9781422287484

12 Jefferson Memorial: A Monument to Greatness

been proposed by Pierre L’Enfant, the original designer of the capital . By 1922, work on the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial had been finished. It seemed only fitting to members of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission that their memorial would com- plete the final phase of the National Mall project. Then, without holding a nationwide competition—as had been expected—the commission asked architect John Russell Pope to submit a design. This action drew

VITAL FIGURE: John Pope, architect John Russell Pope was an American architect whose most impor- tant design was the National Gallery of Art. It was completed in

1941 and since 1978 has been known as the West Building of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Pope was born in New York in 1874 and studied architecture under William R. Ware at Columbia University. He graduated in 1894 and two years later began training at the American Academy in Rome and later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He became a leading advocate of academic eclecticism, which is the duplication of his-

toric architecture through painstaking study and research. This is what Pope did when he designed the Jefferson Memorial in the style of Jefferson’s home, Monticello. Because he was immensely popular as a designer, his services were in great demand. In addition to designing the Jefferson Memorial, Pope also designed memorials for Theodore Roosevelt in Washington, D.C., and New York City, and the Lincoln Memorial in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Pope died in 1937.