Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor by Julia Sienkewicz, and: Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe by Jean H. Baker (review)

The attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 seized our attention with its violence and farce. Its violation of the authority of the federal government included the disruption of deliberation, the mediated transgression of sovereign boundaries, and vandalism of the fabric of the Capitol itself. These moments of disruption foreground the centrality of architectural symbolism to the machinery of national governance and become opportunities for its revaluation. Such was also the case following the War of 1812, when architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe returned to Washington to rebuild the edifice following a decidedly severe incident of capitol-involved violence. And like the redcoats’ attack of August 24, 1814, January’s outburst represented an escalation in an ongoing national struggle, one waged in significant ways in the realm of history and architecture.

At a time when architectural neoclassicism and the year 1776 are unexpected flashpoints in America’s culture wars, Latrobe is back. To speak of Latrobe, the “primogenitor” of the profession and prolific polymath, has always been to grapple with fundamental questions of the nation’s architectural practice and intellectual life.¹ In Talbot Hamlin’s exhaustive 1955 life and works, Latrobe emerges as an American modernist, tragically ahead of his time. In the 1970s, Edward C. Carter II led, with the Maryland Historical Society, an initiative to publish Latrobe’s extensive papers. The entire corpus reached microfiche in time for the Bicentennial, and published volumes continued through 1995. This material has since informed scholarly refashionings of Latrobe for a post-2008 cultural landscape ruled over by the likes of the Tea Party and the musical Hamilton.

Two recent works leverage the journals and correspondence in these volumes to cast Latrobe as something more than the nation’s first architect. Julia Sienkewicz’s Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor analyzes the early watercolors in his journals to depict him as an ambitious and reflective amateur artist perceiving the nation with an immigrant’s eye. Jean H. Baker’s Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe instead uses correspondence and journals to assemble a biography rooting his career as the nation’s architect firmly in his education and family life.

In part, these perspectives reflect disciplinary and generational concerns. While Epic Landscapes emerged from an art history dissertation, Building America registers its author’s training in social and political history as well as the feminist and cultural turns her work has taken in subsequent decades. The books focus on different time spans: while Baker retells Latrobe’s life story, Sienkewicz closely reads his work over a four-year period. Even when looking at the same historical moments, the two often make starkly different interpretations. In recounting Latrobe’s journey to America aboard the Eliza, for example, Sienkewicz foregrounds his watercolors to narrate it as a melancholy, brooding “purgatory,” while Baker identifies in his journals a sardonic pride and an enthusiasm that “never faltered.”² Both authors note Latrobe’s private distaste for slavery and, in different ways, interpret his depictions of plantation life as critiques. While Sienkewicz reads his deadpan rendering of a group of enslaved fishermen on an unrefined Virginia plantation as a form of realist “undeception,” Baker chooses to explain another image, Overseer Doing His Duty, as a sarcastic indictment of sexual and racial power.³ Baker however complicates such progressive attributions by acknowledging his frequent use of convict labor and his acquisition of an enslaved man named David Smith in 1804.⁴ In discussing Latrobe’s design for the Virginia State Penitentiary, Baker contrasts its liberal reformism with the legislature’s illiberal purse strings.⁵ Sienkewicz instead analyzes Latrobe’s liberties with the renderings, arguing for a sort of primacy of image over building...