I can’t remember the last time I went to an auction and didn’t see one of those small hand-colored landscapes of Wallace Nutting.
The colors were usually muted and dull. Among the masses, Nutting was no-doubt a very popular artisan at one time because so many of his works now turn up at auction. Sometimes as single prints – like the one I saw last week – and groupings – like the half dozen or more I saw a week before at another auction house.
I was always mildly interested in who this man was but never very curious: His works just didn’t move me enough to look him up. In fact, I never examined them closely enough to see that they were actually photographs, and not lithographs, until someone pointed it out to me.
With so many Wallace Nuttings around, I figured it was time that I did check him out. Who was he and why was he so popular?
Nutting was a prolific master of hand-colored photographs, but he was more than that. He was, in fact, a very versatile man: minister, photographer, author, entrepreneur, furniture maker, antiques expert and collector, and more. He was born in Massachusetts in 1861, seven months after the start of the Civil War that would take the life of his Union-soldier father three years later.
He went to some of the country’s best schools, including Harvard, and then to divinity school. He served as a minister until poor health forced him to retire. It was a tough choice:
“The greatest sorrow of my life, almost a killing sorrow, to cease from the regular duties of a pastor,” he wrote in his 1936 autobiography. “Many times when people have congratulated me on the million of pictures scattered through the country, and my large editions of books, I have answered that these things are all a makeshift. The glory of translating God to man or at least attempting it, is the greatest glory possible in any human life.”
Nutting took to bicycling the countryside where nature’s abundant beauty took hold of him. He was so compelled by what he saw that he started taking photographs. He opened his first photography studio in New York and later in Massachusetts. Nutting recognized the marketability and appeal of photographs.
He created what one site called a “cottage industry” of affordable photo prints that graced the walls of many middle-class families. He sold 10 million prints, he said in his autobiography, which explains why so many of them are still around. His best years were said to have been from 1915 to 1925.
The subjects of his prints were eclectic: bridges, homes, church buildings, roads, mountains, flowers. His love of the ministry could be seen through the choices of some of his photos and the titles he gave them. He also traveled to foreign countries where he took photos that were printed and sold.
Nutting also produced a group of interior prints called “Colonials,” which showed women in traditional roles in front of furniture that he used as props on a set in his home. He included images of women knitting before a fire dressed in colonial garb or a child standing outside a home in similar fashion. The whole idea was to evoke a romantic and nostalgic feeling for the colonial period in U.S. history.
“Those ‘Colonials’ pictures she (his wife Mariet) has made attractive by providing fair young women decked out in the finery or the sweetly homely garb of the ancient day. We have learned an added fact. No one cares about an interior without a person posed in it,” he said in his autobiography.
Nutting hired workers to “colorize” prints of his photos, and a few were authorized to sign his name. Some of his colorists went on to make names for themselves, but none produced works that are as prevalent as Nutting’s.
The prints were made from the actual photographs that he took on his country rides – later in carriages and cars. The negatives were printed on platinum paper and then hand-colored. They were sold in frames.
He took about 50,000 photos, a number that dropped to about 10,000 after he removed the inferior ones, he said in his autobiography. Most were country scenes (which tend to be the less expensive).
The use of furniture led Nutting to manufacture and sell reproduction furniture in 1917. When the prints business began to drop off in the 1930s, his furniture enterprise kept the company afloat.
Nutting wrote 20 books. His rarest is the 1913 “Old New England Pictures,” which has sold at auction for more than $10,000. He also published a series of travel books called “States Beautiful” starting in 1920, along with books on furniture, clocks and his autobiography.
“I am under no illusions as to my pictures,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I am not an artist and it is most disagreeable to me to be called one. I am a clergyman with a love of the beautiful.”
Nutting died in 1941.
Interest in his works as an investment arose in the late 1990s, but was short-lived. Today, they are both plentiful and affordable. At auctions over the past few months, his prints have sold for as little as $5, which is close to what they sell for at the auctions I attend. A check of eBay over the last month shows that very few of them sold.
