A massive 1830's pierced and carved doorway treats classical ornament with yankee exuberance.(Discoveries)

You might expect an object exquisitely edged in carved oak leaves and trimmed with seven-pointed stars, French horns, fleurs-de-lis, and plump rosettes to be the work of an ebeniste with a British penchant for the mighty oak. Instead we are describing an American door-frame of about 1830 by an anonymous carver, a spirited tour de force in both design and execution.

"It's both folk art and period architectural element," says Alan Granby, the Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, dealer who owns the doorway and cannot recall ever having seen anything remotely like it. The architect and neoclassical expert Thomas Gordon Smith, whose most recent book is Vitmvius on Architecture (2003), affirms the doorway's uniqueness: "I've never come upon a Greek revival example like it that maries the simplicity of the pierced shapes with the intricacy of the fully carved elements." Usually doorframes with cutout details are just that--two-dimensional forms, according to Smith. Here the flatness of the decorative elements, picked out by piercing, are in marked contrast to the fully carved forms, all of which make a dramatic impact.

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Though its creator was an unknown artisan who worked with white pine, one of the lowliest of woods, he was a master of a host of decorative elements usually reserved for fine furniture, sculpture, and architecture. He took a common form and transformed a prosaic wood into a richly embellished creation. "What makes the doorway so extraordinary is the carver's playful nature in employing a classical vocabulary," Smith says. The pilasters incorporate shields, hearts, and more scrolls and are topped ...