The Skillin Workshop - ship figures by the Skillin family

Magazine Antiques, March, 1999 by Sylvia Leistyna Lahvis

The documented works of John and Simeon Jr. all date from the 1790s, and all attributions must be based on these objects. For fear of attributing all sculpture from 1738 to 1825 to the Skillins, as has happened in the past when a craftsmen was identified, scholars have been hesitant to attribute any undocumented piece to them. However, since it can be proved that the Skillin shop had no local competitors in figure carving after the Revolution, many undocumented works can now safely be attributed to their shop based on solistic characteristics.

The most definitive of the documented figures are those Elias Hasket Derby ordered for the garden of his farm in South Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts. In 1793 Derby hired Samuel Mcintire to design a summerhouse for the same garden (Pl. II and Fig. 3), and, as with other commissions, McIntire was to carve the decorative swags and vases for the summerhouse, and the Skillins were to do the figurative carving. The two bills prepared by Simeon Jr. and entries in the account books of Benjamin Pickman, Derby's son-in-law, indicate that the workshop supplied Derby with several figures, some specified by name and some not.(23) The first bill names as garden figures a "Hermit," a "Gardener," and a figure of "Plenty," all of the same size, and a smaller "Shepherdess." The drawing of the summerhouse prepared by Mcintire shows only a shepherdess flanked by two urns topping the pediment. Of the three figures that have survived the Pomona or Plenty shown in Plate IV most resembles the figure McIntire drew. Her size seems to be in the proper proportion to that of the building (see Pl. II), and she may initially have been intended to crown the pediment.

Pomona is the work of a master carver, for the figure has a plastic quality rarely found in other works of this period. The folds of her clothes are soft and rounded and were conceived as separate from her body. Every aspect of the costume is clearly articulated. Her hair falls in thick, lively strands and is not just a contour filled in with striations. She is spirited and vigorous; the wind rustles her skirt and tugs at the ribbon at her back. Although the figure has been heavily painted, the carved details offer a lively play of light and dark and emphasize the rococo attire.

The "Gardener," now called the Reaper (Pl. III), and his mate Pomona were eventually mounted atop the gables of the summerhouse, although they may never have been intended for this purpose. These life-sized figures give some idea of the quality of the ships' figureheads, now long gone, created by the Skillins. The Reaper survived the sale of the Derby farm and was moved with the summerhouse to Glen Magna, an estate in Danvers now owned by the Danvers Historical Society. The figure remained there until recently, when it was replaced by a replica, and the original was finally conserved. Both the Reaper and Pomona were probably based on the lead garden statues so fashionable with the British gentry in the eighteenth century. The Skillins may also have used a live model, perhaps George Heussler (1751-1817), the charismatic Alsatian gardener at the Derby farm about whom much has been written.(24)