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Benevolent Squires. Here he is in Paris, "violently smitten" with the geometrical volumes of the Hôtel de Salm, so denuded of fripperies of rococo as to promise him a new mode of architectural thought. There he is in Nîmes, entranced by the proportions of the Roman Maison Carrée, ordering a model of it, which, shipped back to Virginia, became the basis of the Capitol at Richmond.
Of course, there are things one does not learn from the show. The part titled "The British Connection" is merely a rehash, laid forth in paintings, of the now outmoded picture of 18th century England as an Age of Elegance, populated by enlightened lords, benevolent squires and happy forelock-tugging peasants. The whole matter of slavery is discreetly omitted from Jefferson's American experience, although neither his wealth nor the leisure he needed for self-cultivation would have been possible without his slaves. (If the National Gallery wanted to be consistent in its policy of using great borrowed paintings to allude to the social and intellectual norms of Jefferson's day, it might as well have borrowed Turner's Slave Ship.)
Moreover, there is the problem that Jefferson had actually seen few of the major works in the show. There on view is the Uffizi's Medici Venus, because Jefferson longed to install a copy of her at Monticello. Not having been to Florence, he had never seen the original, which he knew through engravings and plasters. It is pleasant to see the Towneley Vase, that once renowned Attic mar ble of the 1st century A.D. on which Keats based several lines of Ode to a Grecian Urn. But Jefferson never saw it, and (as the catalogue admits) would probably have disliked the "licentious mysticism" of its Bacchic figures.
These distortions matter because they imply that Jefferson's experience of the visual arts was much wider than it really was. He did not have the automatic overview of a modern museumgoer; nor was he a kind of Yankee Kenneth Clark, mellifluously discoursing among the servants and mockingbirds of Monticello. He believed, correctly, that he was an instrument of history; but he did not imagine himself as a character in a cultural saga. Jef ferson's tough, ambitious self-teaching, in all its patchiness, cannot have been the smooth inheritance of masterpieces that his show suggests. It was won, not inherited, and in that sense was profoundly American.
Robert Hughes