1910s AD

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

Branding and surface finish were issues of honesty and quality in Nutting's mind just as solid construction was a moral issue. He wrote with disdain of the

cheap furniture [that] floods the American market.... Far more attention is given to the finish than to the form or the substance. For instance, I see before me as I write a table of oak, on which is stamped by machinery a design intended to make the buyer suppose that the table is quartered oak. The old scheme of imitating the grain of wood with paint was bad enough, and this is still worse. It is a falsity and is intended to deceive. It isn't an honest thing for children to see. (28)

If the impact of grain-painted furniture on the youth of America concerned Nutting, he certainly would not have wanted children to see the forms he introduced to keep his company afloat during the Great Depression. Although the company outlived Nutting and survived until 1945, the stock market crash of 1929 had a dramatic effect and left Nutting looking for new customers. Despite his intolerance for hybrid colonial furniture, Nutting was forced to capitalize on the market for institutional furniture. Not only did he provide furnishings for such institutions as the State Street Bank and Trust Company in Boston, First National Bank in Kansas City, Missouri, and Aetna Casualty and Surety Company in Hartford, hut also, no doubt to his considerable distress, he began to offer adaptations of his furniture for the modem workplace. (29) In 1930 he began to offer designs such as a "Tip and Turn" executive chair and a "Connecticut Pattern" oak desk based on a seventeenth-century chest in his catalogue. To add insult to injury market demand led him to note that the desk was "adapted for typewriter." (30) Although he was willing to make furniture "the new way" by using modern tools, such objects could not have registered as anything hut "humbug" with Nutting.

Nutting was a victim of circumstances when the Great Depression stunted his furniture company, just as World War I had ended his foray into house museums. However, in the course of building up his furniture business his energy as a collector, lecturer, and writer made him the leading voice on early American furniture for much of the twentieth century.

A traveling exhibition entitled Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America will be on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, from June 6 until October 19. It will then be seen at the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania, from February 16 to May 25, 2004.

(1.) Wallace Nutting, "Early American Furniture," typewritten ms. corrected in Nutting's hand, c. 1925 (local history collection, Framingham Public Library, Framingham, Massachusetts).

(2.) Wallace Nutting, Wallace Nutting's Biography (Old America, Framingham, Massachusetts, 1936), p. 77.

(3.) For a longer biography, see Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, in association with the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, 2003), especially chap. I.