Jefferson's Temple: The Virginia State Capitol

Thomas Jefferson was in Paris in seventeen eighty-five when he received a commission from Virginia to design a new state capitol building for Richmond. He visited the ancient Roman temple called the Maison Carrée in Nimes, in the south of France, stood before it for a long time, and decided that was the model. He wrote to a friend that he gazed at the building for hours, like a lover at his mistress.

Working with the French architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Jefferson produced drawings for a capitol modeled on a first-century Roman temple, with a full Ionic portico and a tall basement story adapted for American use. Construction began in seventeen eighty-five. The building was completed in seventeen eighty-eight.

It was the first public building in the Western Hemisphere to be built in the classical revival style, and it influenced public architecture across the United States for the next century. The United States Capitol, built later, followed the idiom that Jefferson introduced here. The building served a double history.

It housed the Virginia General Assembly, which traces its lineage to the House of Burgesses of sixteen nineteen, making it the oldest elected legislative body in North America. During the Civil War, the same building served as the capitol of the Confederate States of America from eighteen sixty-one to eighteen sixty-five, and Jefferson Davis worked from offices nearby. In nineteen sixty, the building was designated a National Historic Landmark.

Inside, a life-size marble statue of George Washington by Jean-Antoine Houdon, completed in seventeen ninety-two from a direct sitting with Washington, stands in the central rotunda. It is considered the most accurate likeness of Washington ever made.