It was Benjamin H. Latrobe (1764-1820), an English-born architect of German and English training, who finally brought to America just before 1800, and shortly to Washington, the highest professional standards of the day and a complete Romantic Classical programme. Indeed, he almost succeeded in making Romantic Classicism the official style in the United States for all time; at least it remained so down to the Civil War in the sixties, and a later revival lasted, as regards public architecture in Washington, from the 1900s to the 1930s (see Chapter 24). A pupil of S. P. Cockerell, Latrobe emigrated in 1796 and was soon assisting Jefferson on the final completion of the Virginia State Capitol as well as undertaking the construction of canals as an engineer. Not inappropriately Latrobe’s first important American building, the Bank of Pennsylvania begun in 1798, was also an Ionic temple, but with an order that aspired to be Greek. This Philadelphia bank included a great central hall whose saucer dome, visible externally, made it a more complex and architectonic composition than the Richmond Capitol. The flat lantern crowning the dome recalled, and may derive from, those over Soane’s offices at the Bank of England. Characteristically, Latrobe at this very same time was also building a country house, Sedgley, outside Philadelphia, with ‘Gothick’ detailing. By 1803 he had taken charge of the construction of the Capitol, nominally under Thornton, with whom he had continual rows. Most of the early interiors there were his, notably those in the south wing, fine examples of Romantic Classicism with French as well as English overtones; moreover he was still in charge of rebuilding them after the burning of the Capitol in 1814 down to his forced resignation in 1817. In 1805 Latrobe submitted alternative designs for the Catholic cathedral in Baltimore. The Gothic design is one of the finest projects of the ‘Sublime’ or ‘High Romantic’ stage of the Gothic Revival; yet in its vast bare walls, carefully ordered geometry, and dry detail it is also consonant with some of the basic ideals of Romantic Classicism. The Classical design that was preferred and eventually built is perhaps less original; but internally, at least, this is one of the finest ecclesiastical monuments of Romantic Classicism, combining a rather Panthéon-like plan with segmental vaults of somewhat Soanic character (Plate 5). The cathedral was largely completed by 1818. The portico, though intended from the first, was added only in 1863, but the present bulbous terminations of the western towers are not of Latrobe’s design.