Danielle Willkens
travels of Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway were typically sponsored, professionally driven expeditions that, although inclusive of leisurely pursuits, were largely shaped by working interests. As designers, agents, and patrons, they were participants in post-Enlightenment intellectuals circles and highly attuned to aesthetics and new developments in architecture. Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway were also linked to a transatlantic community through their desire to disseminate knowledge and to bring international experience to a larger audience through their localised architectural and educational endeavors: Jefferson’s house-museum of Monticello and his Academical Village of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia; Soane’s Museum and his work as a Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy in London, England; and Cosway’s Collegeio delle Grazie in Lodi, Italy, a multi-lingual school that taught the arts, humanities, and science to adolescent girls. The geographic timeline for eighteen other figures within the network is featured below and shows that Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway were not the only correspondence within the network embarking on professionally driven travel and founding educational institutions. The figures featured in the timeline below were all shared correspondence of at least two of the members of the Jeffersonian-Cosway triumvirate. 3
Soane’s ambitions were confirmed by his deliberate attempts to obscure his humble heritage that even included adding an ‘e’ to the end of his surname, as noted by several previous researchers such as Darley (1999: 16). His plans to transcend his class took him from the country to the city and in his Memoirs on the Professional Life of an Architect Between the Years 1768 and 1835 (1835), he wrote that, as if by divine intervention, he was “led by natural inclination to study architecture at age fifteen” (11). Cosway was potentially the most caricatured and, consequentially, dismissed of the three. She embodied the image of the attractive artist and within the majority of extant scholarship, her romantic role as a muse has consistently overshadowed her numerous artistic commissions and contributions. Yet, she served as a conduit for her closest correspondents by advancing connections between international figures in the arts, helping circulate publications on architecture and landscape, and providing eyes on the artistic scene of Europe. As an interconnected triumvirate, the projects by and longstanding relationships between Jefferson, Soane, and Cosway demonstrate a particularly distinguished sample of the Transatlantic Design Network. The humble backgrounds of each figure distinctly differentiate their travels and experiences from those of most aristocratic participants in the Grand Tour who travelled at a leisurely pace with substantial funds, spent the majority of time abroad with their own countrymen, and resisted the full exploration of foreign cultures, much like Smelfungus of Laurence Sterne’s satirical account A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, by Mr Yorick (1768). Additionally, the
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3 Due to the density of information, this map can also be found online as an interactive graphic that allows users to filter and more closely example certain places of travel, professional categories, nationalities, and dates (http://www.archdsw.com/transatlantic-design-network-1768-1836.html).
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