a knowledgeable guide. Clérisseau served as a mentor to a generation of young architectural students who (like Clérisseau) had won the prestigious Prix de Rome and came to study at the French Academy in Rome. He also guided the developing taste for the Antique in young French and British artists and gentlemen amateurs on the Grand Tour. His skillful drawings of ancient architectural details, of real Roman ruins and imaginary ones, helped form the taste of young architects like Robert Adam in the 1750s and his brother James Adam, in 1760-63. Clérisseau added to his income by providing architectural illustrations, sometimes in series, for young men on the Grand Tour. On the first of December, 1763, in San Luigi dei Francesi (Church of St. Louis of the French) in Rome, Clérisseau married Therèse, daughter of the sculptor Pierre de l'Estache. "Clérisseau was forty-two and Therése was presumably much younger, though her father was about seventy-five at the time." Return to Paris; dealings with Catherine the Great and Thomas Jefferson Upon his return to Paris in the summer of 1767, Clérisseau became a magnet for young neoclassical architects, like François-Joseph Bélanger, who themselves never visited Rome. Although they never met, and he never traveled to Russia, Clérisseau nonetheless attracted the attention of Catherine the Great, who in 1773 solicited from him plans for a house in a style à l'antique to be erected in her gardens at Tsarskoye Selo. Catherine was vexed when she received the plans, which were far more elaborate than she expected, "a grandiose Roman palace" described "as the Baths of Caracalla set into Hadrian's Villa." There is no evidence that Clérisseau was ever paid for the rejected plans. Nevertheless, in 1778 Catherine again approached him, through an emissary, and arranged to purchase over a thousand drawings and artworks from him; this huge cache would ultimately find a home in the Hermitage. In 1780 she asked Clérisseau to design a triumphal arch to be built in Russia, but when the plans arrived she decided the gigantic project would be too large and expensive and abandoned it. Although his projects for Catherine never came to fruition, Clérisseau's drawings and designs were highly influential in the decoration of her apartments at Tsarskoye Selo. In recognition of his artistic achievements and his efforts on her behalf, the empress made Clérisseau an honorary member of the Imperial Academy of Arts and bestowed