LIFE PORTRAITS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON.
Born at Shadwell, Virginia, April 2, 1743. Died at Monticello, Virginia, July 4, 1826.
With Notes and an Introduction by Charles Henry Hart.
THOMAS JEFFERSON has had more ardent followers, and more ardent opponents, than perhaps any other patriot in American history. The cause of this is that he was essentially a strong man, and no one can follow the lines of his face without seeing this.
In McClure's Magazine for October, 1897, was presented the life mask of Thomas Jefferson, taken by J. H. I. Browere, in 1825, when Jefferson was eighty-two years old. In relation to this, Jefferson said: "I now bid adieu forever to busts and even portraits." It was two-score years earlier that Jefferson sat to Mather Brown for the first portrait that we know of him, and which is the first portrait here reproduced. Others follow by Houdon (1789), Gilbert Stuart (1800), Rembrandt Peale (1803), George Miller (1803), St. Mémin (1805), and Thomas Sully (1821). These portraits, covering a period of thirty-five years, are selected as among the best and most characteristic to which we have access.
When Jefferson was in France, John Trumbull was there, and at the minister's house at Chaillot, in the autumn of 1787, he painted Jefferson's portrait for his picture "The Declaration of Independence." It was one of those small cabinet portraits, on panel, for which Trumbull is so justly celebrated, and is now owned by Mrs. John W. Burke, of Alexandria, Va. The head of Jefferson in the "Declaration of Independence" picture is not a close copy of the original. Charles Willson Peale, to whom Americans are under lasting obligations for preserving authentic portraits of the public men of the Revolutionary epoch, painted a portrait of Jefferson in 1791, which belongs to the city of Philadelphia and is a most interesting delineation of him. James Sharpies made a pastel portrait of Jefferson in 1798, which is also owned by the city of Philadelphia, but it is deficient in character and individuality.
A number of portraits of Jefferson were made that cannot be traced, which is the more to be regretted as some of them were by skillful artists. Jefferson took an intelligent interest in art, and posed as a profound connoisseur. He numbered among his personal intimates, Richard and Maria Cosway, Trumbull, Peale, Houdon, Ceracchi, and most of the foreign contingent that emigrated to these shores. It was chiefly due to his instrumentality that George Hadfield, the brother of Maria Cosway, came from England as assistant architect of the Capitol at Washington, and that Cardelli and Persico came from Italy to do the carvings. Jefferson was an amateur of some ability, especially in the not easy field of architecture. The University of Virginia, which he designed, would do no discredit to a professional of recognized experience. Jefferson showed himself to be a man of excellent æsthetic taste, and with an actual knowledge of the subject far beyond the general cultivation of his time. His correspondence teems with suggestions and reflections on design and decoration, showing an understanding of the subject, and not merely idle thoughts bestowed on an ephemeral fad.
Perhaps the most important of the lost portraits of Jefferson is the bust made by Ceracchi, which was destroyed with the burning of the library of Congress, December 24, 1851, and of which there seems to be neither replica or copy. Dr. William Thornton, the first Commissioner of Patents, and an amateur artist of decided proficiency, calls it, in writing to Jefferson, a "superb bust, one of the finest I ever beheld." Jefferson paid Ceracchi $1,500 for the original marble, that being the amount of tax the disgruntled Italian levied upon all those persons whom he had besought to sit to him as a favor, when his scheme for a national monument fell through and he prepared to leave the country.
William J. Coffee, an Englishman, who modeled small busts in terra cotta, made a bust of Jefferson in April, 1818, as also busts of his daughter Mrs. Randolph and granddaughter Ellen, for the three of which
