216 Section Looking West, Tayloe House, 217 Section or Internal View of the Theatre & Stage, 192 Sheet IV, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 165 Situation of the Eliza, December 21st 1795, 18 (detail), 34 Sketch at Norfolk, 203 Sketch of a group for a drawing of Mount Vernon, 115 Sketch of the Bay of Naples, 1–3, 144–45 Sketch of the Bridge at the little Falls of the Potowmac, 241 Sketch of the Estate of Henry Banks Esqr. On the York River, 97 Sketch of the Situation of the Eliza, December 21, 1795, 34 Sketch of Washington’s Island, James River, Virginia, 94 Sketch of York town, from the beach, looking to the West, 126 South Front, Tayloe House, 215 Studies of Trees 1–2, 151–52 Taste Anno 1620, 150 Three Small Landscapes. Rainy Weather, 226, 227 title Cartouche, vignette detail, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 63, 64 Title Cartouche detail No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire, 59 Title Cartouche detail Plan of the new Congn. Place At Droylsden, 57 Tollenstein, in the Mountains of Bohemia, The, 50 trompe l’oeil detail, Plan of the new Cong. Place At Droylsden, 57 untitled vignette at Yorktown, 130

Index ·

Venus Flycatcher, The, 138, 157 View at Little York in Virginia, 128 View in Pennock’s Hall & Staircase, 190, 206, 204 View in Perspective of the Gate of the Penitentiary House, Virginia State Penitentiary Project, 166 View of Dover, taken at Sea, 3 miles o∑ Land, A, 31 View of East Grinstead, 44 (detail), 70 View of Hammerwood Lodge Park from the Southeast, 65 View of Lord Botetourt’s mutilated Statue Wmsburg, 133 View of Mount Vernon looking to the North, 105 View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West, 84 (detail), 104 View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West (Version 2), 109 View of Norfolk from [Smith’s] Point, 125 View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk, 118 (detail), 119 View of Richmond from Bushrod Washington’s Island, 92 View of the Coast of England at Hastings, 27 View of the fishing Shore on the York river at Airy Plains, 99, 100, 101 View of the House from the Stage, 187 View of the North front of Belvidere, Richmond, 95 View of the Potowmac about a mile above George town, taken from the road, to the Westward, 240 View of the Summit of Pico di Azores, as it appeared at 12 o’clock, 37 View of the undercli∑ on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, England, 31 View on the Elizabeth River, Norfolk Virginia, 124 View to the North from the lawn of Mount Vernon, 6–7 (detail), 107 vignette detail, No. 11: The C.[ongregation] Shop, 60 vignette detail, No. 12: C[ongregation] Inn, 60 York River, looking N.W. up to West Point, 98–99 Washington Monument Proposal: Decorative Ceiling Motif, 252 (detail), 254 Washington Monument Proposal: Rendered Perspective, 255 Watercolor: Two Views of the Potomac and a Portrait, 224 (detail), 226 See also watercolor Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, biography of, 14–15, 17, 45–47, 63, 87, 102, 121, 152, 158, 249, 253, 257 architectural career of, 11–12, 55, 64, 70–71, 197–201, 207, 222–23, 254–55, 267n17 Atlantic crossing of, 19–43 bankruptcy of, 13, 15, 20, 41, 45, 64, 83, 245, 253, 260n7 depression and mental state of, 120, 220, 250 education in drawing and watercolor, 47–52 education of, 12, 19, 21, 30, 45–49, 52, 63, 83, 88, 121, 164, 198, 247, 261n6 European life and influence of, 41–42 friends and friendships of, 47, 50–52, 83, 85, 88, 92–95, 101, 120, 140, 155, 158–59, 168, 173, 176, 179, 209–10, 236–38, 241–42, 246–47, 255, 257 immigrant years of, 17, 25, 255 Moravian education in architecture of, 46 Moravian period of, 61

ties to Moravian church, 15, 45, 52, 63, 71, 73, 83, 121, 155, 257 work as a watercolor instructor, 142 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, sketchbooks and sketches of, 12–17, 15, 23–25, 33, 39–43, 47–48, 50–52, 70–71, 75–76, 79, 86–87, 91–92, 95–105, 108, 110, 112–13, 117–18, 123–29, 134, 143–46, 149, 152, 154–55, 158–59, 168, 188, 194, 202–3, 209, 209–10, 223, 225, 229–32, 236, 238–43, 247–48, 253, 255–57, 260n18, 260n60, 261n20, 261n35, 262n56, 263n16, 263n48, 263n72, 263n74, 264n2, 264n16, 264n21, 265n38, 265n44, 266n63, 267n87, 267n1 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, views on accuracy in landscape, 146 American landscape, 141 artistic license, 26, 101, 146, 149 British immigrant identity, 86 composition, 145 form in landscape, 146, 148 gender and landscape, 153 heroism, 132 hierarchy of the genres, 143 his own immigrant identity, 86, 88 historical truth, 119, 121, 129–31 historic preservation, 136 landscape design, 103, 517 natural history, 29–30, 35, 39, 104, 139, 155–56 novels and fiction, 104, 119, 240 pacifism, 137 picturesque tourism, 48, 50–51 predilection for radical neoclassical design, 61 professional identity, 154 rational design ethos, 249 representing trees, 150–51 selfhood/self-representation 33, 137, 159, 189, 247, 250 shipboard life, 42 social vision for watercolor, 174 virtue, 132 watercolor practice, 12–14, 51, 141 152, 159, 227, 254, 257 watercolor theory and technique, 12, 139, 141, 248 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, writings of Anniversary Oration, 251, 269n67 Apology, The, 179–80, 231, 267n59 correspondence and letters, 11, 13, 19, 43, 46, 83, 86, 94, 167, 175–77, 179, 184, 194, 209–11, 226–27, 236–38, 246, 259n2, 261n3, 263n13, 265n38, 267n60 Designs of a Building proposed to be erected in Virginia (see Designs of a Theatre) Designs of Buildings Erected or Proposed to be Built in Virginia by B. Henry Latrobe Boneval from 1795 to 1799 (see Designs of Buildings) Essay on Landscape (see Essay on Landscape) journals, 12–13, 16–17, 19, 23–25, 33–35, 42–43, 45, 87–88, 92, 105, 120–21, 129, 132, 135, 137, 158, 168, 179–80, 194, 222, 227, 231, 242, 256–57, 260n20, 260n18, 261n77, 263n1, 263n4–5, 263n13, 263n22, 263n29, 263n40, 263n41, 263n50, 261549, 266n34, 267n60, 270n6

281

Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 16, 46, 257, 259n14 Latrobe, Christian Ignatius, 47, 63, 71, 83, 103, 261n10, 262n50, 266n34 journal of, 260n20, 261n19 travel memoire to South Africa, 262n58 Latrobe, Henry Sellon Boneval, 253 Latrobe, John Frederic, 261n10 Latrobe, Justinia, 261n10 Latrobe, Justinia Elizabeth, 261n10 Latrobe, Lydia Sellon, 20, 64, 81, 123, 260n5, 264n4 Latrobe, Mary Agnes, 261n10 Latrobe, Mary Elizabeth Hazelhurst, 15 See also Hazelhurst, Mary Latrobe, Osmun, 260n18 Latrobe, Rev. Benjamin, 16, 47, 55, 57, 64, 86, 179, 262n50, 266n13 Latrobe’s View of America, 1795–1820 (Edward C. Carter, II, et al.), 39, 45, 228–31, 232, 260n4 Lee, Henry, 263n62, 270n4 Lee, William Ludwell, 135–37 Lees, Mr., 155 Leeds, England, 73 Le Havre, France, 33 Lenni, Karl, 268n20 letters, epistolary See correspondence Libation Bearers (Aeschylus) 131, 265n29 See also Choephoroi libertas and liberty, 22, 79, 89, 134, 155, 163, 177, 179–80, 251, 265n46 Liston, Henrietta Marchant, 257 Liston, Sir Robert, 257, 270n6 Little Falls, Virginia, 240, 241, 242 Little York, Virginia, 26, 127, 128, 129, 149, 260n26 See also Yorktown Lock, William, 71 Locke, John, 237, 269n39 London, England, 15–16, 29, 42, 45, 51–52, 58, 63–65, 69, 73, 75–76, 83, 164, 167, 173, 195, 225, 230, 233, 245, 253–54, 256, 260n7, 262n51, 264n10, 266n13 Lord Botetourt (Norborne Berkeley, 4th Baron Botetourt), see Botetourt, Norborne Berkley Lord Cornwallis See Cornwallis, Charles Lord Nelson’s House, 127, 129 Lorrain, Claude, 109, 143, 230 Lounsbury, Carl, 265n39 love feast, Moravian, 48 Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), 122–23, 137, 175, 235, 250, 265n12, 265n15 Bellum Civile, 122, 175, 265n12 Maclure, William, 242 Macpherson, James, 76, 79, 81–83, 262n78 Madison, Dolly, 268n60 Manchester, Virginia, 52, 90–91 map of the Pennock Property (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 203 Marcus Atilius Regulus See Regulus, Marcus Atilius

282 · Index

Marschall, Friedrich von, 48 Mason, William, 263n27 Mason vignette, The, (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 156 McClure, William, 93, 247 Medici Villa at Poggio a Caiano, 218 medium, watercolor, 13–15, 46, 65, 76, 83, 143, 149, 157–58, 172, 174–75, 193, 195, 204, 223, 228–29, 241, 253–56 See also genre medley prints, 230, 261n75 melancholy, 28, 73–75, 83, 96, 120–21, 137, 139, 164, 232, 236, 245, 256 See also depression; morbid sensibility mementoes, 51–52, 140 memento mori, 141, 179 See also vanitas memory, 20, 83, 178, 184, 261n27 cultural, 118 historical, 136 See also forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit Menelaus, 112, 113 Mercury, 37, 41 Metastasio, Pietro (born Pietro Antonio Domenico Trapassi), 172, 263n56 Atilius Regulus 176–77, 267n50 Mills, Robert, 265n21, 270n2 Minstrel or the Progress of Genius, The ( James Beattie), 225, 240, 243–48, 250, 267n2 minstrels, 243, 245, 247 monarchy, absolute, 235 Monmouthshire, England, 76 See also Tintern Abbey Montgomery County, Maryland, 242, 269n45 monuments and monumental structures or forms, 49, 51–52, 61, 79, 106, 122, 129, 132–34, 140, 167, 242, 248, 250–55 moon and moonlight, 27, 29, 35–36, 81–82, 161, 189–90, 194, 232–34, 236 Moonlight scene at Hastings, England (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 28 Moore, John Hamilton, 260n23 Moravian archives, 45, 49, 59 Church House archives in London, 45, 52, 59, 61 Nazareth archives, 47, 261n14 Unitätsarchiv (Unity Archives) 45–46, 48, 52, 61, 261n20 Moravian Church and community, 15, 17, 45–48, 50–52, 59, 61, 63–64, 71, 73, 83, 121, 155, 158, 256, 261n6, 261n9, 261n23, 261n37, 262n46 Moravian education and schools, 46–48, 51, 164 See also pedagogium Moravian watercolor tradition, 48, 50, 59, 61, 70, 164, 261n20 morbid sensibility, 176, 212, 255 See also depression; melancholy Moreau, Jean-Victor-Marie, 233 Mount Vernon, 84, 85, 101–3, 104–5, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 114–15, 125, 128, 232, 243, 265n44 mourning, 13, 80–82, 118–20, 130–32, 236 mummies and mummy oil, 233–35, 269n25

Naples, Italy, 144–45, 146, 154 Napoleon Bonaparte, 233–34 natural history, 17, 29–30, 143, 154, 156–58, 232, 253, 266n63 See also Sea Anemone natural world and nature, 24, 26, 30, 32, 36, 39, 46, 49–51, 58, 62–63, 69, 73–75, 87–89, 96, 98–99, 103–4, 108, 120, 122–23, 125–27, 130, 139–41, 143, 144–6, 148–159, 161, 184, 211–12, 214, 219–21, 225, 231, 241, 243–47 natural environment, 67, 86, 108, 153, 237 See also landscape: natural Nazareth Hall See Moravian Archives Nelson, Secretary Thomas, 127 Nelson, Vernon H., 46, 48, 261n10 Nelson House and Fortifications, Yorktown (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 127, 129 neoclassicism and neoclassical style, 22, 49, 61, 67, 69, 106, 113, 153, 166, 171, 172, 186, 185, 189–90, 192–93, 204, 207, 212, 214, 223, 249, 265n44 Neo-Palladian style, 204 New England, 87 New Hampshire, 88 New Jersey, 173 New Orleans, Louisiana, 87, 253–54 New World, 21–22, 87, 90, 114, 117, 127, 137, 220, 231, 234, 244, 249 New York, New York, 158, 173, 182, 261n74, 266n53 Nicholson, Charles, 252n51 Niemsch Peasants at Rest vignette (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 155 Niesky, Germany, 47–48, 63 Nile River, 200 Nilotis, 200, 249 No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 58 Norbury Park, Surrey, England, 71, 72 Norfolk, Virginia, 19, 37, 84–90, 94, 117, 118 (detail), 119, 123, 124–25, 126–28, 130, 172, 201–2, 203, 238–39, 248, 264n1 Norfolk Theater, 173 ruins, 117–118, 123–25, 238 Nullum est Sine Nomine Saxum (C.S.), 122 nunc est bibendum (Horace), 175, 184 ocean See Atlantic Ocean Octagon House, Washington D.C., 213 Octavian, 22, 122, 175, 184 See also Augustus Odes (Horace), 102, 175, 177, 180–81, 184, 186, 263n62 Odysseus, 34, 118, 156 Odyssey (Homer), 115, 261n57 Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck, 52, 56, 61, 62–64 Oedipus, 186 Oenone, 122 Oft by the Setting Moon (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 80

Okely, William, 48 Old American Company, 173, 182 Old Testament, 79 Old World, 83, 126–27, 137, 157–58, 163, 231, 234 Olympus and Olympian gods, 37, 200 O’Malley, Therese, 106, 264n16 Oresteia (Aeschylus), 130–32, 175 Orestes, 130–32 Ossian See Macpherson, James Othello (William Shakespeare), 260n47 Outlines of a group for another drawing of Mount Vernon (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 111 painters and painting, 13, 41, 47, 71, 140, 146, 148–49, 154, 158–59, 181, 188–90, 219, 231–32, 239, 242, 255, 261n27, 265n10, 265n16, 269n48 architectural, 190 deception, 229, 267n4, 267n7 history, 158, 220–22, 231, 258n68 panorama, 39, 73, 98–99, 101, 129 See also knacks; landscape watercolor; still life; watercolor Pantheon, 188 Papers of Benjamin Henry Latrobe See Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, works of Paris, son of Priam, 100, 112–14, 122 patrons, artistic, 69, 73, 142, 220, 222 architectural, 142, 202, 207, 209, 219, 250 Peale, Charles Wilson, 231 Staircase Group, The, 231 pedagogium, 48 See also Moravian education and schools Penitentiary House (Virginia State Penitentiary Project), 158, 163, 164, 165–66, 167–68, 169–70, 171–72, 174, 179, 195, 205, 266n23 Pennock, Captain William, 200–203, 207, 209 family, 202, 204 House and property, 196, 198, 202, 203, 204, 205–6, 211, 213, 219, 248, 267n16 Pennock House: Second Floor Plan and Elevation (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 205 Pennock House Plans, ground and chamber stories (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 205 Pennsylvania, 15, 48, 121, 141, 164, 197–98, 231, 242, 247–50 Petersburg, Virginia, 95–96 Pevensey Bay, 24 Pfeil, Count Karl Friedrich von, 155, 266n56 Pharsalia, (Lucan), 265n12 See also Bellum Civile Phidias, 110, 218, 251 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 17, 86, 88, 139, 141, 158, 164, 173, 179–80, 197–201, 209–10, 213, 225, 242, 247–49, 251, 253–54, 257, 261n74, 265n23, 267n83, 267n4 philosophers and philosophy, 121, 139, 142, 151–52, 157–58, 210–12, 245–47 Philosophière, retreat, 209–10, 212, 235 See also hermits and hermitage; retreat from public life Ph(o)ebus, 245

Index ·

Pico Island, Azores, 36, 37–38, 39–41 picturesque, style and theory, 12, 24, 32, 50–51, 58–59, 73–74, 89, 91, 98, 101, 107, 128, 145, 149, 204, 206, 212, 214, 220, 238, 242, 244, 261n20, 261n32 tourism and tourist, 48, 51, 73, 155, 244, 261n20 Pinnegar, David, 262n55, 262n56 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 66, 68, 258n54 Borghese Vase. Vasi, Candelabri. . . . ed Antichi, 68 Piroli, Tommaso, 110 Piscataway River, Virginia, 108 Plan and sections of the Dining Room, Tayloe House (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 220–21 Plan of Part of the City of Richmond Showing the Situation of the Proposed Building (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 192 Plan of the new Cong. Place at Droilsden (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 53 Plans Relative to the new Congn. At Droylsden; Ground Plan of the Estate at Droils[den] (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 54–55 Plan und Profil title cartouche from Plan von der Leitung des Roehrwassers vom Berthelsdorfer Territorio nach Herrnhuth ( Johann Gottfried Schulz), 48, 49 Plate I Frontispiece, America. A Prophecy, (William Blake), 78 poems, poets and poetry, 76, 82–83, 90, 102, 113–14, 118, 122, 153, 175, 180, 212, 220, 236, 239–40, 243–44, 260n11, 262n68, 263n27, 264n4, 266n46 See also Ars Poetica; Bellum Civile; Fingal; Iliad; Minstrel, The; Odes; Odyssey; stanzas; verses Poggio a Caiano, Italy, 218 Poland, 47, 155 politics, politicians and political topics, 12–13, 22, 29, 34, 45–46, 73, 76, 86, 88–89, 94, 96, 103, 134–35, 137, 149, 151, 167–68, 175, 177, 179, 182–85, 193, 195, 223, 232–34, 239, 246, 251, 259n4, 260n11, 260n614, 260n15, 263n24, 263n38, 263n59 political cartoons, 183, 229, 259n4, 259n15 See also American politics Polyneices, 186 Pompey (C. Pompeius Magnus), 122–23 Pope, Alexander, 110, 113 Porcupine, Peter (William Cobbett), 179 portraits, 11–12, 41, 105–6, 153–54, 181–83, 186, 220–22, 225–26, 242–43, 265n39, 269n48 Portsmouth, Virginia, 42, 90 Poto(w)mac River, 103–4, 106, 108–9, 114, 221, 224 (detail), 225, 226, 240–41, 242, 245, 268n3 Praxiteles, 251 presentation, booklets, 164, 166 drawing, 48, 52, 61, 163, 232, 266n4 watercolors, 60, 95 Priam, 80–83 prison, 164, 166–67, 172, 266n23 prison architecture and design, 164, 166, 266n13, 266n27 prison reform, 167, 172, 262n13 See also Penitentiary House

Progress of Genius, The See Minstrel, The Prometheus, 200–201 Prussia, 102 Pylades, 131 Quandt, Johann Christian, 51, 261n36 See also Amicis Quarrier, Major Alexander, 174, 189 Quesnay’s Academy, 173 Radcli∑e, Ann, 90, 104, 263n26, 263n71 Rainy Weather See Three Small Landscapes. Rainy Weather (Benjamin Henry Latrobe) Randolph, Edmund, 246, 269n64 Rapidan River, Virginia, 265n3 Rappahannoc River, Virginia, 243 Ratcli∑e, Mrs. Ann See Radcli∑e, Ann Ravenstones at Saddleworth vignette, The (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 154 Regulus, Marcus Atilius, 176 Reichel, Carl (Charles) Gotthold, 48, 61, 261n23 rendering See artistic: rendering; architectural: rendering Republican ideals and Republicanism, 11, 22, 121, 176–82, 184, 234–35, 237, 246 retreat from public life, 93, 146, 209–12, 235, 247 See also Garden/Temple Retreat; hermits and hermitages; Philosophière reveries, 94, 120, 137, 163, 176, 222, 236, 244, 247. See also fancy and fantasy; imagination revolution and revolutionary sentiments, 13, 79, 118, 121, 122–23, 130, 133, 175, 183–84, 223, 230, 235 See also Age of Revolutions; American Revolution; French Revolution Revolutionary America See America, Revolutionary Revolutionary France See France, Revolutionary Revolutionary War, American See American Revolution Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 243 Rhine River, 233–34 Rhoades, Tommy or Thomas Rhoades Esquire, 85 See also Rothe, Baron von Richmond, England, 90 Richmond, Virginia, 85, 90–91, 92, 94–96, 135, 163–64, 172–73, 177, 179–80, 182, 193, 197, 199, 201, 212, 236, 238, 242, 248–49, 253 Eagle Tavern, 201 Richmond Theater and Richmond Theater Proposal, 160 (detail), 161, 162, 163, 173–177, 178, 179–84, 186, 187, 188–95, 198, 206–7, 266n4, 266n31, 267n58, 267n59, 267n60, 267n87 Rocks on the James River (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 140 Romanticism, 16, 24, 26, 92, 96, 133, 220, 223, 244

283

Rome and Roman world, 21–22, 24, 68, 122–23, 175, 184, 188, 231, 239, 249, 264n15, 268n53, 268n19 Romney, England, 24 Rothe, Baron von, 85–86, 263n3 See also Rhodes, Tommy ruins, 12, 17, 24, 26, 28, 48, 51, 58, 71, 73–74, 79, 101, 118 (detail), 119, 120–27, 129–30, 132–33, 135, 137, 139, 141, 148, 158, 166, 175, 180, 185, 220–21, 232, 238–39, 249–51, 264n7, 270n3 See also Virginia: revolutionary ruins of Saddleworth, England, 154, 155 Sandby, Paul, 71–73 View of Vinters at Boxley, Kent, with Mr. Whatman’s Turkey Paper Mills (Vinters and Turkey Mill), A, 72 Sandby, Thomas, 71–72 View of Boxhill from Norbury Park, Surrey, 72 Sanddown Castle, England, 24 São Jorge Island, Azores, 39 satire, 14, 149, 175, 229, 237 Saxon stile of the West entrance (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 73, 74 Saxony, 94 Scandella, Giambattista, 11, 13, 92–91, 175–77, 179–80, 184, 194, 200, 209–10, 243, 246–47, 259n2, 260n9, 266n4, 267n60 Schachmann, Carl Adolph Gottlob von, 48, 51, 122, 261n19 Schulz, Johann Gottfried, 48–49, 53, 57, 61 landscape vignette title cartouche from Plan von der Leitung des Roehrwassers vom Berthelsdorfer Territorio nach Herrnhuth, 48, 49 Plan und Profil title cartouche from Plan von der Leitung des Roehrwassers vom Berthelsdorfer Territorio nach Herrnhuth, 48, 49 Scotland and Scots, 85–86, 93, 202, 244–45, 247, 267n53 sculpture and sculptors, 66, 133–34, 199, 214, 218–19, 249, 255 relief, 130, 215–16, 242 See also statues Scylla, 21 Sea Anemone (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 29 Second Phase, Plan I, Virginia State Penitentiary Project (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 170 Section Looking North, Tayloe House (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 216 Section Looking West, Tayloe House (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 217 Section or Internal View of the Theatre & Stage (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 192 Selma See “Songs of Selma, The” sensibility, cult of, 41, 75, 79, 91, 115, 120–21, 163, 176, 194, 212, 251, 255, 264n8 serial images, 25, 87, 119 Serres, John Thomas, 260n66 Shakespeare, William, 182, 260n47

284 · Index

Sheet IV, Virginia State Penitentiary Project (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 165, 167, 171 Sherman, Susanne K., 173–74, 266n29, 266n38 ships, 20, 23–24, 27, 29, 32–36, 42, 124–25, 129, 202–4, 233–35, 260n3, 261n69, 261n74 See also boats; vessels, sailing Shockoe church, 268n31 Shockoe Hill, Richmond, Virginia, 173 Silene, 156 Silesia, 46, 154–55, 158 Sirens, 156 Situation of the Eliza, December 21st 1795 (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 18 (detail), 35 Sketch at Norfolk (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 203 sketchbooks and sketching, 51–52, 261n20, 261n35 See also Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, sketchbooks and sketches of Sketch of a group for a drawing of Mount Vernon (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 115 Sketch of the Bay of Naples, 1–3 (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 144–45 Sketch of the Bridge at the little Falls of the Potowmac (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 241 Sketch of the Estate of Henry Banks Esqr. On the York River (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 97 Sketch of the Situation of the Eliza, December 21, 1795 (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 34 Sketch of Washington’s Island, James River, Virginia (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 91, 93 Sketch of York town, from the beach, looking to the West (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 126, 127, 129 slavery and slaves, 13, 89, 98–101, 112–13, 121, 137, 161, 176, 204, 211, 216, 237, 263n16 Smeaton, John, 71 Smollett, Tobias, 260n16 Snadon, Patrick A., 46, 198, 201, 204, 213, 216, 219, 260n17, 267n17, 268n45, 268n52, 268n56 Soane, Sir John, 65 Sommer, Frank H., III, 199, 264n16 “Songs of Selma, The” ( James Macpherson), 79, 81, 83 South Africa, 70, 262n58 South Carolina, 172, 265n29 South Front, Tayloe House (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 215 Spallanzani, Lazzarro, 268n20 Spangenberg, August Gottlieb, 63 Sperling, Harriet, 66 Sperling, John, 65, 69 Spotswood, Alexander, 265n3 Spotswood, Susan Catherine, 139–40, 142–43, 148, 152–53, 156–57, 159, 265n3 Squally Weather James River (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 226, 238–39 See also Country Scenes; Three Small Landscapes Staircase Group, The (Charles Wilson Peale), 231 stammbücher, 50–52, 232, 261n20 See also Amicis stanzas, 123, 156, 225, 240, 244–45, 263n27 See also poems; verses statues, 69, 134–35, 219, 265n38, 265n39, 265n46 See also sculpture and sculptor

still life, 177, 179, 181, 178, 182, 184, 220, 222, 231 Stockach, battle of, 233 Strickland, William, 270n2 Studies of Trees, 1–2 (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 151–52 Study (George Bickham), 230 Surrey, England, 71–72 Sweden, 257 Swift, Jonathan, 13 Taste Anno 1620 (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 149, 150, 181 Tayloe, Colonel John, 213–14, 218 Tayloe House, 201, 213, 214–17, 219–21, 222 Temple of Apollo at Delos, 268n52 Tercera, Azores, 39 Thames River, England, 90–91 theater, 161–63, 172–95, 197, 207, 223 Thebes, 186, 210 Theseus, 69 Thomas, Richard F., 22 Thornton, William, 213 Three Small Landscapes. Rainy Weather (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 226, 227 Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti filius Augustus, 263n38 Tintern Abbey, 73, 75–76 title cartouche, detail No. 1: Ground p[lan] of Fairfield in Lancashire (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 59 title vignette detail, Oeconomy House of the Boys at Fulneck (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 63–64 Tivoli, Italy, 221 Todtenstein, Der (Unknown), 51 Tollenstein, in the Mountains of Bohemia, The (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 50, 51, 73, 155 topographical features and techniques, 12, 26, 29, 36, 39–40, 65, 70–71, 73–74, 86, 96–97, 109, 127, 192 Toumlin, Mr., 88 tours, tourism and tourists, 17, 24–25, 50–53, 73, 86, 89, 130, 134, 136, 144, 149, 163, 183, 194, 223, 257, 261n19, 261n20, 262n64, 263n13, 264n24 transatlantic and transatlanticism, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 29, 43, 46, 94, 96, 118, 173, 181, 185, 239, 253, 259n15 Transept of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire ( Joseph Mallord William Turner), 77 Trapassi, Pietro Antonio Domenico See Metastasio, Pietro travel writing, 87–88, 263n13 trompe l’oeil, 14, 19, 23, 41–43, 57, 158–59, 177, 181, 184, 188–89, 199, 223, 225–34, 236, 238–40, 244, 246–51 and autobiography, 231 and the “Age of Revolutions,” 232 trompe l’oeil detail Plan of the new Cong. Place At Droylsden (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 57 Troy and Trojan War, 21–22, 79–80, 82–83, 110–12, 113, 122–23, 131, 136, 141, 149, 235 Turkey Mill, England, 71, 72 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 70, 75–76, 195 Transept of Tintern Abbey, Monmouthshire, 77 Twickenham, England, 90–91

ubi panis ibi patria, 231 ubi solatia ibi patria, 231–32, 235 Udolpho Castle, 104 See also Radcli∑e, Ann undeception, 94, 101, 230, 236 underworld, 22, 81, 118, 120, 146 Unitas Fratrum, 46 See also Church of the United Brethren; Moravian Church and Community Unitätsarchiv See Moravian archives United Brethren See Church of the United Brethren; Moravian Church and Community United States of America, 11, 13, 16–17, 20, 22, 33, 41, 43, 45, 49, 82–83, 85–89, 93, 96, 103, 110, 115, 117, 118, 123, 127, 133, 137, 140, 142–43, 150–51, 164, 173, 175, 182–83, 190, 197–99, 202, 210, 220, 222, 229, 233–36, 246–47, 250–51, 253, 256, 259n2, 263n4, 263n24, 263n38, 264n16, 267n83, 268n32, 268n7 See also America Unknown. Der Todtenstein, 51 Unknown [Quandt?]. Amicis, 52 untitled vignette at Yorktown (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 127, 130, 139 vanitas, 58, 179, 183 See also memento mori vario sembiante l’istessa virtú, 176 Venice, Italy, and Venetians, 15, 176–77, 175 Venetian Republic, 179, 251 Venus, 110, 112–13 Venus (Praxiteles), 251 Venus Flycatcher, The (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 138 (detail), 156, 157, 158 Vergil (P. Vergilius Maro), 21–22, 250 See also Aeneid verses, 51, 90, 153, 156, 246, 250, 263n27 See also poems and poetry; stanzas vessels, sailing, 19, 35, 40, 109, 117, 123, 127, 203–4, 233, 265n21 See also boats; ships Vesuvius, Italy, 146 View at Little York in Virginia (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 128 View in Pennock’s Hall & Staircase (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 196 (detail), 204, 206 View in Perspective of the Gate of the Penitentiary House, Virginia State Penitentiary Project (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 166 View of Boxhill from Norbury Park, Surrey (Thomas Sandby), 72 View of Dover, taken at Sea, 3 miles o∑ Land, A (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 31 View of East Grinstead (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 44 (detail), 70 View of Hammerwood Lodge Park from the Southeast (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 65 View of Lord Botetourt’s mutilated Statue Wmsburg (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 133 View of Mount Vernon looking to the North (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 105

Index ·

View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 84 (detail), 104 View of Mount Vernon looking towards the South West (Version 2) (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 109 View of Norfolk from [Smith’s] Point (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 125 View of Part of the Ruins of Norfolk (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 118 (detail), 119 View of Richmond from Bushrod Washington’s Island (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 92 View of the Coast of England at Hastings (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 27 View of the fishing Shore on the York river at Airy Plains (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 99, 100, 101 View of the House from the Stage (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 187 View of the North front of Belvidere, Richmond (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 95 View of the Potowmac about a mile above George town, taken from the road, to the Westward (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 240 View of the Summit of Pico di Azores, as it appeared at 12 o’clock (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 37 View of the undercli∑ on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, England (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 31 View of Vinters at Boxley, Kent, with Mr. Whatman’s Turkey Paper Mills (Vinters and Turkey Mill), A (Paul Sandby), 72 View on the Elizabeth River, Norfolk Virginia (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 124 View to the North from the lawn of Mount Vernon (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 2 (detail), 107 vignette detail, No. 11: The C.[ongregation] Shop (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 60 vignette detail, No. 12: C[ongregation] Inn (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 60 Vinters, England, 71, 72 Virginia and Virginians, 11–15, 17, 19, 20, 25, 27, 30, 41–43, 46, 51, 70, 73, 79, 83, 85–95, 99, 101–3, 108, 114–15, 117, 122–23, 127–30, 133, 135–37, 139–41, 145, 152, 155, 156–57, 159, 161–64, 165, 168, 173, 173, 182, 195, 197–201, 203, 211, 222–23, 227, 231–40, 245–51, 253–55, 257, 261n85, 262n64, 263n16, 263n34, 265n39, 265n46, 265n4, 266n62, 266n23, 266n27, 266n29, 267n56, 270n3 agriculture in, 237; built environment of, 94, 98, 118, 121, 127, 129–30, 134, 135–36, 143, 173, 201–2, 223 coast, 19–20, 260n3 culture of, 86, 93 domestic architecture of, 94–95 economy of, 238 history of, 85, 88, 99, 117, 123, 128, 134–35, 137 landscape, 89–91, 103–6 poverty in, 133 revolutionary ruins of, 12, 17, 117, 123, 127 shabby architecture of, 95, 129 slavery in, 100–101, 121, 137 society in, 96, 102, 140, 189, 236–38

theater in, 174 See also Greenspring; Little Falls; Little York; Mount Vernon; Norfolk; Richmond; Williamsburg; York River; Yorktown Virginia State Capitol (Richmond), 91, 166, 192, 263n35 Virginia State Capitol (Williamsburg), 133, 135 Virginia State Penitentiary Project See Penitentiary House virum justum See justum virum Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio), 235, 269n34 Vivat Respublica, 182, 194, 267n73 Vivat Rex, 182, 184 Volney, Comte de (Constantin-François de Chassebœuf ) 209–10, 247, 268n32 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 260n16, 263n38, 269n48 voyage, 19–21, 23, 25, 28–30, 33–35, 39, 41–43, 90, 254, 260n36, 261n69 Waln House, 213, 255 wars, 11, 13, 21, 26, 45, 121–23, 127, 129, 132, 135, 137, 151, 175–76, 180, 231–32, 234–36 See also American Revolution; battles and battlefields Washington, Bushrod, 85, 91–93, 95, 101, 129, 263n34 Washington, D.C., 17, 164, 213, 218, 242–43, 246–47 See also Tayloe House Washington, George, 101–3, 108, 112–14, 118, 123, 129, 135, 213, 243, 255, 263n34, 263n38, 263n59, 263n62 Washington, Martha, 104, 108, 114, 263n34 Washington Monument Proposal, 252, 254–55 Washington Monument Proposal: Decorative Ceiling Motif (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 252 (detail), 254 Washington Monument Proposal: Rendered Perspective (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 255 Washington’s Island, 91–92, 93, 94, 96, 209, 212, 263n34 watercolor architectural rendering, 65, 69, 171, 193 as therapy, 13, 82, 120–21, 140–41, 158–59 picturesque, 50–51, 73–76, 26061n66 reception of, 45, 87–88, 163–64, 171, 174, 204, 228–29, 261n69 topographical, 36, 70–71 See also keeping, concept of; knacks; landscape watercolors; Latrobe, Benjamin Henry: education in watercolors of; Latrobe, Benjamin Henry: views on sketchbooks and sketches of; Latrobe, Benjamin Henry: work as a watercolor instructor; medium, watercolor; Moravian watercolor tradition; presentation watercolors; sketchbooks and sketching Watercolor: Two Views of the Potomac and a Portrait (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 224 (detail), 226

285

Watson, James, 269n48 Wedgwood ( Josiah Wedgwood and Sons), 186, 267n81 Wedgwood-Flaxman stoneware collaborations, 218 Wedgwood motifs, 194 West, Thomas Wade, 126–27, 148, 172–73, 180, 182, 184, 189, 266n29 West Point, Virginia, 98–99 White Cli∑s of Dover, England, 23, 24 William and Mary Waln House See Waln House William Pennock House See Pennock House Williamsburg, Virginia, 123, 133, 134, 236–38, 265n38, 265n39 William the Conquerer, 25 Wood, Governor James, 167, 265n23 Woods, John, 85 Wright of Derby, Joseph, 269n49 Wurmser, Genera Dagobert, 233–34 Wyatt, John, 69 XYZ a∑air, 13, 234, 269n30 Yellow Cli∑s of Hastings, England, 25–26, 27–28 York River, looking N.W. up to West Point (Benjamin Henry Latrobe), 98–99 York River, Virginia, 96, 98–100 Yorkshire, England, 262n64 Yorktown, Virginia, 90, 123, 126, 127–29, 130, 132, 149, 154, 264n21, 264n24 Zephyr, 153 Zeus, 122, 200 Zinzendorf, Count, 48

Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor is composed in Adobe Caslon, a transitional oldstyle type family adapted from the original designs of the great English typographer William Caslon (1692–1766) and digitized for modern typesetting in 1990 by Carol Twombly of Adobe Systems. At first a precision engraver of gun barrels and pistol locks, Caslon cut brass letters for bookbinders before being encouraged in 1720 to develop quality metal types for printing. Significantly improving upon Dutch designs, Caslon’s fonts were notably featured in the 1728 publication of Henry Pemberton’s View of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy. The popularity of Caslon’s type spread across the Atlantic to become the principal source for colonial printers, and was employed in the first printing of the Declaration of Independence by John Dunlop of Philadelphia in 1776. The ornamental fleurons incorporated in the endpaper designs of Epic Landscapes were modeled for Adobe Systems by Wesley Tanner on Caslon’s original 1738 specimen sheets.