Jefferson Memorial

The Jefferson Memorial was dedicated on April 13, 1943, the 200th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, in the middle of a world war. The bronze statue was not ready. Metal was needed for the war, so the figure that stood inside for the first few years was a painted plaster model. The bronze went in after the war.

The building was designed by John Russell Pope, who also designed the National Archives and the National Gallery of Art. He chose a round, domed form with columns, a nod to the Pantheon in Rome and to the buildings Jefferson himself designed at Monticello and the University of Virginia. Pope died in 1937, and others finished the work.

Even the site was a fight. The memorial was placed on the Tidal Basin, where Japanese cherry trees had been planted in 1912. When word got out that some trees would be cut down for construction, protesters came out to defend them. The trees that were lost were replaced, and the cherry blossoms and the memorial now appear together in countless pictures.

Most of this board is about Jefferson himself. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as the 3rd president, and arranged the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which doubled the size of the country. He was also an architect, a farmer, an inventor and a collector of books. He was a slaveholder all his life, which is part of his story and part of how he is understood today.

Pictures of Jefferson are mostly prints taken from a handful of painted portraits. He died in 1826, before photography existed, so every image of him comes from an artist. Rembrandt Peale and Gilbert Stuart painted the best-known ones, and engravers copied them for a century. The stamps on this board come from the same source. Jefferson chose his own epitaph. He listed 3 things: author of the Declaration, author of the Virginia statute for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. He left off the presidency. That says a lot about what he thought mattered.