Bulfinch was possessed of consummate good taste, a fine sense of proportion and a genius for judicious adaptation. He was educated while the Adam influence was at its height, had broadened his field by observation and foreign travel and began to practise just before the first fresh impetus of direct classicism was launched. It was, therefore, quite natural that, with his trained perception and happy faculty of selection and combination, he should have picked out the best in each school, and peculiarly appropriate that his work should exemplify the transitional stage by which one was merged into the other for, in the evolutionary process, already alluded to, the purest form of neo-classic design found its analogue in the earlier Adam practice.
Along with Bulfinch, as a representative of the transition stage, must be classed Samuel McIntire, of Salem, whose work both public and domestic has always been justly esteemed. He, too, retained a large share of Adam elegance and wealth of detail which he successfully incorporated with motifs and methods of treatment inspired by the more recent impetus of classicism. To McIntire’s influence may be attributed much of the slender delicacy of proportion and the attenuation of pillars and pilasters--this attenuation had a counterpart in some of the contemporary New York Dutch design--so noticeable in a great deal of New England architecture of this period. He eliminated all grossness and pared down the dimensions of columns while he drew out their length to a degree that had no precedent in ancient practice and would have shocked the French purists under whose auspices the new movement
[Illustration: ANDREW SAFFORD PORCH, SALEM, MASS.
[Illustration: INTERIOR DOORWAY, NICHOLS HOUSE, SALEM, MASS.]
Photograph by C. V. Buck, from Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
[Illustration: GIRARD COLLEGE, PHILADELPHIA.
had been inaugurated. Despite these departures from architectural and archæological orthodoxy, however, McIntire’s work is replete with exquisite charm and is justified by applying to it the touchstone of good taste.
Latrobe, McComb, in his later work, L’Enfant, Hoban, Dr. Thornton, Thomas Jefferson, Strickland and other noted architects of the last years of the eighteenth century and the fore part of the nineteenth followed classic precedent somewhat more closely in the practice of their profession and may, therefore, be considered the most faithful and typical exponents of Classic Revival principles. Much of their work is noble in conception and peculiarly suited to the monumental character of the buildings they designed.