Wallace Nutting (1861-1941)
Wallace Nutting was born in Rockbottom, Massachusetts, in 1861. He was ordained a Congregational Minister in 1887 and while he appeared to excel in this profession, he continually declined calls from one church or another all over the country. He finally settled in 1894 in Providence, Rhode Island, as minister of the Union Church. He resigned from Union Church after a nervous breakdown in 1904 and began to take photographs in earnest, moving around and eventually settling in Southport, Connecticut, in 1905. For the remainder of his life he was variously a manufacturer of reproduction early American furniture; an author who wrote on windsor chairs, clocks, the furniture of the Pilgrim Century, a Furniture Treasury, and his best known series called “States Beautiful”; a lecturer; and foremost a photographer who took and cataloged more than ten thousand photographs. And those were just the ones he considered good enough to save, destroying some forty thousand others. In the process he traveled extensively throughout the US and Europe, Asia, and Africa taking pictures for which he became famous.
Wallace Nutting’s furniture factory reproduced Windsor form chairs, Chippendale and Hepplewhite cased furniture, and furniture from what he called the Pilgrim Century for at least 20 years. Because he insisted on perfection in his reproductions, he spent heavily for skilled craftsmen and in the manufacturing process and consequently his furniture enterprise never made money. He was fortunately able to cover his ongoing furniture business losses with the handsome profits from his book publishing and picture business.
He began collecting period furniture from a love of the workmanship and form, and to use as props, background, and atmosphere for his interior photographs. Good antique furniture was hard to come by so it seems, and he recognized the opportunity to make and sell reproductions of hard-to-find original pieces. His own personal collection, which now resides in the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, became the models for many of his reproductions. He marked the furniture with a paper label at first but soon began “branding” with block letters to thwart dealers who were removing the labels, mildly distressing the new furniture and selling the well made reproductions as antiques. He sold the furniture and picture companies for a period of time but purchased them back when the new owners, who had rights to his name, cheapened the products to increase their profits and thereby, to his thinking, cheapened his name. Furniture from this period of non-ownership was branded in script instead of block letters.
By Paul H. Lauer, New England p4A.com representative
Wallace Nutting Hand Colored Photographs
Wallace Nutting began taking pictures of the countryside at least six years before retiring from the ministry in 1904. He started his picture company shortly after retiring, growing his business with sales to department stores, Woolworth’s, book stores and art stores. At his peak, he employed more than 100 colorists to color the millions (yes, millions) of pictures he eventually sold. Another 100 or so employees developed, matted, signed and framed each picture under glass, producing a finished product which sold for an average of $0.25 to $0.35 in 1910.
Current values depend upon subject matter, condition of the picture, mat and frame, size and rarity as follows:
a. Subject matter and rarity: desirable subjects include foreign scenes with men, horses or cows, and interior scenes with women.
b. Condition: the finished photos were called platinotypes. If poorly colored or damaged, the value is minimal since the platinotypes cannot be restored or repaired.
c. Mat and frames: a picture with a water stained mat or an overmatted image could lose fifty percent of its theoretical value.
d. Size: all other things being equal, the larger the size of an image (which could be as small as 2″ by 3″ or as large as 20″ by 40″), the greater the value.
All Nutting photographs sold commercially were signed, although very few were signed by Nutting personally. Signatures were in pencil until 1910 and in ink thereafter and a number of designated employees signed Nutting’s name over the years. An excellent presentation on Nutting signatures can be found in A Collector’s Guide To Wallace Nutting Pictures, by Michael Ivankovich.