While the newly opened Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, offers a hemispheric view of 3,000 years of North, Central, and South American art, the period rooms tell a distinctly local story. Of the eight period rooms and other architectural elements interspersed within fifty-three new galleries, six of these rooms make their return to public view after a hiatus of nearly eight years, now carefully restored and rethought for a new generation of visitors. Two other rooms are on view for the first time. The American period rooms have been a popular part of the MFA’s displays since they were first installed in the former Decorative Arts Wing of the museum, which opened to the public in 1928. Now, as then, the rooms focus on New England, complementing the MFA’s significant holdings of colonial and nineteenth-century art from New England. The most elaborate and well known of the period rooms are those from Oak Hill, Samuel McIntire’s 1800–1801 architectural masterpiece created in Peabody, Massachusetts, for the Derby-West family and filled with luxurious furnishings and exquisite examples of his carved furniture. The three Oak Hill rooms now sit comfortably alongside a gallery devoted to the furniture of John and Thomas Seymour (who were heavily patronized by the Derby-West family) and the neoclassical silver of Paul Revere. Other rooms now reinstalled include the 1730 Jaffrey parlor and the 1803 Shepard parlor, with its original French scenic wallpaper. Two newly installed rooms from the 1840 Roswell Gleason House in Dorchester inform adjacent galleries of mid-nineteenth-century paintings and decorative arts; the earliest timber-frame structures—the 1692–1693 Manning frame and the 1704 Brown-Pear hall—are placed in spirited dialogue with the museum’s important collection of early Anglo artifacts arranged within and around their walls. Throughout, the period rooms inform our sense of place and scale, while providing a more intimate encounter with art.
