During his time as minister to the court of Louis XVI, from 1784 to 1789, Thomas Jefferson became not only a friend of France but also the champion of European culture in the United States. Because the man who was to become America's third president learned so much from his five years abroad - about the fine arts of architecture and painting and about the practical arts of agriculture, bureaucracy, and commerce - his stay in Europe remains one of the most important of any American before or since.

In the first book to describe and explore the significance of Jefferson's European journey, George Green Shackelford offers the reader an intimate and richly detailed account of what Jefferson saw and how he saw it. In the process, he assesses the influence on Jefferson of such figures as the architect Charles Louis Clerisseau and the artist Maria Cosway.

Illustrated with more than sixty contemporary images of the places Jefferson visited and described, Jefferson's Travels in Europe shows how Jefferson's journeys in France, England, Italy, the Netherlands, and the German Rhineland shaped his intellectual and aesthetic development.

Coaxing meaning out of Jefferson's account books and correspondence, and the parallel experiences of other travelers of the day, Shackelford has created a unique document, one that bears "a general resemblance to the book that Thomas Jefferson never wrote, his Notes on Europe."