During the years of the American Revolutionary War, 1776-83, years in which Romantic Classicism was maturing in France and in England, North Americans were not entirely cut off from the Old World. Not only did many earlier cultural ties remain unbroken—while a surprising reverse emigration of good painters from the New World to the Old occurred—but new cultural ties with the French ally were established, and these were maintained and reinforced by several émigrés of ability who arrived in the 1790s. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), hitherto as confirmed a Palladian as any English landowner of the mid eighteenth century, was undoubtedly influenced by his friend Clérisseau when he based his Virginia State Capitol[[23]] of 1785-96 at Richmond very closely on the best preserved ancient Roman structure that he had seen in France, the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, even though he used for the portico an Ionic instead of a Corinthian order. In this first major public monument initiated in the new republic Jefferson’s drastic aim of forcing all the requirements of a fairly complex modern building inside the rigid mould of a Roman temple was more consonant with the absolutism of the French in this period than with the rather looser formal ideals of the English.
Jefferson was not able to impose so rigid a Classicism on the new Federal capital of Washington at its start, despite the efforts of various French and British engineers, architects, and amateurs who participated in the competitions of 1792 for the President’s House (White House) and for the Capitol and who worked on the latter during its first decade of construction. The White House[[24]] as designed by the Irish architect James Hoban (c. 1762-1831) was still quite in the earlier eighteenth-century Anglo-Palladian manner, and Jefferson’s own project was based on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. Neither the English amateur William Thornton (1759-1828) and his professional assistant who was also English, George Hadfield (c. 1764-1826), nor their French associate É.-S. Hallet succeeded in giving the Capitol[[25]] a very up-to-date character (Plate [82A]). Yet it is these major edifices that still occupy two of the focal points in the Washington city plan,[[26]] which was prepared by the French engineer P.-C. L’Enfant (1754-1825) before his dismissal from public service in 1792.
It was Benjamin H. Latrobe (1764-1820), an English-born architect of German and English training, who finally brought to America just before 1800, and shortly to Washington, the highest professional standards of the day and a complete Romantic Classical programme. Indeed, he almost succeeded in making Romantic Classicism the official style in the United States for all time; at least it remained so down to the Civil War in the sixties, and a later revival lasted, as regards public architecture in Washington, from the 1900s to the 1930s (see Chapter [24]). A pupil of S. P. Cockerell, Latrobe emigrated in 1796 and was soon assisting Jefferson on the final completion of the Virginia State Capitol as well as undertaking the construction of canals as an engineer. Not inappropriately Latrobe’s first important American building, the Bank of Pennsylvania begun in 1798, was also an Ionic temple, but with an order that aspired to be Greek. This Philadelphia bank included a great central hall whose saucer dome, visible externally, made it a more complex and architectonic composition than the Richmond Capitol. The flat lantern crowning the dome recalled, and may derive from, those over Soane’s offices at the Bank of England. Characteristically, Latrobe at this very same time was also building a country house, Sedgley, outside Philadelphia, with ‘Gothick’ detailing. By 1803 he had taken charge of the construction of the Capitol, nominally under Thornton, with whom he had continual rows. Most of the early interiors there were his, notably those in the south wing, fine examples of Romantic Classicism with French as well as English overtones; moreover he was still in charge of rebuilding them after the burning of the Capitol in 1814 down to his forced resignation in 1817.
In 1805 Latrobe submitted alternative designs for the Catholic cathedral in Baltimore. The Gothic design is one of the finest projects of the ‘Sublime’ or ‘High Romantic’ stage of the Gothic Revival; yet in its vast bare walls, carefully ordered geometry, and dry detail it is also consonant with some of the basic ideals of Romantic Classicism. The Classical design that was preferred and eventually built is perhaps less original; but internally, at least, this is one of the finest ecclesiastical monuments of Romantic Classicism, combining a rather Panthéon-like plan with segmental vaults of somewhat Soanic character (Plate [5]). The cathedral was largely completed by 1818. The portico, though intended from the first, was added only in 1863, but the present bulbous terminations of the western towers are not of Latrobe’s design.
Near by in Baltimore the Unitarian Church of 1807 is by a Frenchman, Maximilien Godefroy (c. 1760-1833),[[27]] who was also responsible for the first Neo-Gothic ecclesiastical structure of any consequence in North America, the chapel of St Mary’s Seminary there, also of 1807. The Unitarian Church is a monument which might well have risen in the Paris of the 1790s had the French Deists been addicted to building churches. The triple arch in the plain stuccoed front below the pediment comes straight from Ledoux’s barrières; the interior, unhappily remodelled in 1916, was originally a dome on pendentives of the purest geometrical order. So also Godefroy’s Battle Monument of 1814 also in Baltimore, with its Egyptian base, might easily have been erected in Paris to honour some general prominent in Napoleon’s campaign on the Nile.[[28]] Another Frenchman, J.-J. Ramée (1764-1842), active since the Revolution in Hamburg and in Denmark, also came briefly to America. In 1813 he laid out Union College[[29]] in Schenectady, N.Y., on a rather Ledolcian plan and began its construction before he returned to Europe. His semicircle of buildings still crowns the hill—although two only are original—and Ramée here initiated a tradition of college architecture as remote from that of earlier American colleges, with their free-standing buildings set around a ‘campus’, as Wilkins’s Downing at Cambridge was from earlier English colleges.
The French eventually departed leaving no line of descent; but Latrobe had a pupil, the first professionally trained American in the field and, like Latrobe, almost as much an engineer as an architect. By 1808 Robert Mills (1781-1855) was supervising for Latrobe the new Bank of Philadelphia, Gothic (or at least ‘Gothick’) where his earlier Bank of Pennsylvania had been Grecian, and also building on his own the Sansom Street Baptist Church, a competent but not distinguished essay in Romantic Classicism. In the same year another Latrobe pupil, William Strickland (1788-1854), designed for Philadelphia a Gothick Masonic Hall; this was built in 1809-11, and later rebuilt, but according to the original design, after a fire in 1819-20.
Far more successful than either of these, if now overshadowed by the megalomaniac Classicism of the twentieth-century Philadelphia Museum of Art by Horace Trumbauer and others on the hill above, are the waterworks begun in 1811 on the banks of the Schuylkill. These are probably but not certainly by Mills rather than by the engineer Frederick Graff, whose name is signed to the drawings. These very utilitarian structures are most characteristic of the beginnings of Romantic Classicism in America, where Latrobe, Mills, and also Strickland were all three engineers as well as architects. Moreover, it is evident that engineering considerations often influenced their approach to architecture, just as architectural considerations gave visual distinction to much of their engineering. Thus they may be compared with engineers like Telford and Rennie in England as well as with the English architects of their day.
In this so-called ‘Federal’ period, when Romantic Classicism centred in the Middle Atlantic states thanks to Latrobe, Godefroy, Mills, and Strickland, the leading architect outside this area, the Bostonian Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844), was a late-comer to Romantic Classicism. His great public monument of the 1790s, the Massachusetts State House in Boston, had been designed originally as early as 1787-8, and even as executed in 1795-8 it derived principally from the Somerset House in London of Sir William Chambers (1726-96) and in one interior from Wyatt. His Boston Court House of 1810 first showed evidence of a change in his style, notably in its smooth ashlar walls of cold grey granite. That was a local material destined to lend particular distinction to the principal Romantic Classical buildings of Boston from this time forward (see Chapter [5]).
The Frenchmen who came to America at the end of the eighteenth century or in the early 1800s (and shortly left again) could hardly import the French architecture of those decades; on the one hand, they had all been trained before the Revolution, from which most of them were in flight; on the other hand—and more consequently—there was almost no later architecture for them to reflect. Between 1789 and 1806 French building was at a standstill. Architects were mostly busy, if at all, with the decoration of various revolutionary fêtes and the accommodation of new political agencies in old structures.
One major example of the accommodation of an older structure to a new purpose deserves particular mention. In the years 1795-7 J.-P. de Gisors (1755-1828), E.-C. Leconte (1762-1818), and the former’s brother A.-J.-B.-G. de Gisors (1762-1835) built within the old Palais Bourbon the Salle des Cinq Cents, the legislative chamber of the First Republic. This hemicycle, at least as rebuilt along much the original lines by Joly in 1828-33, still serves as the Chamber of Deputies of the Fourth Republic. Such a chamber, so different in plan from the college-chapel arrangement of the British House of Commons with facing benches for Government and Opposition, is characteristically Romantic Classical in form, but this form has unfortunately proved to be conducive to an indefinite shading of multiple parties from right to left. The British model, suited to two-party rule only, was rarely imitated; the French one has been rather frequently, beginning with Latrobe’s House of Representatives in the Washington Capitol. Leaving aside the apparent political effect of the plan—not so notable in Washington as elsewhere—Gisors’s chamber seems to have been respectable if not especially distinguished. Covered with a segmental half dome and a barrel vault, both top-lighted, the smooth though rather richly decorated surfaces of the walls and the vaults made clear the interesting geometrical form of the interior space. The prototype was the lecture theatre of the École de Médecine in Paris erected in 1769-76 by Jacques Gondoin (1737-1818), one of the most advanced interiors of its day.