This work reconstructs the career of Hammatt Billings, one of the most versatile artists of the 19th century. Skilled in a wide range of media, Billings designed furniture, statuary, monuments, architecture, and public and private gardens, was a painter, and a private and public artist.

Since the Renaissance, books and drawings have been a primary means of communication among architects and their colleagues and clients. In this volume, twelve historians explore the use of books by architects in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period when the profession of architecture was first emerging in the United States.

As architects separated themselves from amateur and gentlemen designers on the one hand and masons and carpenters on the other, members of the profession were distinguished by their ability to draw and their possession of a common body...