This catalog, which marks the bicentennial of our nation’s founding in 1776, takes as its focus the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson—through his reading, looking, travels, and own artistic output—was a force in not just America’s, but the world’s intellectual and artistic life of this time period. Of all the Founding Fathers, with their remarkable talents, learning, and accomplishments, Jefferson stands alone in his lifelong commitment to the arts. His legacy includes not only the concrete achievements of his architecture and designs, but more importantly, the record of a uniquely creative man whose example is unmatched in the first 200 years of the Republic. The development of that eye and the mind and imagination behind it is the subject of the catalog, which serves as an aesthetic biography of Jefferson.