1910s AD

Magazine Antiques, May, 2003 by Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Trina Evarts Bowman

"Whatever is new," wrote Wallace Nutting (Pl. III), "is bad." (1) A well-known Congregational minister turned photographer, antiquarian, and entrepreneur, Nutting was a man of few words when it came to the vices of his time, but many in describing the virtues of the past. He wrote the landmark Furniture of the Pilgrim Century (1921), the three-volume Furniture Treasury (1928-1933), and many articles. His collection of seventeenth-century furniture was the largest in the country, and he was one of the foremost authorities on early American life in the years before World War II. Often obscured by his carefully constructed public image as a Yankee sage are the very modern foundations of his business empire. In fact, this "clergyman with a love of beauty," as he described himself, employed the most up-to-date methods of marketing and manufacturing to sell his line of historically inspired consumer goods. (2)

By the 1920s, the name Wallace Nutting could be found penciled on hand-tinted photographs, branded into reproduction furniture, and printed on the title page of innumerable books and magazines. Nutting himself could be found preaching to audiences across the United States about a time and a place he called Old America.

Nutting's credentials as a spokesman for traditional American furniture and values were impeccable. Born on the eve of the Civil War in the village of Rockbottom, Massachusetts, he was raised in Industry, Maine, and held a variety of odd jobs before attending Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire; Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut; and the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. As a Congregational minister, he served in cities throughout the United States, including Seattle, Washington, and Providence, Rhode Island--his last official posting. (3)

As a minister, Nutting proved to be particularly susceptible to neurasthenia--the scourge of the late Victorian thinking classes. He took up photography as a means of escaping "the nerves," and he retired from the pulpit in 1904. "Turned out to grass," as he called it, Nutting made a poor invalid. (4) He transformed his avocation into a business, and by the time the United States entered World War I, the sickly shutterbug controlled a diverse corporation known as Old America, Incorporated.

The economic base of Old America was his photography business (see Pl. II). He had been copywriting his photographs since 1897 and occasionally published them in magazines, but it was not until he moved to Southbury, Connecticut, in 1905 that the endeavor took off. He perfected a method of hand-tinting his platinum prints and hired a staff of young women to pefform the work (5) in a barn that he converted into a photo studio.

The erstwhile minister issued ever-larger catalogues of his photographs in 1906, 1912, and 1915, tailoring his offerings to suit his customers. By 1915, almost 20 percent of his catalogue was composed of "colonials," images of women in period costumes and historical settings (see P1. I). The remainder of the line was composed of landscapes (see P1. II), architectural views, and foreign scenes. With success Nutting moved from Southbury in 1912 into larger quarters in Framingham, Massachusetts, where he began to branch out by purchasing a series of historic houses to serve as authentic backdrops for his platinum prints. Eventually he owned five structures in three New England states, restoring them according to his notions of colonial life and often including architectural details for which there was little evidence. He furnished the houses according to their date of construction and in 1916 opened the Wallace Nutting Chain of Colonial Picture Houses to tourists. (6)

Nutting's interest in American furniture was initially a corollary to his picture business and the houses, for which he collected furniture as props. However, the depth of his collection is astonishing. At a time when most collectors experienced difficulty acquiring one seventeenth-century court cupboard. Nutting purchased five. He had more than forty chests (see P1. V), sixty joined and turned chairs, and thirty tables, as well as a variety of other cupboards, boxes, cabinets, and desks. He purchased hundreds of domestic tools and utensils made of wood, wrought iron, and pewter. In the end his collection swelled to more than three hundred pieces of furniture and some six hundred domestic utensils and fixtures. Never one to miss an opportunity, in 1917 Nutting opened a furniture factory in an old woolen mill adjacent to Broad-hearth, his Saugus, Massachusetts, property. In doing so, he hit on the very modern notion of cross promoting his wares.

"Those who know the pictures," he observed, "want the chairs." (7) He began to sell authentic reproductions of the chairs, chests, cupboards, tables, and miscellaneous forms he had gathered as props in his photographs and houses. He linked culture and commerce to become one of the foremost authorities on American decorative arts.