Washington: watercolor on ivory in a rose-gold on silver locket. Martha: watercolor on ivory in a rose-gold over copper locket; reverse: Join’d by Friendship, Crown’d by Love. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.
These private images of the couple were painted at Martha’s request on the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death.
But as an intellectual enterprise ... [Jefferson’s University of Virgina] proved less satisfactory to its creator when it opened the year before he died. The students turned out be not so much an aristocracy of virtue and talent as a gang of rowdy youths with a taste for drink, gambling, breaking windows, firing guns into the air, and thrashing professors who tried to stop them. The horrified Jefferson came down from his mountain to Charlottesville to reprimand them. Flanked by his dear friends and fellow trustees James Madison and James Monroe, the frail eighty-two-year-old patriarch drew himself up to his full six foot two, began to speak — and burst into tears.