In 1784 Thomas Jefferson moved to the sophisticated and exhilarating city of Paris, where he spent the next five years as minister from the new United States of America. These were formative years for France, for the United States, and for Jefferson’s cultural and intellectual development. This engaging book recreates in word and illustration the atmosphere and personalities of prerevolutionary Paris, and it reveals the profound impact they had on one of America’s first transatlantic citizens. William Howard Adams discusses how the provincial Virginian became a cosmopolitan connoisseur in the rarefied intellectual, political, scientific, and artistic circles of the city. He describes Jefferson’s relationships with such luminaries as Lafayette, Condorcet, Lavoisier, Baron Grimm, La Rochefoucauld, John and Abigail Adams, Gouverneur Morris, and J.-L. David, as well as his involvement with the English painter Maria Cosway. His alleged affair with his slave Sally Hemings is critically examined in the context of all available evidence. Adams’s principal focus is on Jefferson’s role as the preeminent American envoy in Europe after the departure of Franklin, his participation in the cultural and political life of the city, and his private intrigues to help his friends bring the Bourbon monarchy to heel. Finally, he places the author of the Declaration of Independence in the middle of his second revolution and chronicles the dramatic events leading up to the upheaval of 1788-1789. The book is richly illustrated with art of the period and with specially commissioned photographs of Parisian sites by Adelaide de Menil.

The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson

Biographies & Memoirs

ADAMS, William Howard

Adams, Professor William Howard

Historical

Yale University Press

A plainspoken, racy patrician who distrusted democracy but opposed slavery and championed freedom for all minorities, an important player in the American Revolution, later an astute critic of the French Revolution, Gouverneur Morris remains an enigma among the founding generation. This comprehensive, engrossing biography tells his robust story, including his celebrated love affairs during his long stay in Europe. Morris's public record is astonishing. One of the leading figures of the Constitutional Convention, he put the Constitution in its final version, including its opening Preamble. As Washington's first minister to Paris, he became America's most effective representative in France. A successful, international entrepreneur, he understood the dynamics of commerce in the modern world. Frankly cosmopolitan, he embraced city life as a creative center of civilization and had a central role in the building of the Erie Canal and in laying out the urban grid plan of Manhattan. William Howard Adams describes Morris's many contributions, talents, sophistication, and wit, as well as his romantic liaisons, free habits, and free speech. He brings to life a fascinating man of great stature, a founding father who receives his due at last.

Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life

Leaders & Notable People

An engrossing biography of one of the most colorful and least well-known of the founding fathers A plainspoken, racy patrician who distrusted democracy but opposed slavery and championed freedom for all minorities, an important player in the American Revolution, later an astute critic of the French Revolution, Gouverneur Morris remains an enigma among the founding generation. This comprehensive, engrossing biography tells his robust story, including his celebrated love affairs during his long stay in Europe. Morris’s public record is astonishing. One of the leading figures of the Constitutional Convention, he put the Constitution in its final version, including its opening Preamble. As Washington’s first minister to Paris, he became America’s most effective representative in France. A successful, international entrepreneur, he understood the dynamics of commerce in the modern world. Frankly cosmopolitan, he embraced city life as a creative center of civilization and had a central role in the building of the Erie Canal and in laying out the urban grid plan of Manhattan. William Howard Adams describes Morris’s many contributions, talents, sophistication, and wit, as well as his romantic liaisons, free habits, and free speech. He brings to life a fascinating man of great stature, a founding father who receives his due at last.

An architectural study of Thomas Jefferson's house, exploring in detail its design and construction. Second revised edition.

Jefferson's Montecello

Arts & Photography

Architecture

Abbeville Pr

Nature Perfected: Gardens Through History

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

A wealth of illustrations effectively traces the development of the art and architecture of the French garden over the course of three centuries, highlighting a number of key examples in detail

The French Garden, 1500-1800 (World Landscape Art & Architecture Series)

George Braziller

The French Garden 1500 1800

Roberto Burle Marx: The Unnatural Art of the Garden

Museum of Modern Art

Eye of Thomas Jefferson

University of Virginia Press

As the end of the twentieth century approaches, it becomes apparent that the past one hundred or so years have been characterized by a great variety and virtuosity in landscape architecture, which, at the same time, has demonstrated a strange reticence about itself as an art form. This discomfiture with its status among the arts is mirrored in the fact that, until now, there has been no serious book-form examination of modern garden design on an international scope. Structured around works of the greatest twentieth-century landscape designers of Europe, Great Britain, and the Americas, Grounds for Change sets about correcting this omission. In an impressive disquisition on the origins and development of twentieth-century landscape architecture, Mr. Adams examines the Italianate and Anglophilic urges of designers of the late 1890s and early 1900s, the Cubist and Modernist approaches of the twenties and thirties, and then proceeds right up to recent attempts to evoke beauty through environmentally responsible design. This is followed by a portfolio of twenty-four gardens, each illustrated with exquisite full-color photographs made especially for this book.

Grounds for Change: Major Gardens of the Twentieth Century

Bulfinch Pr

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Books by ADAMS, William Howard