Of Grains and Domes: Jefferson and U. S. Capitol Building Design (Part 2)

After Thomas Jefferson returned to the United States in 1789, he began the extensive rebuilding of Monticello. He added the distinctive second-story octagonal dome that included design elements of the Halles aux Blés to become the first feature of its kind for an American residence. As president in 1805, Jefferson directed British-American architect Benjamin Latrobe (1764-1820) to construct the ceiling for the new Capitol Building’s House of Representatives chamber based on the Paris grain market design. Despite Latrobe’s concerns about leakage, Jefferson’s intentions to build “the handsomest room on the world” prevailed although it was destroyed when the British burned the Capitol in 1814. Latrobe applied similar principles in the design of the first cathedral in America, Baltimore’s Basilica of the Assumption (1806-1821) to form the skylit lumiere mysterieuse (mysterious light) that to this day still hovers above the altar.

Visiting Jefferson’s Monticello with family

The Founders’ grand visions for New World prosperity was translated into Charles Bulfinch’s neoclassical Federal Style design and decoration of the United States Capitol Building that featured numerous agrarian associations. The massive inner and outer domes crowning the original central 1800 structure were completed in the 1860s with an inner oculus that reveals an enormous fresco covering approximately 5,000 square feet, The Apotheosis of Washington (1865) by Italian-American artist Constantino Brumidi (1805-1880). The painting depicts George Washington enthroned amidst the heavenlies above six allegorical perimeter scenes. Brumidi’s Agriculture shows Ceres with a wreath of wheat and cornucopia perched atop a mechanical reaper assisted by a capped Young America who holds the reins of the horses. Flora gathers flowers nearby.

Constantine Brumidi, The Apotheosis of Washington—Agriculture (1865)

United States Capitol Building Rotunda Dome, Washington, D. C.

Architect of the Capitol Collection

Brumidi had trained at Rome’s Academy of St. Luke where he mastered trompe l’oeil (“fools the eye”) depiction of human forms on flat surfaces in three dimensions, and restored frescoes at the Vatican. His Summer in the House Appropriation Room’s four-panel Season’s series (1856) shows Ceres attended by cherubs who tend to an enormous grain sheaf and cornucopia. Bulfinch’s work influenced versatile Salem architect-woodcarver Samuel McIntire (1757-1811) whose designs of New England homes frequently featured sheaves of wheat and garlands for wall frieze and mantel ornamentation as well as for furniture.

Monticello Farming Exhibit

Of Grains and Domes: Thomas Jefferson and U. S. Capitol Building Design (Part 1)

“And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”  These lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding,” first published in 1943, crossed my mind while driving cross-country this summer helping to move our son and family back to the Northwest from their year in Washington, D.C. My wife and I enjoy visiting the U.S. Capitol and surrounding city given the variety of sights and special events to take in. This trip was especially memorable as we visited National Defense University to witness son Karl’s graduation at Ft. McNair and learned more about his studies that focused on global food insecurity in the wake of the war between Russia and Ukraine. (His research paper, “Weaponizing Wheat: How Strategic Competition with Russia Threatens the U. S. Wheat Industry,” will be published this fall in National Defense University’s journal, Joint Force Quarterly.)

Following our time in D.C., we commenced the long journey home but traveled south from Virginia to Alabama and then west via Texas to Arizona and north to Washington to see relatives and friends. All along the way we visited sites related to various agrarian (and grandchildren) interests which provided discoveries shared in the following dozen posts. One memorable scene was our first view of the Grand Canyon’s southeast rim at day’s end. While not agricultural, I’ll offer it here in the spirit of Eliot’s “exploring.” In spite of the heat and gas prices we had a grand time with old and new friends that reaffirmed the many reasons America is such a special place. May we ever safeguard its democratic institutions and the magnificent lands that provision our country and much of the world.

                  Yours for spacious skies and amber waves, -Richard.

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Some historians consider Thomas Jefferson’s application of restrained Enlightenment reason to culture and cultivation especially relevant to the “pursuit of happiness” he penned in the Declaration of Independence. Old World European conditions that had made gleaning a necessity for impoverished Europeans would not be the case for Americans. Pursuing happiness in the New World would bring new techniques to improve crops and livestock as well as construction of new roads, canals, and markets. As American minister to the Court of Versailles in the 1780s following Benjamin Franklin’s tenure in that crucial role, Jefferson traveled extensively throughout France with more on his mind than diplomacy.

Above: Halle aux Blés, Paris (Hall of Grain, 1808); aquatint on paper, 5 ¾ x 8 ¾ inches

Columbia Heritage Collection

In a letter to Lafayette from Nice, Jefferson wrote, “I am never satisfied with rambling through the fields and farms, examining the culture and cultivators, with a degree of curiosity which makes some mistake me to be a fool, and others to be much wiser than I am.” Heir to Newtonian science, Jefferson was ever fascinated by the prospect of a rational cosmos and the complexities of new mechanisms, yet grew anxious over the prospect of a machine age in America that might disturb the fragile equilibrium between Nature’s bucolic ideal and emerging notions of technological progress. These ambiguities represent an unresolved ambivalence in Jefferson’s thinking about nature and progress.

Benjamin Latrobe, “Sketch of the South Wing of the Capitol” (c. 1810)

Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

In Paris Jefferson viewed Old Master works and paintings by Royal Academy artists at museums and salons as well as Roman antiquities at the Maison Carrée. Mindful of his new nation’s public spaces, Jefferson had special interest in Neoclassical architecture and carefully studied the design of numerous churches, palaces, and bridges. In August 1785, he accompanied Maria Cosway, wife of English artist Richard Cosway, on a tour of the Halles aux Blés, the city’s principal grain market. Jefferson was awestruck by the immense skylit dome covering the round structure’s bustling 130-foot diameter central court where buyers gathered throughout the year to bid on piles of grain and flour sacks. Famous domes of substantial size at Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, the Roman Pantheon, and elsewhere were made of stone and brick, which would significantly complicate construction contemplated by Jefferson. The grain market’s dome, designed by Jacques Molinos and Jacques-Guillaume Legrand and completed in 1783, featured an innovative skeleton of laminated wood adapted from rural carpentry methods to frame enormous vertical windows of arched glass. The restored structure today is the Pinault Art Museum.