The Skillin Workshop - ship figures by the Skillin family

Scattered along the eastern seaboard of the United States in private collections, museums, and historical societies are eighteenth-century carved wooden figures - the last surviving examples of the earliest non-native figurative sculpture created in the United States. These images once played a significant role in the daily events of American port cities, where allegorical figures of Justice, Hope, and Wisdom communicated national power, public pride, and individual status.

In the harbors, the warships of the Royal Navy glistened at prow and stern with golden emblems of the king's affiliation with the heavens. Privately owned vessels, although far less elaborately decorated, had carved brackets, catheads, taffrails, and figureheads that associated mercantile prowess with aristocratic prestige. On shore, merchant princes, wishing to emulate the British gentry, built mansions that featured carved mantels and furniture adorned width portraits of poets and philosophers, while their gardens were populated with carved hermits, milkmaids, and personifications of Plenty.

It was in the port city of Boston that the Skillin Family provided not only ships' figures but also all the trappings of a genteel society. The shop was founded by Simeon Skillin Sr. (1716-1778) about 1737 and was carried on by his sons Samuel (1742-1793), John (1745-1800), and Simeon Jr. (1756-1806), and two grandsons - Samuel (c. 1770-1816), the son of Richard (1744-1791),(1) in Boston and Simeon III (1766-1830), the son of Samuel, in New York City. The shop closed in 1825. For a brief period when the new Republic lauded its heroes and constructed its capital cities john and Simeon Skillin Jr. adorned Boston's Finest symbols: the triumphal arch to honor George Washington when he toured the nation in 1789, the Massachusetts State House, and the frigate Constitution, which represented the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States Navy.

The Reverend William Bentley, the pastor of the East Church in Salem, praised the genius of "Skillings" (presumably John), and noted his death in his diary.(2) In Boston's Columbian Centinel of July 18, 1793, an observer referred to the "handsome" winged Mercury adorning the new post office (Pl. I) and remarked: "The execution of the work was by Skillings - and mentioning that, precludes the necessity of saying it is elegantly done." By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the taste for neoclassical sculpture had eclipsed baroque emblematic images, and the Skillins joined the other anonymous American craftsmen who had left their work unsigned and never commented about their workshop practices.

In 1931 Mabel M. Swan brought the Skillin workshop out of relative obscurity when she refuted Fiske Kimball, who earlier that year had assigned the pediment carving shown in Plates VIII and VIIIa to Samuel McIntire.(3) She had discovered a bill to Elias Hasket Derby that identified John and Simeon Skillin Jr. as the carvers. She also found that Derby had ordered four garden figures from the Skillin shop, three of which survive. She established the brothers as the leading carvers in late eighteenth-century Boston and identified a body of work on which to base stylistic comparisons.

The Skillins were mentioned in subsequent publications on American art, but their work has never been truly evaluated because so little documentation exists. However, a picture of the shop and of the Boston carving community emerges with the help of the Skillin family genealogy; Suffolk County, Massachusetts, court deeds; merchants' account books; and tax and probate records.

Simeon Skillin Sr. was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a member of the third generation of the family to be born in the Colonies. Sometime before he reached the age of apprenticeship, the family moved to Boston.(4) There they lived in the North End, where most craftsmen involved in the shipbuilding trades had settled. Simeon chose to become a carver, and his parents probably sent him to the major carving shop in the North End - that of William Shute Jr. (c. 1690-1746), who was probably working with his son-in-law William Burbeck (w. 1740-d. 1785).(5) Upon completion of his apprenticeship Simeon had enough money to open a shop of his own. Responsible and productive, he was soon chosen for a town office.(6) In 1738 he married Ruth Phillips, then sixteen, and they had ten children. Of the five boys who lived to adulthood, Samuel, John, and Simeon Jr. became professional carvers.(7)

At the age of twenty-three, and perhaps earlier, Simeon Skillin Sr. was carving ships' fittings for John Erving (1693-1786), one of the richest and politically best connected merchants in Massachusetts.(8) In 1758 Skillin was hired to do the carving on the King George, a ship built by the province to guard the coast.(9) He signed his receipt "Skillin and Comp., Carvers," probably referring to the addition of his son Samuel, who had just become an apprentice, and to his expanded shop on Charter Street in Boston. However, two years later a disastrous fire burned out 225 families and destroyed 176 warehouses.(10) Thereafter the city suffered from Britain's long war with the French, and with a credit crisis and multiple bankruptcies the port of Boston almost came to a standstill.