“Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery”

Wallace Nutting’s Antique Furniture Reproductions

Written by: Brian Roche

“The quest of beauty is the heart of an enduring life. The man who does not believe in beauty is a failure.” – Wallace Nutting

Wallace Nutting (1861-1941) is not often associated with the Arts & Crafts movement in America but putting him in that context helps provide a cultural and historical orientation to understand his many accomplishments. Nutting was one of the main creators and promoters of the Colonial Revival in the United States which reached its height in the 1920’s and still continues today through furniture design, architecture, antique collecting and historical preservation.

Nutting was famous in his day for his “Pilgrim Century” furniture collection, his authoritative books on antiques (including the Furniture Treasury, still a staple and in print since 1928), his high-quality furniture reproductions, and his huge output of hand-tinted photographs depicting mostly pastoral scenes and staged “Colonial” interior scenes. It has been said that Nutting looked back at the past and saw the future. “Nutting firmly believed in the power of historic artifacts to educate Americans about the ‘wonder of their land and the grace of old, forgotten things’, writes Edward Cooke in Inspiring Reform: Boston’s Arts and Crafts Movement (Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA 1997). “For him, art could serve history by revitalizing the American character.”

A Thousand Dollars a Day

Nutting had a marketing savvy and all-encompassing view of America that may have more in common with Walt Disney, Norman Rockwell and Martha Stewart than any figures from his own generation. At one point Nutting estimated he was grossing $1000 a day from his photographs. This was when his pictures cost a dollar or less retail. This wealth allowed Nutting to pursue other interests, which led to even greater fame and historical significance for the man and his work. In order to provide his photographs with more historical accuracy, Nutting went on an antique buying spree. His aggressive zeal for antique collecting and ever-growing knowledge on the subject became legendary. Nutting soon amassed a huge collection and eventually bought five historic houses in New England, restored them, filled them with antiques, and created our first house museums.

“Nutting’s insatiable interest in the past, first the 18th then the 17th century, is reminiscent of another great figure, William Morris. The Englishman, who was only 27 years older than Nutting, strayed out of his century with a long leap into the Middle Ages,” writes Henry Maynard, curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT. “Both men shared similar ideas on design and honest workmanship in furniture. While Morris was famous for many original and inspired designs, Nutting restored, preserved and reproduced ancient craftsmanship. It is not difficult to believe that Nutting knew a great deal about Morris and was influenced by him. However, because he lacked early training in the arts, his late start did not permit him to become an American William Morris. He remained Wallace Nutting, a New Englander.”

In 1925, Nutting sold off a large portion of his antique collection to J.P. Morgan, who then donated it to the Wadsworth Atheneum where it now enjoys prominent display as the largest grouping of early American furnishings in the world. “More than anyone else in the 20th century, Wallace Nutting was responsible for popularizing American 17th century furniture,’ says William Hosley, curator of decorative arts at the Wadsworth. “Nutting really believed it was his special mission to teach Americans about the lifestyle and folk culture of their colonial ancestors.”

“Right after World War I, these words were a call to action for a newly nationalistic America,” explains Philip Zimmerman, senior curator at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware. “He was in the vanguard, looking at American furniture from a historical perspective.” Hosley points out that Nutting was one of the first to recognize the development of an American style in furniture design: “American furniture before 1670 was European furniture. There was no Americanization in style at that point.”

Even as an American style evolved, it embodied a grace and sense of proportion usually not attributed to the early settlers. “This furniture had traditionally been interpreted as severe or rustic or primitive or crude, but you only have to open your eyes to see that it is terribly complex. The people who owned this kind of furniture were perhaps the most cosmopolitan generation ever to live in this country, because so many were well educated,” Hosley says. “The things that Nutting acquired tend to be a little more sophisticated than what most people owned. The collection is not a totally accurate reflection of the average 17th century household. Some of the pieces are among the most important and highly elaborated things produced in the 17th century.”

Time to Reproduce

“In 1917 Nutting decided that the best way to educate the public in the glories of Pilgrim century furniture was to make it widely available to them, so he began reproducing antiques; a stickler for perfection, he scoured the country for the best examples of early-American furniture to copy,” writes Rhada Jaffin Murphy in “Apostle of Americana” (House Beautiful, May 1991). “The pieces his company produced – all handmade, laboriously finished and often crafted with the same techniques as the originals – were so fine that today unscrupulous dealers can sometimes pass

Wallace Nutting furniture off as genuine. Even the scholarly Winterthur Museum was fooled by a Nutting: In the 1970’s, the museum discovered a Windsor highchair that was not an 18th century antique, as purported, but rather a 20th century Nutting copy.”

Because of his passion for quality, Nutting’s reproduction furniture was quite expensive and limited to a much smaller and up-scale market than his photographs were. Although his reproduction business failed to become profitable, Nutting kept the business going for many years and received some impressive commissions

including work for Colonial Williamsburg. Eventually Nutting sold both his photography and furniture business, but quickly wanted to buy his furniture company back when he felt the new owners were cutting corners and compromising his name. This is why Nutting sold much of his personal collection to J.P. Morgan, and why he was soon back in the furniture business again.

Framingham: The Hub of New England

 

Professor John Freeman studied the Nutting reproduction catalogs closely and wrote an introductory essay to the 1969 edition of Nutting’s Checklist of Early American Reproductions  entitled “The Arts-Crafts Ideology or Wallace Nutting’s Colonial Revival.”  Below is an extended excerpt: 

Note with a modesty characteristic of the Arts-Crafts, Nutting places Framingham at the hub of New England (and therefore the universe). Note, too, that they are not factories but ‘studios’ akin to the present-day Fanny Farmer candy ‘studios’ begun by the mother of Art Cookery. He is concerned that you know something about his craftsmen and the virtue that they personally inject into each and every piece that they made: “The force consists of fine American mechanics [genteel 19th century word for workingman], men of character, whom it is a privilege to know,” he says, the idea being an Art-Crafts one that men of bad character do bad work, bad work is the indication of bad character, and good work builds good character – oddly reminiscent, somewhat, of the Protestant Ethic. 

 

He assures us that his mechanics have been untainted by city living – still close to God and Nature, “many live on their own little farms.” The religious nature of the objectives pursued by this re-dedicated minister are oddly clarified in his references to the Ten Shop Commandments handgun on the studio walls: “If the work can be done better by hand do it that way’ substitutes for not taking the name of the Lord in vain and “Let nothing leave your hands till you are proud of the work” replaces coveting something belonging to your neighbor. “The purpose of these commandments,” he preaches, “is to encourage individuality and make men while making furniture.”

 

Nutting’s earliest approval was reserved for oak furniture of the 17th century, country pieces of the 18th century made from native American pine and maple, and vernacular Windsor chairs that survived into the 19th century; these are things that would appeal to an American follower of Arts-Crafts principles. Mahogany was snubbed because it was not a native American wood, was used in over-refined furniture, and tainted by its association with Aristocracy. Oak was better because it was a native wood, was used in furniture possessing crude vitality, directness, honesty, sincerity, etc., and suggested more democratic associations. This quest for a national wood style in furniture is another reminder of the 19th century search for an appropriate visual expression of American nationalism.

 

Nutting recognized that America was losing faith in the Puritan Ethic brought to these shores in the 17th century, so what better way to rejuvenate this vital spirit than apply the Arts-Crafts principle of advance-guardism in reverse? – lead taste back to Pilgrim furniture, back to the ethical system embodied in it. “We love the earliest American forms because they embody the strength and beauty in the character of the leaders of American settlement… We carry on their spirit by imitating their work.”

A Nutting Revival

“Scorned after his death in 1941 as a sentimental crackpot with an unhealthy yen for Pilgrim days, the Rev. Dr. Wallace Nutting, a congregational minister turned photographer author antiques expert and furniture manufacturer, is enjoying an unexpected revival,” marvels Mitchel Owens in a New York Times article in 1995 (“Nutting Nuts’ Hero”. July 27). “Maybe it is the conservative climate or maybe it is just long enough after Dr. Nutting’s heyday for his work to prove interesting again.” With an ever-growing market for his photographs, books and furniture, Nutting’s Arts & Crafts-influenced philosophy and techniques live on in new generations of Americans. There is even an on-going campaign to get Nutting on a U.S. stamp.

“Nutting was a true evangelist, the man who got people to shout ‘Hosanna!’ when they saw a Windsor chair,” says Wadswoth curator Willam Hosley. “He installed this apparatus that evoked the American Way. It was a romanticized, Anglo-centric view of America, but his genius was that he created multi-reinforcing agendas – the books supported the furniture supported the house restorations supported the photographs and back again. It was a relentlessly clever piece of marketing, whatever the audience.”

“Nutting romanticized rural America and mythologized various aspect of the past, which is neither new nor is it dead. It is very much a balancing and necessary component of a complex and high-tech world,” Hosley continues. “There is no contemporary Nutting. There are institutions instead – there are Sturbridge Villages and Yankee Magazines, but no Nuttings. His gift wasn’t so much as a creator as it was a marketer and promoter of a certain vision. He was no less a genius than Ted Turner – somebody with a phenomenally wide range of interests who seems to be on the cutting edge of all of them, and who can make those interests visible to a wide audience. To the extent that anyone is a genius, Nutting might have been one.”

A Love of the Beautiful

While there may be a small touch of P.T. Barnum in his persona, there can be little doubt that Wallace Nutting was almost painfully sincere in his beliefs and mission in life. “What saves Nutting, in many ways, is that he had no pretensions about what he was doing,” writes Robert Miller in The News-Times of Danbury CT (“In Southbury, Nutting found past perfect”). “’I am not an artist,’ he wrote in his biography, ‘and it is most disagreeable to me to be called one. I am a clergyman with a love of the beautiful.’”

Nutting often spoke of the “quest of beauty” as the key to a good life. He wrote: “To discover undiscerned beauty is surely a worthy aim as well as a delightful occupation. It is not on mountaintops that the charm of life lies, because we are seldom there. It is in the nooks and vales, in odd corners, that life is spent and finds it setting.” 

Along with his landscapes, Nutting stressed beauty in his staged photographs.  In his catalog, he writes  that “he never uses  models for posing, always persons who still live in the midst of the dignified and beautiful surroundings of our fathers…showing old fashioned  girls and grandsires at the center of our ancestral life that is the hearth, and at the hospitality and beautiful front doors, and on the winding stairs and old settles of our ancestors.” 

Of course, like many innovators and tastemakers, Nutting can appear to be bundle of contradictions. A former employee of Nutting, William Bowers, wrote in The Antique Trader that “the cabinet shop was the worst shop I ever worked in for conditions, poorly lit and heated, and sanitary conditions deplorable. He was always quoting how he liked beauty about him, but he never spent much time down there with us.”

Although Bowers may appear disrespectful, nothing could be further from the truth. “One might say that WN (Willaim Nutting), contributed more for the preservation of our past heritage of American arts and culture than anyone else. We had greater names in the arts, but they reached selected few. WN was for everybody and everyone appreciated him. He put everything he had, both finances and all his time to explain how and why our ancestors lived and felt the way they did.” (“Recollections of Wallace Nutting”, The Antique Trader, March 26, 1974).

“What’s really important about Nutting is that his pictures inspired people to hit the road and see the beauty of America,” sums up Hosley. In much the same way, Nutting’s antique furniture collecting and furniture reproductions also inspired people to see the inherent beauty of their own ancestors engrained in their material goods, and in our shared American heritage.

Wallace Nutting lived, worked and photographed in Framingham for much of his life. His house (now demolished) and a woodland garden his wife created were located directly across the street from the Framingham Centre Common and the FHC Old Academy building at 24 Vernon St.

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SIDEBAR

Natural Beauty Enjoyed by Decent People

The photographs, in particular, were immensely popular and helped finance Nutting’s other endeavors. “He hired young women to hand-tint his photographs and even copy his signature” explains Gerald Peary in The Boston Globe. “He hired young men to go on the road and peddle his pictures, signed and matted, to department stores such as Macy’s, Gimbel’s and Wannamaker’s. The rest is pop culture history. By 1933 Nutting estimated that his photos hung in 10 million American homes. And many thousands of Americans had purchased his coffee-table volumes of New England photos, all showing, said Nutting, ‘only that natural beauty which can be enjoyed by decent people.’”