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Maryland Historical Magazine, 1942, Volume 37, Issue No. 4

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Maryland Historical Magazine, 1942, Volume 37, Issue No. 4 EAST FRONT OF THE CAPITOL AS DESIGNED BY LATROBE Drawing by the architect, signed and dated 1810. Only the wings had already been built. Presented to the Maryland Historical Society, 1897, by Charles H. Latrobe. WS4 c5C .5^/ -I-/a MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE VOL. XXXVII DECEMBER, 1942 No. 4 BENJAMIN HENRY LATROBE: THE MAN AND THE ARCHITECT By TALBOT HAMLIN Benjamin Henry Latrobe, more than any other one man, was the creator in America of the architectural profession, as well as the instigator of a new kind of architecture. He came to this country only a few years after the successful conclusion of the Revolutionary War had made it a nation; through his efforts and the efforts of the men he taught and influenced, its architec- ture became national and no longer colonial. He brought to the country a new vision of the dignity of classic simplicity. He showed the country the inspiration to be gathered from the per- fection of ancient Greek buildings. He thus performed in this country almost the same function performed in England at about the same time by a man twelve years his senior. Sir John Soane. It is a somewhat disgraceful irony that even here in America there are more people who know the work and the genius of the Eng- lish architect than those who know equally well the work and the genius of Latrobe. There were many similarities between them. Both revolted against a worn-out tradition of older Georgian or Colonial Renais- sance and Baroque; both felt that the nineteenth-century world demanded an architecture clearer, simpler, more powerful; both had to fight the entrenched supporters of the older forms; and both designed works of revolutionary import, which set the entire architectures of their respective countries on a different road. In character, too, there was much that was similar between them, for both men were emotional, at times embittered by their strug- 339 340 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE gles, and both had a genius for finding themselves immersed in futile controversy. Arthur Bolton in his Portrait of Sir John Soane, R. A. quotes a friend of Soane's as reminding him that " your constitution is too eager for stormy weather." Latrobe wrote of himself in the Envoi of his Journal: " I find infinite satisfaction in grumbling and complaining." Of both, too, there is an unusually complete record in letters and drawings, so that we can, as it were, see them at work as well as study their completed works. Bolton says further of Soane: Soane was an idealist, hardened but never entirely disillusioned by con- tact with the difficulties and disappointments to which all those who pursue a high aim, regardless of circumstances, are subjected. When Latrobe, a year after his resignation as architect of the Capitol, the inevitable end of a long and futile squabble, went to New Orleans in connection with his water supply scheme, he went as essentially a disappointed man, although confident of his ulti- mate high rank among American architects. Yet his fame, even then, was greater than he realized, and Ackermann's Repository, in London, published a long and eulogistic obituary of him shortly after his death. Latrobe was born in Yorkshire in 1762. He was half American by birth. His father was a Moravian clergyman, but his mother— Ann Margaret Antes—Moravian also, was of a Pennsylvania family and had come to Europe originally to be educated in a German school, where the elder Latrobe met her. Young Latrobe also was sent to Germany for his later education, first to a Mora- vian academy in Saxony, and then to the University of Leipzig, where he remained for three years. When he left the university, out of pure adventurousness he and two English friends joined the German army and served for part of a year. Latrobe was slightly wounded, left the service— one judges, with considerable relief—and spent the rest of the year in making the usual young Englishman's " grand tour " of the Continent. The results of his German experience he embodied in two booklets he published later in England.1 He had been interested in architecture and buildings from an early age, and 1 Characteristic Anecdotes and Miscellaneous Authentic Papers, Tending to Illus- trate the Character of Frederick II, Late King of Prussia (London, 1788). Authentic Elucidation of the History of Counts Struensee and Brandt, and of the Revolution in Denmark in the Year 1722 (London, 1789). BENJAMIN HENRY LATROBE 341 loved to sketch, and this trip seems to have determined his decision to seek his life work in architecture. He returned to England in 1786, and for the next three years served some kind of an apprenticeship, first with Smeaton, the engineer (the famous designer of the Eddystone Lighthouse), where he imbibed the elements of engineering, and later with the architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, a great-nephew of the famous diarist as well as the father of the C. R. Cockerell who later became a distinguished architect in his own right. The elder Cockerell, from whom Latrobe probably gained most of his strictly architectural training, was strangely enough not a member of the advance guard of English architects of his time. The greater part of his work, especially the East India House (which he designed), harks back to the dignified Palladianism of Sir William Chambers, rather than forward to the experiments which Soane was just beginning to make. At the end of his three years' training, Latrobe struck out for himself, and made an early reputation in London—which gained him an appointment as surveyor to the Police Offices of London. Of his other English work there is little trace, though the Acker- mann obituary mentions a house called Hammerwood Lodge, at East Grinstead, and implies other important domestic work. He had married the daughter of a London clergyman, Lydia Sellon. They had two children—a son, Henry, destined to become La- trobe's right-hand man in much of his work (and yet to pre- decease him, of yellow fever, in New Orleans in 1817), and a daughter, named after her mother, Lydia, who was to marry an American, Nicholas Roosevelt, the financier. In 1793 Mrs. Latrobe died. Latrobe apparently felt himself at loose ends. The break in his life made future work in London distasteful to him, and we know that at that time he was an enthusiastic political radical, devoted to republicanism and liberty. What more natural than that his mind should turn to his mother's home, America? She must have told him much about it during his childhood. What tales he must have heard from her, as he sat at her feet in the little Yorkshire house!—stories of the busy Moravian farmers in that rich Pennsylvania country, descriptions of the hills and the woods and the lush valleys. Perhaps, too, she told him of Indians and the dangers of Indian invasion during 342 MARYLAND HISTORICAL MAGAZINE the French and Indian wars. She may have spoken of Franklin and the gradual growth of common colonial feeling in the mid- eighteenth century, and of the increasing vision of liberty that accompanied the rapidly growing wealth and security. He must have been filled with curiosity about the strange new country that had so recently been born. Adventurous, radical, with a half American background, emigration to America was the obvious step—and that step he finally took. Arriving in America in 1796—not in Pennsylvania, where he had planned to go, but, through force of storm, at Norfolk—he made Virginia his home for the next three years. It was a strange, rather uncouth, rather half finished world that Latrobe found. The sketches which he made so plentifully show generally a most untidy landscape, with great houses rising out of half trimmed meadows, scraggly woods, and underbrush. It was a world where almost everything had to be done to make a civilized environ- ment, and yet—though shoes were scarce and expensive, and even gentlemen went barefoot when they played billiards—it was a world full of idealism and full of determination. Latrobe's professional abilities were instantly made use of. He worked on schemes to improve the navigation of the Potomac. He designed and built the Penitentiary at Richmond—long since destroyed—and possibly may have designed the Governor's Resi- dence there, which seems to have many of the earmarks of his work. He made a trip to the Dismal Swamp to investigate the possibilities of drainage and navigation canals, and seems to have enjoyed every minute of a rather wandering, even almost purpose- less, kind of life. And all the time he was making his beautiful and vivid watercolors of the country he was discovering. These watercolors of Latrobe's are among the most informing portrayals we possess of that early America of the end of the eighteenth century. Technically excellent, facile and rapid, they yet have a compelling realism. One lives in them, one feels almost that he has actually traveled those rough roads, seen the stumps of newly felled trees, pressed through underbrush to the little garden of a big house, to find unusual and unexpected luxury within. Through these travels Latrobe came to know not only how the country looked, but also, as his Journal2 shows, how all 2 Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Latrobe (New York, 1905), reproduces several of the Latrobe sketches. BENJAMIN HENRY LATROBE 343 sorts of people in America behaved—rich and poor, workers, farmers, slaves. Yet at the same time he was meeting the best people of the country, and through the introduction of Bushrod Washington, whom he had met, he visited the Father of his Country at Mount Vernon.
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