Possibly the best known of all American "colonial" architects, Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844) approached design as an 18th-century amateur gentleman of taste rather than as a 19th-century professional architect.

Charles Bulfinch was born into a well-connected and well-to-do Boston family; his father was a physician and a graduate of Harvard College and Edinburg University. Bulfinch took a degree at Harvard in 1781; then, as soon as political conditions permitted, he took the 18th-century gentleman's grand tour of Europe (1785-1787). On his return, according to his autobiography, he "passed a season of leisure, pursuing no business but giving gratuitous advice in architecture, and looking forward to an establishment in life."

In 1788 he married Hannah Apthorp and designed his first building, the Hollis Street Church in Boston. The following year he provided plans for churches in Taunton and Pittsfield and executed a Revolutionary memorial in Boston, a Roman Doric column of stucco-covered...