How Wallace Nutting capitalized on America's romantic longing for a Colonial Eden

By Richard Todd

Buy this book

Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America
By Thomas Andrew Denenberg
Yale University Press, $39.95

In a used-book store several years ago I came upon a copy of Massachusetts Beautiful, by Wallace Nutting—a collection of photographs, with rambling text, depicting a landscape of idyllic rusticity. The book was first published in 1923. I recall feeling a pang of loss as I thumbed through it—the purity of that landscape, in this my own state, just decades ago! Later it occurred to me that a similar pang was likely felt by the book's original readers, because the world the book celebrated was already in flux. The book was made for a reader troubled by the onrush of industry, suburbs, immigration—of change.

Wallace Nutting was a professional nostalgist, and a successful one. His name lacks carrying power today, but in the first half of the 20th century Nutting was a considerable force in American popular culture—as they used to say, a "tastemaker." Perhaps more effectively than any of his contemporaries, he promoted an aesthetic that honored the country's colonial (especially its New England) heritage. It's an aesthetic that flourishes to this day.

Nutting had a curious life, as we learn in this handsome book, the only full-length study of the man to date. He was Massachusetts-born (1861), Harvard-educated, and gave the first 20 years of his professional life to the Congregational ministry. But his mind was not entirely on the pulpit. During this time he became an expert in colonial furniture and an accomplished amateur photographer. In his early 40s, he gave up the ministry entirely to become an entrepreneur.

In the course of his second career, his photography turned professional, he grew into a prominent author and lecturer, and at the height of his ambitions he also produced a line of reproduction furniture and ran a "chain" (his biographer's word) of five historic houses open to the public for tours. But it was Nutting's photographs—his own and later those he commissioned or bought—that stood at the financial heart of the enterprise. The photographs captured, and to some extent created, scenes of what he liked to call "Old America"—scenes of pastoral beauty and domestic peace. Many featured models in generically antique costume, typically a woman in a long dress with mobcap. The images were romantically soft and seemed to their admirers "quaint"—a word that had not yet taken on overtones of kitsch. The photographs were generally hand colored; at its peak the Nutting enterprise employed some 35 women as colorists. They were under instructions to cover over any signs of modernity in the landscapes, like utility poles. The pictures were framed and sold as works of art and proved popular as a part of middle-class décor. Many can be found in the series of Nutting's books celebrating the preindustrial landscape, of which Massachusetts Beautiful was one.

Nutting's biographer, Thomas Andrew Denenberg, is decorative arts curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, which benefited from the donation of Nutting's extensive collection of 17th- and 18th-century American furniture. No lingering institutional gratitude infects his book, however. He dwells disapprovingly on the paradoxical fact that Nutting used, sometimes even pioneered, modern marketing techniques to sell products that depended on technology while romanticizing a world in which such things were unknown. "Old America, part halcyon sermon and part corporate facade," Denenberg writes, "provided the forum for Wallace Nutting the minister to become 'Wallace Nutting' the trademark." He seems not to like his subject very much, an impression enhanced by his referring to Nutting with heavy irony as "the minister."

The reader is likely to emerge with a warmer sense of the man than the author may have intended. Seen through the glass of history, Nutting's products appear very innocent indeed and, in the case of his well-made and honestly sold furniture, even worthy. (The pieces have dramatically appreciated in value over the years.) If Nutting's posed photographs seem merely silly now, the landscapes grow more evocative with time and the pastoral ideal they evoke can't be easily dismissed.

This is a fascinating and valuable book. I wish only that the author had a more sympathetic imagination for the life it recounts, a recognition of the contradictions one personality can contain. That Wallace Nutting was a shrewd and profit-minded merchant of sentiment seems clear enough, but the evidence of his life and his writing (to which Denenberg might have paid more attention) suggests that he was also a genuine enthusiast for "Old America." In this he is a fitting emblem of American ambivalence: our lust for the future, our longing for the past.

Richard Todd, who lives in Ashfield, Mass., is writing a book on authenticity.

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