James Hemings

Portrait by Artist to Come

QUICK FACTS
BORN:
1765 in Guinea, Cumberland County, Virginia
  DIED:
1801 in Baltimore, Maryland

           

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Portrait to come. See entry in Wikipedia.

 

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Visitors to Monticello often wonder at its practical accessories. Jefferson labored a month to save a minute. His home was impractical from the start — by reason of its very site (on a mountain), by the height given the first version of the building (later disguised in a way that left useless spaces in and around its dome), by the perpetual course of its dismantling and reassembly. To make the house more convenient, he made his daughter and her children live for years in a chaos of artistic second thoughts, sometimes sheltered only by canvas as the roof rose, fell, and assumed new shapes in his mind.

Garry Wills
Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1978)