Dome Room
From Thomas Jefferson Wiki
Dimensions: 28' - 2" x 25' - 3";
Color: Walls are Mars yellow in distemper paint with calcium carbonate added. Floor: oil-based green paint.
Source: Courtyard of the Temple of Nerva Trajan as depicted in plate 15, Book 4 from Giacomo Leoni edition of The Four Books of The Architecture by A. Palladio
Although quite beautiful with its large circular windows and oculus skylight, the function of the Dome Room is not completely understood. The only known long-term occupants were Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph and his bride, Jane Hollins Nicholas, who lived in the room for a number of months starting in 1815. By Jefferson's death, if not before, the room had become primarily a storage area.
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Restoration of the Oculus
Thomas Jefferson referred to it as his "skyroom," the octagonal chamber inside the commanding dome so familiar to generations of Americans.[1] Even those who have never visited Monticello have a passing glimpse of the most famous feature of Jefferson's mountaintop home every time a nickel is counted out in change: the west front, with its dome view, is imprinted on each coin.
After years of careful planning, painstaking research, physical dexterity, and ultimately, international cooperation, the restoration of the dome room was completed with the installation of a massive table of blown glass made to duplicate Jefferson's first plans for the dome skylight, or oculus.
On December 1, 1989, an installation team scaling indoor and outdoor scaffolding lowered the circular glass onto the so-called oculus (Latin for "eye") at the pinnacle of the dome. Led by Monticello Restoration Specialist H. Andrew Johnson and Director of Buildings Michael B. Merriam, and under the watchful direction of Charlottesville restoration architect Floyd E. Johnson, the installation was successfully completed.
Scholars believe that Jefferson's decision to construct a dome over the central part of the house was inspired by his years in France (1784-1789). While in Paris, he wrote of being "violently smitten" with the Hôtel de Salm, a town house crowned with a prominent dome over its center riverfront room. This contemporary construction, combined with Jefferson's own study of Roman antiquities, may have formed the basis for his own grand vision at Monticello.
During Jefferson's lifetime, the only documented use of the dome room appears to have been as a grandson's bedroom. Access to the room was reached after climbing steep, narrow stairs and following a low hallway along the third floor. There would seem to be a limit to the practicality of such a chamber, but certainly no argument against the aesthetic beauty of the space. Washington socialite Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, following her visit to the house in 1809, that "it is a nobel and beautiful apartment furnished and being in the attic story is not used, which I thought a great pity, as it might be made the most beautiful room in the house."
The potential for beauty noted by Mrs. Smith faded in the years following Jefferson's death. During the Civil War, the house was seized by the Confederate government and suffered severe neglect and abuse. By the end of the nineteenth century, layers of paint covered years of graffiti and three windows were bricked in to prevent water damage.
In the twentieth century, thorough planning and dogged restoration efforts returned mahogany window sashes to the circular windows and the original Mars yellow distemper paint to the walls. The final step for Monticello's team of restoration experts was to replace the oculus lens.
Like Jefferson's own experience with the oculus glass, this final restoration effort was to prove the most challenging of all. In 1804, Jefferson ordered from the Boston Glass Works a sheet of glass which he specified should be at least forty-eight inches in diameter and of a suitable thickness. The initial shipment broke. Three additional sheets were ordered, but Jefferson's correspondence with his joiner suggests that within a few years he had to modify his original scheme.
The decision was made to replicate Jefferson's first visionary scheme, but Monticello's own search for a successful forty-eight inch table of blown glass proved to be equally elusive. In 1982, Monticello's Director of Restoration, William L. Beiswanger, and Floyd E. Johnson began to look for a glassworks which could replicate the historic process, but no annealing kilns of adequate size could be found. The multi-year investigation eventually led to a small 200-year-old company in Oberglas-Barnbach, Austria. The company's owner, Dr. Cornelius Grupp, took a personal interest in the project and, after months of experimentation and persistence, the glasmeisters created an oculus lens to Thomas Jefferson's own specifications.
Measuring four feet in diameter, weighing forty-nine pounds, and having a distinctive bull's-eye center, the oculus skylight offers luminous transcendence between the earthly and heavenly realms. Its installation completes the restoration of the dome room, and marks another milestone in the conservation and preservation work at Monticello.
Primary Source References
1807 April 18. (Jefferson to Richard Barry). "As the most important work you have to do here is to finish the floor of the hall and to paint the floor of the Dome room exactly in the same way."[2]
1809 August. (Margaret Bayard Smith). "We looked into a beautiful and circular room in the dome--it is 26 or 27 feet diameter--has eight circular windows and a handsome sky-light. It was designed for a lady's drawing-room when built, but soon found, on account of its situation in the dome, to be too inconvenient for that use, and was abandoned to miscellaneous purposes."[3]
1809 August. (Margaret Bayard Smith). "He [Jefferson] afterwards took us to the drawing room, 26 or 7 feet diameter, in the dome. It is a noble and beautiful apartment, with eight circular windows and a sky-light. It was not furnished and being in the attic story is not used, which I thought a great pit as it might be made the most beautiful room in the house."[4]
1812 March 16. (Jefferson to Henry Foxall). "I have a large dome room of 24. f. diam. which needs a stove, but a large one."[5]
1819 July 18. (Cornelia Jefferson Randolph to Virginia Jefferson Randolph Trist). "I will not ask you to make a great search for it [part of a pencil] and think it is in the dome if some of the young gentlemen have nor recognized it as their own, and taken it."[6]
1819 July 28. (Cornelia Jefferson Randolph to Virginia Jefferson Randolph Trist). "I made apologies to you about giving you so many commissions because I knew you sometimes would sooner die than drag yourself up into the dome where you would have to go to execute most of my commissions."[7]
1823 June 5. (Virginia Jefferson Randolph Trist to Nicholas Philip Trist). "I have never told you of the nice little cuddy that has become my haunt, and from which I an now writing. Do you recollect the place over the parlour's Portico into which the dome room opened? Since the columns to the portico have been completed, Grand-Papa has had the great work bench removed from it, and a floor layed. Corneilia's ingenuity in conjunction with mine formed steps from the dome into this little closet with a pile of boxes, and having furnished this apartment with a sopha to lounge upon, though alas! without cushions, a high and low chair and two small tables, one for my writing desk, the other for my books; and breathing through a broken pane of glass and some wide cracks in the floor; I have taken possession with the dirt daubers, wasps and humble bees; and do not intend to give it up to any thing but the formible rats which have not yet found out this fairy place."[8]
Footnotes
- ↑ This section based on Monticello Newsletter, Summer 1990.
- ↑ Massachusetts Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/findingaids/doc.cfm?fa=fa0031
- ↑ Richmond Enquirer. 18 January 1823.
- ↑ Smith, First Forty Years, 71.
- ↑ Massachusetts Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/findingaids/doc.cfm?fa=fa0031
- ↑ Nicholas Philip Trist Papers. University of North Carolina. http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Papers of Nichols P. Trist. Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/
See Also
Further Sources
- Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. "Restoration of Monticello's Dome Room." Audio file available at http://www.monticello.org/podcasts/index.html.
