Neoclassicism: ancient roots for a modern democracy

A new country built from a clean slate still needed to resort to the past, a very human need to explain where we come from. The Founding Fathers chose ancient Greece and Republican Rome.

Thomas Jefferson and Monticello

The father of American architecture, sinking his root deeply in the classical world, Jefferson designed Monticello and the building of the University of Virginia. Statues representing the statesmen were certainly innovative in their size: human size.

Benjamin West

With his Portrait of General Wolf, West changes the notion of what a heroic portrait was, for he chooses to portray the general in modern dressing and not surrounded by people in togas.

Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole's series of five paintings warning of disasters to come, in a more romantic tone. He warns against Andrew Jackson's caesarism. Some images can be found here.

The stagnant South

While a new American art was thriving in the North, the South had nothing to show but neoclassical architecture in large plantations.