Chest with two drawers,
shop tradition of Peter Blin (1640-1725), circa 1685. Oak, pine
and maple. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Wallace Nutting
Collection, gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, Jr, 1926.
Wallace
Nutting and the Invention of Old America
By Laura Beach
HARTFORD, CONN. -- Two antiques dealers we know created a
beautiful formal garden, planting in it a stone monument
inscribed, "Reality is what you can get away with." The phrase,
both wry and inspirational, sums up the guiding philosophy of
Wallace Nutting, the crazy-like-a-fox Congregational minister
turned marketeer who perhaps more than any one else is
responsible for our vision of the past, maybe even for the whole
culture of collecting that past.
That Wallace Nutting (1861-1941) packaged "Old America" as an
integrated consumer experience -- see the life, buy the life,
live the life -- is a theory persuasively argued by Thomas Andrew
Denenberg in a new book, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of
Old America, published by Yale University Press and a
companion exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of
Artthrough October 19.
Of the man who reminds him of no one more than Ralph Lauren or
Martha Stewart, Denenberg, the Atheneum's Richard Koopman Curator
of American Decorative Arts, writes, "Nutting organized the
fledgling Americana market to fit his commercial needs. By
writing books for the collector while providing catalogs for the
consumer, Nutting effectively linked culture and commerce..."
But who was Wallace Nutting?
"If he hadn't existed, his Madison Avenue advertising agency
would have created him," says Denenberg, striding through the
serpentine galleries housing nearly 200 examples of Nutting's
products -- photographs, books and furniture -- along with the
Boston School painting and antiques that inspired him, and the
"mongrel" Victoriana that repelled him.
"Portrait of Wallace Nutting," William C. Loring, 1925. Oil on
canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; gift of Wallace
Nutting, 1926.
Under the slogan "Whatever is new is bad," the purveyor of New
England refinement for the masses, his Anglo Saxon features
chiseled and his eyes icy blue, gazes benevolently, if
patronizingly, at visitors from the heights of William Cushing
Loring's 1925 oil on canvas portrait of the minister.
As he delighted in telling people, Nutting, as American a figure
as ever was one, was born poor in Rockbottom, now Marlboro,
Mass., and through luck and pluck made his way through Harvard.
Part Horatio Alger, part Henry Ford and part P.T. Barnum, he
trained as a clergyman, then suffered a nervous collapse that
forced his retirement from the pulpit in 1904. He began
copyrighting his photographs by 1901, perhaps envisioning a new
career for himself as a commercial photographer. By 1906, he had
moved to Southbury, Conn., where he created his fanciful country
seat-cum-cottage industry, Nuttinghame; then on to Framingham,
Mass., in 1912.
By 1915, Nutting operated a tourist concession, five historic
properties christened the Chain of Colonial Picture Houses.
Having assembled one of the country's largest collections of
early American furniture and accessories, which he used primarily
as props, Nutting began copying them for resale in 1917. When
wartime gas rationing contributed to the demise of the Picture
Houses, Nutting, ever resourceful, turned to publishing
travelogs, like the 1922 Vermont Beautiful, for armchair
adventurers. With his extraordinarily successful Furniture
Treasury, Nutting secured his lasting reputation as a
collector and antiques authority, a reputation enhanced when the
Wadsworth Atheneum acquired his collection, a gift from J.P.
Morgan, Jr., in 1926.
Very little about Nutting was completely original. There were
earlier and better photographers of the New England scene, as
Denenberg's thoughtful display of images by Mary and Francis
Allen, Emma Coleman and Amasa Day Chafee reveal. There were
makers of Colonial-style furniture, sincere copyists and
disreputable fakers alike; and popular authors who extolled the
virtues of roadside tea houses and Model T touring. Nutting's
contribution, says Denenberg, was to "make history an everyday
part of the modern era."
"It was the generation from the Civil War to WWII that invented
Old America. Many of these artists and writers were born in
somewhat reduced circumstances. What they had was their ancestry
and their ability to advance socially," reflects the curator, who
argues that the Colonial Revival began as early as the Federal
era with the conscious desire to forge a national identity and
continues to this day.
But history is never simple. Nutting's Colonial Revival is a
contradictory movement meshing the Arts and Crafts' horror of
industrialization with the Modernist's enthusiasm for technology.
The duality is explicit in photographs such as "Waiting for the
Auto to Pass," a hand tinted platinum print of 1901 that shows a
farmer pushed to the side of a country road as the future
overtakes him. Of all of Nutting's creations, it is the
photographs, with their alien hues, homespun pieties and overt
symbolism, that offer the sharpest insights into Old America.
It is small wonder that the curator has chosen as the show's
central icon, on loan from the Owl's Head Transportation Museum
in Maine, a 1913 Stephens Duryea touring car much like the one
Nutting himself owned. The entrepreneur liked his fans to think
he was a humble man of God. In fact, the status symbol set
Nutting back $4,400, the equivalent of about $90,000 today.
"For all of Nutting's arguments about spinning wheels, the
touring machine was the center of his universe, the center of
modern life," concludes Denenberg.
Through department stores and mail order catalogs around the
country, Nutting sold more than five million hand tinted platinum
prints of pastoral landscapes and early American interiors. By
contrast, Hospitality Hall, now part of the Webb-Deane-Stevens
Museum in Wethersfield, Conn., drew only 2,000 visitors between
1916 and 1918 when it was part of the Chain of Colonial Picture
Houses.
There is also less surviving Nutting furniture that one might
imagine. The #733 Desk-and-Bookcase is probably one of less than
a dozen such pieces made. The Newport-style, nine-shelf
desk-and-bookcase cost $1,800 in 1932, the equivalent of about
$19,000 today. It sold in 2002 for a record $36,750 to
Massachusetts collectors Sharon and Robert LaCasse and is shown
in the galleries next to a spectrum of Nutting's inventory that
ranges from the limited edition #910 Cupboard to one of the
bread-and-butter Windsors, sold by Nutting by the truckload to
banks and libraries.
Denenberg has also included what he calls the "zany" Nuttings,
among them such unashamedly commercial pieces as a Pilgrim
Century executive desk; reproductions by other interpreters of
Colonial style, including a 1930 Sunflower Chest from the Nathan
Margolis Shop of Hartford; and, in a hands-on exhibit of tools
and workbenches in the last gallery, Nutting-style Windsors by
contemporary craftsman D.R. Dimes.
After viewing "Wallace Nutting and The Invention of Old America,"
visitors are encouraged to climb the stairs to view the Nutting's
antiques. "We've got every major monument you could want,"
Denenberg says of the 1,100-object trove.
Some of the curator's most intriguing discoveries were made close
to home. Nadeau Auction Gallery's 2001 sale of the estate of Paul
Koda (1905-2001), a Hartford restorer with links to early
Twentieth Century collectors, dealers and cabinetmakers, led to
the identification of E.J. Dunn of Hartford as a supplier of
carved elements to Nutting, among others.
"The Morning Mail," Wallace Nutting, 1912. Hand-tinted platinum
print. Wadsworth Atheneum of Art.
"Nutting made a lot of money, lost a lot of money, and didn't
want anyone to know what he was doing," says Denenberg. The
marketer and his wife destroyed their business records and
personal papers, and Nutting's autobiography, published in 1936,
offers few additional clues. It is "equal parts memoir,
advertisement and Christian testimony," says the curator. With
limited sources to draw from, Denenberg made thorough use of the
papers of William Summer Appleton, stored in the archives of the
Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.
"Nutting is an impossible man to deal with," wrote SPNEA's
founder, who more successfully than most maintained relations
with the former minister, whose disputes with the leading dealers
and collectors of the day are storied. Through Appleton,
Denenberg views Nutting as his contemporaries did, as an
unstoppable force for both good and ill in the fledgling
preservation movement.
Denenberg adds significant chapters to the Nutting story. Few in
this context have looked as closely at Berea College, which led
an Appalachian revival in traditional crafts. The college, where
the former minister helped develop a woodworking program in the
1920s, was a favorite charity of both Wallace and Mariet Nutting,
who willed their business to the institution. Denenberg also
examines the role of Madison Avenue in promoting the idea of Old
America through the deft manipulation of potent symbols. In the
early 1920s, Nutting employed the George Batten Company, a
precursor to the 1970s powerhouse advertising and design agency
BBDO.
Wallace Nutting never called himself an artist, instead
protesting that he was only "a minister with a love of beauty."
But in his brilliant synthesis of myth and materialism, Nutting
was as artful as spokesman as ever lived for America at the
twilight of one century and the dawn of another.
Following its close at the Wadsworth Atheneum, "Wallace Nutting
and the Invention of Old America" travels to the Allentown Art
Museum where it remains from February 22 to May 23, 2004.
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is at 600 Main Street.
For information, 860-278-2670 or www.wadsworthatheneum.org.
