SALEM, MA.- If you haven’t seen the Painting Summer in New England exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum yet, or if you’ve been meaning to come back for a second look, this is your last chance. Closing Sept. 4, 2006, this record-breaking summer show has attracted the highest number of visitors to the museum since its grand re-opening in June 2003. Due to the popularity of the exhibition, the museum will offer extended hours for one night only on Thursday, Aug. 31st. Dubbed “Summer After Six”, the evening will feature a live band in the soaring, glass-roofed atrium where visitors can enjoy a spectacular view of the sunset over drinks from the cash bar. From 6 p.m. until the museum galleries close at 9:30 PM, visitors will receive a special ticket rate of $10, which includes access to Painting Summer in New England as well as the rest of the museum. An additional admission fee of $4 is required for entry to the Chinese House, Yin Yu Tang. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to celebrate a New England summer evening at the Peabody Essex Museum.

Featuring more than 100 paintings by 83 artists from the late 1850s to the present, Painting Summer in New England takes a fresh look at the lively, lyrical and insightful ways in which painters have interpreted summer in America’s northeast corner. Works by artists including Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Alex Katz and Hans Hoffman illustrate the multiplicity of styles inspired by the New England landscape. Impressionist influences are evident in turn-of-the-century paintings while artwork by subsequent generations explores realism and increasingly abstract arrangements of form and color. The exhibition “reminds us how important the New England landscape was to the development of 20th-century American art,” wrote Greg Cook in the Boston Phoenix.