Last Chance for Samuel McIntire!

The Peabody Essex Museum's wonderful exhibit, Samuel McIntire, Carving an American Style, closes on Sunday - and if you have not yet seen it, I recommend finding some time this weekend to get here!

McIntire heavily influenced the architecture in Salem and throughout this region. People who are lucky enough to have a McIntire detail, a mantle, a doorway, in their house are very proud of it! Further afield, McIntire's work is exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and in 1792 he submitted a proposal for the design of the Capitol at Washington, DC (alas, it wasn't chosen). His carvings are beautiful, and we are fortunate that its significance was recognized and preserved through the past 200 years.

The following is excerpted from the exhibit microsite: Samuel McIntire (1757–1811) was one of America’s most versatile artists during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the young nation explored new intersections among ideas, concepts, and cultures to create the foundation of its artistic traditions. Recognized as the architect who transformed his birthplace, Salem, Massachusetts, into the epitome of an elegant American town, after 1795 he also gained prominence as a wood carver. The original design vocabulary that he developed from confident and ambitious experimentation produced one of the first significant carving traditions in the new nation.

McIntire played a major role in expressing the new British neoclassical style, which drew its primary inspiration from the art and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. He then developed his own distinct version of the style to express the beliefs and aspirations of the first generation of Americans to experience economic, political, and artistic freedom. McIntire worked cooperatively with the town’s leading cabinetmakers, carpenters, and shipbuilders, providing them with carved ornamentation, but his most important surviving carvings are found on furniture and woodwork of his own design done for Salem’s Derby family. His sensitivity to design as a whole produced some of the most beautiful rooms created during the Federal period (1780–1820).

For more on the Peabody Essex Museum, visit http://www.pem.org/. The Boston Globe review of the exhibit ran on November 4, 2007. Read it here.