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"He always woke at first light, eager to get on with the day. For Thomas Jefferson, living was an art to be mastered, and no detail was too small to escape his notice, whether political and philosophical or architectural and artistic. Meals were not only to sustain the body but also to feed the soul. Houses were not only to shield one from the elements but also to broaden the imagination. Paintings and sculpture were not only to fill space but also to shape one&amp;#039;s sense of history and identity. Gardens were not only to produce flowers and fruits and vegetables but also to connect oneself inextricably to the natural world. President and philosopher, patriot and intellectual, aesthete and architect, Thomas Jefferson is the Founder who charms us most. &amp;quot;Mr. Jefferson was six feet two and a half inches high, well proportioned, and straight as a gun barrel,&amp;quot; remarked a Monticello overseer. &amp;quot;He was like a fine horse; he had no surplus flesh. His countenance was always mild and pleasant.&amp;quot; His mind was always in motion, his curiosity always roaming. It was at Monticello, his mountaintop estate just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, that Jefferson most fully modeled the art of living to his countrymen in the new nation. In a lifetime of careful observation of other great Virginia houses, of the arts of entertaining at Williamsburg \u2014 where he was educated in life and liberty as a young man \u2014 in the burgeoning American cities of Philadelphia and New York, and during his years in Paris, he absorbed lessons and admired innovations that he brought home to his own mountain. In his rooms at Monticello, Jefferson slept facing east, on a bed built into an alcove between his working study (which was called his &amp;quot;cabinet&amp;quot;) and a chamber anchored by a fireplace. The bed was draped in a cranberry-red silk counterpane. A 1790 clock mounted between two obelisks rested on a wood shelf inside his sleeping alcove; with a delicate ting, it chimed the hour. If he awoke, as he said he did, at early sunrise, when the hands of the obelisk clock grew visible, then he was aware of a steadily rising tide of light that began as a trickle but soon came to fill the room. He and his Monticello were a little like the sun itself: at the center of the universe. In his cabinet he wrote with his legs stretched out along a red leather bench beneath a plantation writing table. He wrote for samplings of the English mulberry and peach-apricot, as well as for tamed geese and a ram for the farm. He loved politics, but he loved history and the classics too, and his huge library mirrored his eclectic interests. &amp;quot;I feel a much greater interest in knowing what has passed two or three thousand years ago, than in what is now passing,&amp;quot; he wrote in 1819. &amp;quot;I read nothing, therefore, but of the heroes of Troy\u2026of Pompey and Caesar, and of Augustus too\u2026.&amp;quot; Walking into the entrance hall through the glass door on the east front of Monticello, Jefferson, his family, and his guests were immersed in the work of his life. Artifacts and emblems of America&amp;#039;s natural and political worlds hung in the great hall. There were moose and elk antlers and the upper jawbone of a mastodon. There were maps, including the Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia, drawn by his father many years before, and later ones of North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. There were portraits of Americus Vespucius, John Adams, and Jefferson himself (by Gilbert Stuart), two engravings of the Declaration of Independence \u2014 one of Trumbull&amp;#039;s depiction of the signing, the other of the document itself \u2014 and busts of Alexander Hamilton and Voltaire. There was method to the decoration of Monticello. For Jefferson, the portraits, busts, statues, and artifacts in the house were not a random collection, but rather what he called &amp;quot;memorials of those worthies whose remembrance I feel a pride and comfort in consecrating there.&amp;quot; Only steps into the house, then, the range of Jefferson&amp;#039;s mind and heart, the universal nature of his interests and his sense of the sweep of history, is manifest to every eye. The fossils and antlers, the Indian artifacts, and the maps represented the primeval American world and the white man&amp;#039;s first attempts to project his power over the land. Vespucius \u2014 and Columbus, whose portrait hung in the next room, the parlor \u2014 carried the story of civilization across the Atlantic to the New World. Voltaire represented the work of the philosophies of the Enlightenment. Like the entrance hall, the parlor is 18 feet, 2 inches high. In it, Jefferson crafted a room of tiered artwork that surrounded card tables, chairs, sofas, a chess set, a harpsichord, and a pianoforte \u2014 a room in which the present life of the house and of the family unfolded in the midst of emblems of the past that had made its owner, and its owner&amp;#039;s nation, possible. Here hung paintings and here sat sculptures of the makers of the age \u2014 and of the ages. There were George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Magellan, Napoleon, Lafayette, Columbus, another Vespucius, Alexander I, David Rittenhouse, Sir Walter Raleigh, James Madison, Thomas Paine, James Monroe, Louis XVI, John Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Adams, and even Jefferson by both Trumbull and by Mather Brown. Two small S\u00E8vres porcelain figures \u2014 Venus with Cupid and Hope with Cupid \u2014 evoke the ancient world. The brilliantly yellow (he called the color &amp;quot;chrome&amp;quot;) dining room sits to the right of the parlor. Through it, separated by double pocket doors on rollers, is the small, octagonal tearoom. There, amid silver and china, Jefferson and his family would eat and converse in what he called his &amp;quot;most honorable suite,&amp;quot; glancing up at the busts of Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, and John Paul Jones. Jefferson&amp;#039;s granddaughter Ellen recalled that conversation at her grandfather&amp;#039;s house was &amp;quot;completely a feast of reason.&amp;quot; Daniel Webster found Jefferson&amp;#039;s conversation &amp;quot;easy and natural\u2026. The topics\u2026at present, may be said to be science and letters\u2026. When we were with him, his favorite subjects were Greek and Anglo-Saxon, historical recollections of the times and events of the Revolution, and of his residence in France.&amp;quot; He believed in dining well. He had cooks trained in the arts of French cuisine after 1784 and thought of wine as &amp;quot;a necessary of life.&amp;quot; His own love of design was manifested in furniture, a clock, a coffee urn, stemless silver goblets \u2014 the so-called &amp;quot;Jefferson cups&amp;quot; \u2014 and suggested his faith in the possibilities of the American future. With its vast L-shape terraces, Venetian porches, and piazzas, Monticello was designed to enable the enjoyment of the landscape. And Jefferson left an enduring mark on American architecture. He believed in blending indoor and outdoor living harmoniously, using dozens of Windsor chairs inside and outside the house and designing benches with Chinese Chippendale\u2013style backs. With the triple-sash windows and French doors \u2014 a big difference from the American norm \u2014 Jefferson brought light inside and also allowed the landscape to be seen from within the house. But it wasn&amp;#039;t just about the view. Jefferson loved being outdoors, taking particular interest in the ferme orn\u00E9e, the garden that surrounded the house on the mountaintop, which was surrounded by the agricultural plantation and nearby Mulberry Row. He picked fruit for his grandchildren \u2014 usually figs and cherries \u2014 with a long stick topped with a hook and net bag, and he organized and presided over races on the grounds. Awards were figs, prunes, and dates. Monticello served as a laboratory for Jefferson&amp;#039;s cultivated life, serving his larger objective to educate friends and family as well as to live with &amp;quot;a greater eye toward convenience.&amp;quot; Here he designed and entertained and decorated and grew and presided, a man of such versatility and virtuosity that callers thought his home and its master superhuman. &amp;quot;If it had not been called Monticello,&amp;quot; a visitor wrote in 1816, &amp;quot;I would call it Olympus, and Jove its occupant.&amp;quot; On that, it would seem, all could agree. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Susan R. Stein, Richard Gilder Senior Curator and Vice President for Museum Programs at Monticello. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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