Samuel Masury

A well-known Boston daguerreotypist and photographer, Masury was commissioned by Charles Greely Loring, a prominent lawyer and the first director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to photograph his estate at Beverly, Massachusetts. Although genre paintings of the period often included farm workers or stable hands resting by a barn door, Masury's view from inside the barn is unusual. He has used the doorway as a framing device, and the view of a rocky hillside presents a variation on the compositional elements found in most mid-nineteenth-century genre and landscape paintings.

Merry A. Foresta American Photographs: The First Century (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art with the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996)