Thomas Jefferson at Monticello | Leslie Greene Bowman
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Intro: Welcome to the one and only Interior Design Book Podcast, Decorating by the Book, hosted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Leslie Greene Bowman: I'm Leslie Greene Bowman, president of Monticello, and I'm a co-editor with Charlotte Moss of our new book entitled Thomas Jefferson at Monticello: Architecture, Landscape, Collections, Books, Food, Wine.
Suzy Chase: This gorgeous book explores the cultural contributions of Thomas Jefferson through architecture, landscape collections, books, food, and wine. Thomas Jefferson, born 1743, died 1826, the third president of the United States designed his Virginia residents with innovations that were progressive, even unprecedented in the new world. Six acclaimed arts and cultural luminaries pay homage to Jefferson, citing his work at Monticello as Testament to his genius in art, culture, and science.
Suzy Chase: There are so many Jefferson and Monticello books out there, but this is truly different. Could you go through how this book is organized and talk just a little bit it about the contributors whom you call Jefferson's modern day cultural peers?
Leslie Greene Bowman: Absolutely. Thank you, Suzy. We organized this book around Jefferson's great interest in the arts. And as I mentioned in the preface, the one area of the arts we couldn't cover visually in a book, of course, was music, but Jefferson was a cultural connoisseur of his own time.
Leslie Greene Bowman: When we had the opportunity to work with the world class interiors and exteriors photographer like Miguel Flores-Vianna, it set a stage that we felt that really the best way to understand Jefferson's contributions was not for a historian like me or some of our staff to talk about them, but for his peers today who have stood on his shoulders with their work and who understand the impact he has had on American culture.
Leslie Greene Bowman: We turn to those that you know are wonderful authors, Annette Gordon-Reed, Carla Hayden, Jay McInerney, Jon Meacham, Xavier F. Salomon, Gil Schafer III, Alice Waters, and Thomas Woltz. Annette Gordon-Reed and Jon Meacham are both Pulitzer Prize winning historians, and they did the introduction and the conclusion. You really understood the man even before landscape architects, architects, librarians, wine connoisseurs, and culinary experts, like those I've named, then took you deeper into each of those areas.
Suzy Chase: In the book, you write about how Monticello is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and recognized as a masterpiece of human creative genius. Annette Gordon-Reed, American historian and Harvard Law professor, said, "Monticello represents the best and the worst of America. Like the pyramids, the Parthenon, the Great Wall of China, and many other sites honored for their cultural significance, Monticello was made possible by enslaved laborers and artisans."
Suzy Chase: I do believe this is vital information in terms of understanding the full significance and history of Monticello . This book honors and recognizes the enslaved men, women, and children who gave their life to Jefferson's vision and designs.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Well, I'm so gratified that you agree that it's vital to understand when you're at Monticello or even if you're not that the enslaved people, who numbered at any one time 100 to 130 in Jefferson's possession working at Monticello he had other slaves working at other plantations that he owned, his life was made possible by this free labor, and certainly everything we talk about in the book. Every essay speaks to the contributions of the enslaved community. In many cases, we actually do know names and marriages and links of service.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Monticello is unusual, in being one of the best documented and best researched plantations of its period. We know the enslaved cooks who provided the cuisine. We know Wormley Hughes, the head gardener at one period of Jefferson's retirement, who's really in charge of that incredible vegetable garden. We know some of the names of the enslaved laborers who learn to become carpenters and joiners with the help of the white hired workmen that Jefferson initially hired to build Monticello.
Leslie Greene Bowman: And we know that they worked, most of them, from dawn to sunset six days a week. Annette Gordon-Reed in her essay brings out the kind of aha fact that these are the people who made Jefferson's certainly his way of life possible and his lifestyle possible, but they also made it possible for him to think big ideas that helped bound our country.
Suzy Chase: Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress, who happens to be the first woman and the first African American to hold the post, contributed the library essay. The collection was in essence Jefferson's enlightenment and it was his sense of passion and destiny that drove him to be one of the great 18th century book collectors. Could you please chat a little bit about his collection?
Leslie Greene Bowman: Sure. I should have mentioned at the outset, every a contributor to this book had already been to Monticello and had an understanding of Jefferson relative to that art form. When Carla Hayden was appointed the 14th Librarian of Congress, we were thrilled that one of her first trips was to come to the wellspring of that library in Monticello. That library was certainly his enlightenment. Jefferson was throughout his life curious and devoted to the idea of human progress.
Leslie Greene Bowman: He believed that it was only education that would contribute to solving the problems of humanity, and he believed that that knowledge resided in, of course, books and intellectual intercourse with other great minds, much of which takes place in letters and books. He did collect the greatest library on the continent of its time when he sold the library to Congress when their library had been burned in the war of 1812. There were a total of 6,487 volumes. I think the total number of books he owned was between nine and 10,000.
Leslie Greene Bowman: He began recreating his library, of course, after he had sold it, and he wrote famously to John Adams, "I cannot live without books."
Suzy Chase: He was so ahead of his time.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Well, he understood the concept of man having equality with others, obviously if governments allowed and if society is allowed, and that man could improve himself through education. He also believed that self-government and democracy and the Republic that he helped found were not possible without an educated citizenry. He was passionate about education and that all begins with collecting knowledge and making it accessible to people.
Leslie Greene Bowman: The Library of Congress before it burned was nowhere near a dimensionality of the library that it became when they bought Jefferson's library. We really have Jefferson to thank for the mission statement of the Library of Congress. There were congressmen who didn't believe they needed all these books in different languages and on all these other subjects and the arts and in science. We just need politics and history and government and law.
Leslie Greene Bowman: He replied, and of course I'm paraphrasing, there was not a book in his library that a public servant might not need to consult and that he would let them set the price on the library, but he would not divide it.
Suzy Chase: Xavier Salomon is the deputy director, chief curator at The Frick Collection here in New York City, and he wrote the collections chapter. He kicks things off talking about mirrors, which was fascinating to me. And he said mirrors were status symbol. I would love to hear about that. And how was Thomas Jefferson influenced by Parisian design?
Leslie Greene Bowman: Well, I love the way Xavier begins that chapter. Mirrors were very expensive to produce. The larger the mirror, the harder it was. Not unlike the great porcelain figures in the 18th century, the larger the figure, the more likely it was going to be destroyed in the process. Large looking glasses, as they called them then, were extremely rare and expensive. The larger the glass, therefore, the more the status symbol, right? But mirrors in general were expensive.
Leslie Greene Bowman: You probably recall that earlier in the 18th century, back certainly in the 17th century, even just window glass was expensive. Homes had smaller windows, right? Much of it had to be imported. They didn't start making plate glass in the colonies until probably the early 18th into the mid 18th century. Mirrors were a status symbol. They also were an architectural necessity to enhance light inside rooms. We're talking about pre-industrial interiors that are lit by candlelight, later on by whale oil and by other types of oils that are a little bit brighter than candles.
Leslie Greene Bowman: But we have no electric light or even consistent gas lighting at this point. Mirrors are a critical way in the houses of the affluent to enhance and amplify light in a room. You're asking about Jefferson in Paris, and it's just such an amazing five years that he spends there. He goes to Paris really because he is deeply in mourning over the loss of his wife after 10 years of marriage.
Leslie Greene Bowman: He's so morose and depressed that Washington and Franklin and Adams and his friends in the Continental Congress decide that they really need to get him to Europe and try to distract him and pull him out of this depression. And initially they asked him to go and help negotiate the peace. But by the time it was possible to settle his affairs and get on the right ship, ships didn't just sail every hour, they had concluded the Treaty of Paris. He, in fact, then became Franklin's successor as the ambassador to France.
Leslie Greene Bowman: He exclaims when he arrives. He's like a sponge just soaking up everything. From the moment he lands at the Harbor Northwest of Paris, he's talking about the farms, the agriculture, what he's seeing. He gets to Paris and he says, "Behold me on the vaunted stage of Europe," and his greatest love is studying the arts in Paris. He's horrified by monarchy. He's horrified by the poverty.
Leslie Greene Bowman: He writes continually about how America is a worthy experiment and how much better the people are in America and how much they benefit from the new government, of course, that the Founding Fathers put in place. But he waxes rhapsodic about the arts. He goes to theater. He goes to concerts. He goes to art. And of course, he takes his famous tour of agriculture and vineyards, which is deeply influential when we get to the wine chapter.
Suzy Chase: As Jefferson was creating Monticello, he was bringing to Virginia what he believed to be the best that Europe had to offer. The furniture at Monticello is a combination of American and European objects. Table and chairs created in Philadelphia and New York, as well as pieces acquired in Paris and London. I thought it was so interesting to read that many of these objects were purchased not only for their elegance, but also for their technological innovation. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Leslie Greene Bowman: Sure. I love how Annette Gordon-Reed sets the stage for that in her opening introduction when she talks about Jefferson being continually innovative, continually devoted to progress, and therefore his aesthetic is governed by a dual focus on both beauty and utility. In almost everything he's doing at Monticello, it's a laboratory for living, it's a laboratory for how to bring the arts, as well as the sciences, how to have rooms that really contribute to human intellectual intercourse and convey reality.
Leslie Greene Bowman: His interest in paintings and sculptures and portraiture is obvious. He had many more things than we hang today because we're still trying to get reproductions or find what exactly they looked like, but we've even just this year found another lost piece and brought it back. He's set up Monticello very much as a museum for everyone who came. Certainly the public rooms. When you go into the front hall, what he called his Indian Hall, you see European paintings and you also see artifacts from Native Americans from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, right?
Leslie Greene Bowman: Another form of portraiture, if you will. Instead of showing his own aristocracy and his ancestors in portraits, which is what most men of his class would have done in Virginia at that time, he's really showing you the worthies of human knowledge. He's showing you the breadth of intellect and the enlightenment. His portraiture really takes a different dimension, and that's why he's got portraits of the three greatest men who ever lived in his mind, the great scientists and philosophers, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon.
Leslie Greene Bowman: He's got portraits of Columbus and Magellan and Sir Francis Drake, the great explorers. And of course, he's included in the Pantheon, his own peers in the Continental Congress in the new fledgling American experiment, George Washington, Ben Franklin, James Madison. I love to think of Monticello as an enlightenment view of the world, glorifying human knowledge and human possibilities.
Suzy Chase: Jefferson's curiosity continues into the food space. Alice Waters, the chef activist and author, wrote the piece about food and gardens. In the book, you talk about the food Jefferson served and love. You also talk about his garden and it's impossible to separate the two. I was surprised to read that he enjoyed a mostly plant-based diet. I'd love to hear about that.
Leslie Greene Bowman: I think that surprises all of us. He attributed his very good health and longevity. He lived to be 83, which was quite long in that period. He wrote in 1819 to a friend and I quote, "I have lived temperately eating little animal food and that not as an ailment so much as a condiment for the vegetables, which constitute my principle diet." He believed in exercise. He believed in fresh air, and he believed in a diet that was principally vegetarian with meat as the condiment. Something we've come back to, I think, a few hundred years later as we think about our diets.
Suzy Chase: The dining room is beautiful from the Wedgwood plaques on the dining room mantle to the French marble console table, to the vibrant chrome yellow color that at time apparently was a new expensive pigment. It's stunning. Please chat about that color.
Leslie Greene Bowman: I was afraid I might have hate letters when we changed the color of the dining room. I came to Monticello and assumed the presidency in late 2008. I think only within maybe the first six months, the head of the restoration department came to me and said, "Well, we've worked on this for several years. We've sampled the dining room numerous places and it really was yellow and we'd liked to put it back."
Leslie Greene Bowman: I knew that this is going to be a bit of a game changer for people, because there are lots of wonderful photos of Monticello's dining room that beautiful sort of Wedgwood blue matches the Wedgwood in the mantle piece. But we are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We're a museum and we're academically correct. When we were able to identify the color, we were stunned.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Because as you mentioned, it was one of the most fashionable and newest colors of its time, and certainly one of the most expensive, so $5 a pound and I think white lead was something like 5 cents or 10 cents or something. Yes, Jefferson ever being au courant and aware of trends. I'm sure he saw this in Europe. That color originated first in Europe, and then spread to the United States. But what I think is so beautiful about the choice of that color...
Leslie Greene Bowman: And by the way, my friend and senior curator, Susan Stein, calls it the color of egg yolks when hens have been eating marigolds.
Suzy Chase: Exactly.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Yeah. Ralph Lauren sponsored that restoration and actually produced a color that was almost identical. We obviously mixed the color exactly the way it had been done in the 18th century, which is not something that would work and be enduring on walls today, but they called it Monticello Yellow. It's one of those colors that if you'd put it in a small bathroom, you'd probably run screaming, right? One of the reasons it works so well in that dining room is that dining room has skylights and lots of light.
Leslie Greene Bowman: It's another one of the innovations at Monticello that was unusual for its time. With the white paneling around it and the skylights, the yellow, I think, and thank you for admiring it, I think it sings. But I can also tell you something most visitors wouldn't know, which is that it absolutely glows in candlelight at night. Think of it also as a beautiful entertaining space after sundown.
Suzy Chase: My absolute favorite photo in the book is on pages 110 and 111, which was Martha Jefferson's bedroom, where she slept as an adult when she returned to manage her father's household. It's on the second story complete with a French red toile canopy bedstead that I want, that her father bought her from Paris, and she has the most gorgeous highboy dresser. Then there's a small window that is situated very low on the wall and it seems to have a heavy cream linen or cotton simple pullback curtain. Could you please describe this room?
Leslie Greene Bowman: Well, I think you've done a really good job, Suzy, but I can demystify a bit. I love your references to Paris because this room and the parlor are the two rooms that are most French and really evoke that time in Paris. Of course, Martha spent five years in Paris too. Her father took her with him when he went and she was in a convent school. We restored it as part of our Mountaintop Project, which finished in 2018, and that was thanks to a late gift from David Rubinstein.
Leslie Greene Bowman: But interestingly, our co-editor, Charlotte Moss and her husband Barry Friedberg specifically sponsored this room. I'm thrilled that it's one of your favorites. Only two people at Monticello had private bedrooms. Besides Jefferson, it's Martha Jefferson Randolph, his daughter, and his widowed sister, Anna Scott Jefferson Marks, who are given private bedrooms. The grandchildren, there are places to sleep. The boys are sharing a bedroom up on the third floor. This is a big deal. I think it is telling that Martha would have had so many French accents in the room.
Leslie Greene Bowman: She even had a beautiful red leather little like jewelry box in which she kept the ribbon cockade that Lafayette threw to her when he was parading through Paris and went by the convent and she was out on the balcony, because, of course, he knew her very well. He was a good friend of her father. He tossed in a very gallant gentleman way they cockade from his hat and Martha kept that, of course, for the rest of her life. It's a really compelling room in talking about the relationship between Martha and her father, for example.
Leslie Greene Bowman: It actually has a closet which is repurposed from where an alcove bed would've been. If any of you have been to Monticello, most people know Jefferson's famous bed that's in an alcove between two rooms, but the other alcove beds are literally alcoves with three walls. Martha in her fifties is petitioning her father to please let her turn that into a closet and let her have her French bed instead. You mentioned the window down at floor level. That's a really important architectural point that Gil Schafer talks about in his essay.
Leslie Greene Bowman: One of the lovely, lovely architectural devices that Jefferson uses at Monticello is to minimize the volume of the house by certain techniques, one of which is that the second story windows, this bedroom is on the second story, are actually lined up right above the first story windows. By putting those windows at floor, when you look at Monticello as you approach it from the east elevation, those windows appear to be continuous and it looks like a smaller one story house.
Suzy Chase: It's interesting because you were talking earlier about how expensive glass was, but Jefferson splurged on mirrors. I kind of thought may maybe his windows would be larger in the house.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Well, actually he's got more windows in that house than probably any other house of its time. He actually had a mathematical formula because ever the scientist, he believed natural light was very important to our health. The square root of the cubic volume of the room, it was in an equation, dictated for him the amount of area that needed to be window class. He's got triple hung sash windows, for example, that go all the way to the floor and can be raised up to become doorways out into the landscape.
Leslie Greene Bowman: He's got skylight. If you think about the front door of Monticello, it's actually three huge glass door height windows, one of which, of course, has French doors in it. There's actually a lot of glass in Monticello. You just don't happen to see it on those second floor windows.
Suzy Chase: Charlotte Moss is one of my all time favorite interior designers and you mentioned she's the co-author of this book. How did she come to be part of this project?
Leslie Greene Bowman: Well, this is a dream Charlotte's had for a long time, and she's really responsible for kindling the flame into life. Charlotte, as you know, is a stellar, highly well-known interior designer and one who has published many fantastic and beautiful books. She has a great relationship with her publisher Rizzoli, and she's also on our board at Monticello And somewhere along the way, a few years ago, we were chatting and she said, "I think Rizzoli would like to do a book on Monticello," and I said, "Well, we'd love to talk to them."
Leslie Greene Bowman: And really it was Charlotte reaching out to her publisher and then hosting in her living room kind of a brainstorming session. We want to shine the light on Jefferson's amazing contributions in the arts and in design. We talk about him so much in other veins and there's a lot of discontent with him now because people are trying to come to terms with the fact that he was a slave holder and we need to understand that, but we also need to understand some of the amazing contributions he made to our country's culture.
Leslie Greene Bowman: It was her idea to begin to put together the team with Rizzoli that ultimately resulted in this book.
Suzy Chase: How is this book two books on the arts?
Leslie Greene Bowman: I love it that you asked that question because it allows us to talk about the amazing talented world class photographer Miguel Flores-Vianna. I should say about Miguel and about everyone who wrote for this book, everyone did it as a gift to Monticello. They love Monticello. They love Jefferson. For them, it was an homage to a place that they love and an organization they wanted to support.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Miguel was really the first expert artist that we talked to once we had the idea for the book, because we knew we had to have visuals that would convey Jefferson's genius, but that were also equal to his aesthetic acumen. We knew Miguel was that photographer. We have nothing in the book that isn't Miguel's work. It really is two art books because the obvious one is it's an art book about Jefferson's contributions to our culture and how they mattered today, but it's also an incredible array of Miguel's great work and the power of his eye.
Leslie Greene Bowman: I think that if Jefferson could see these images, I think he'd feel he had an aesthetic counterpart.
Suzy Chase: You're the president of the Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and you're also an author. I would love to hear about how you came to this job and your vision for the foundation.
Leslie Greene Bowman: I have a degree from Winterthur in the University of Delaware in Early American Culture. I was both an American history and art history major. And until I came to Monticello, I worked exclusively in art museums. I was a curator of American Decorative Arts out in Los Angeles. And then I was the director of the Winterthur Museum where I had years before worked on my degree.
Leslie Greene Bowman: I consider myself an addicted curator to the arts, and I leaped at the chance to come to Monticello because I thought Jefferson was the Founding Father who did the most for the arts and then he was underappreciated for that. I think Monticello is just one of those beautiful places in America. I left Winterthur after nine years and came to Monticello, and I'm continuing to learn about Jefferson. He's fascinating. He's our American Leonardo. I think the vision, it's changed over the years.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Initially when I arrived in 2008, it was very important to begin to restore the honest and inclusive portrait of everybody who was at Monticello, making Monticello and Jefferson's life possible. We talked about that a little earlier. We had a $35 million project called the Mountaintop Project that restored the landscape of slavery. We put an exhibit in the room where Sally Hemings lived. We obviously at that same time restored the upper floors of the house and furnished those rooms that had never been on tour before.
Leslie Greene Bowman: And I think the vision is always about being as honest and authentic and helping visitors who come to Monticello see it as a place where they can see themselves and feel history and see how it's come forward in our lives. Annette Gordon-Reed's quote about America being the best and the worst, this country is in a lot of turmoil right now around race.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Our hope at Monticello is that we can offer an honest portrait of the past, which is where many of these tensions began in the hope that as we gain greater understanding of that history, we can also gain greater understanding of how to move through it and reconcile and move forward and better realize the word in the Declaration of Independence. Our vision right now, because we have done a lot of work and we're proud of it and we continue to tell these stories every day, we're now looking ahead to the 250th anniversary of the country in 2026.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Barely four years away, our country celebrates 250 years. And the date is, of course, the date of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. That is marked as our moment of birth and Jefferson gave us that document. Our vision for the next five years is to really illuminate the meaning of that document and it's weaknesses as well as its strengths.
Leslie Greene Bowman: I think we all know that when the founders adopted it, none of them, including the author, thought of Native Americans or women or Africans or African Americans as included in that statement, that all men are created equal, but Jefferson also more than perhaps any other founder wanted America to improve and to build on the vision. He talks about every generation needing to take it forward.
Leslie Greene Bowman: I think the beauty of Jefferson's words in the declaration are that they have become the rallying cry for every marginalized group who wants to be treated equally and who wants the same dignity and respect and privileges. And that's not just in this country with the women's movement or the civil rights movement, it's around the world. I mean, you have Gandhi quoting him. You have Mandela quoting him.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Our vision now is to really help the country find common ground and understand what the declaration meant and the work we still have to do to continue the progress that Jefferson wanted for the country.
Suzy Chase: As much as this is a magnificent coffee table book and it's truly a thing of beauty, I also believe this is an essential history book for each and every library in the United States. Have you thought about that or just me?
Leslie Greene Bowman: I love it that you said that.
Suzy Chase: Was it just me?
Leslie Greene Bowman: We always think about that and we are also the publishers with Princeton of Jefferson's Papers, which we also think need to be in every library of the United States. I'd love for this book to have a representation in all the great libraries, because I think it's a dimension of Jefferson that is all often missing. And I appreciate it that you've really fixed on that in your admiration for it.
Suzy Chase: Okay. I have to ask one last question. This is the million dollar question. What is your favorite room at Monticello?
Leslie Greene Bowman: That's so hard. If I want to crawl into the mind of Thomas Jefferson and just even try to understand his genius, of course, it's his cabinet where he had all these books. It was his sanctum sanctorum. It was only by invitation that you could go into his private suite. When Sarah and Ross Perot Jr visited, I loved it when we got to the cabinet and Ross, who is an aviator himself, a great accomplishment, took one look at the cabinet and the polygraph with the two pens to make a copy and all of the things, the scientific instruments and the books, and he said, "This is a cockpit."
Leslie Greene Bowman: And I thought, he's nailed it. Exactly. In a small space, Jefferson had everything set up. He could look East. He could see the time. He had everything at his fingertips. But if I wanted to go enjoy a room and if I were... Of course, we don't do this. But if someone said, "Which room would you like to just relax and listen to some music or read a book," which are two things I love to do, oh my gosh, it's the parlor. Those fabulous mirrors, the beautiful parquet floor, probably the first of its kind in America. I love the combination of French furniture with American furniture.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Not only from New York and Philadelphia, but furniture made right there in the joinery by John Hemings, Sally Hemings' brother, an enslaved. Jefferson wasn't snooty or elite about having to have everything look like a European house. He took, I think, great delight in mixing American and European things. And it's beautiful to see that in the parlor. I love the light. I love the volume of the parlor.
Leslie Greene Bowman: I think the parlor is the most palladian room in so far as it is almost a perfect hue. Therefore, like two and a half stories high, right, to match the breadth and the width of the room. It has the gorgeous windows right out onto the West lawn, bringing the inside out and the outside in. I think I'd have to vote for the parlor.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find Monticello on the web and social media?
Leslie Greene Bowman: Monticello.org is our website and our shop also has a website. It's Monticelloshop.org. We would love your visitors and your listeners to follow up and explore more about Jefferson and Monticello and particularly his dimension in the arts with this book.
Suzy Chase: To purchase Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, head over to DecoratingbytheBook.com. And thank you so much, Leslie, for coming on Decorating by the Book Podcast.
Leslie Greene Bowman: Thank you, Suzy. It's been a pleasure. Can't wait to see you at Monticello.
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