During the years of the American Revolutionary War, 1776-83, years in which Romantic Classicism was maturing in France and in England, North Americans were not entirely cut off from the Old World. Not only did many earlier cultural ties remain unbroken—while a surprising reverse emigration of good painters from the New World to the Old occurred—but new cultural ties with the French ally were established, and these were maintained and reinforced by several émigrés of ability who arrived in the 1790s. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), hitherto as confirmed a Palladian as any English landowner of the mid eighteenth century, was undoubtedly influenced by his friend Clérisseau when he based his Virginia State Capitol[23] of 1785-96 at Richmond very closely on the best preserved ancient Roman structure that he had seen in France, the Maison Carrée at Nîmes, even though he used for the portico an Ionic instead of a Corinthian order. In this first major public monument initiated in the new republic Jefferson’s drastic aim of forcing all the requirements of a fairly complex modern building inside the rigid mould of a Roman temple was more consonant with the absolutism of the French in this period than with the rather looser formal ideals of the English. Jefferson was not able to impose so rigid a Classicism on the new Federal capital of Washington at its start, despite the efforts of various French and British engineers, architects, and amateurs who participated in the competitions of 1792 for the President’s House (White House) and for the Capitol and who worked on the latter during its first decade of construction. The White House[24] as designed by the Irish architect James Hoban (_c._ 1762-1831) was still quite in the earlier eighteenth-century Anglo-Palladian manner, and Jefferson’s own project was based on Palladio’s Villa Rotonda. Neither the English amateur William Thornton (1759-1828) and his professional assistant who was also English, George Hadfield (_c._ 1764-1826), nor their French associate É.-S. Hallet succeeded in giving the Capitol[25] a very up-to-date character (Plate 82A). Yet it is these major edifices that still occupy two of the focal points in the Washington city plan,[26] which was prepared by the French engineer P.-C. L’Enfant (1754-1825) before his dismissal from public service in 1792.