C.W. Wolff

Related Articles

Portrait of Wallace Nutting, oil by William C. Loring, © 1925.

If large white houses with black shutters, gently curved central stairways, sparsely appointed parlors, immaculate dark wood floors, and hooked rugs in front of kitchen hearths are some of the images that come to mind when you think of Colonial America, then you can thank Wallace Nutting. This quirky, New England minister-turned-entrepreneur built a Martha Stewart-style enterprise in the early nineteen hundreds selling a vision of the past. His romantic—but not always accurate—notions persist today.

Preaching that “everything new is bad,” Nutting was an energetic spokesman for the Colonial Revival Movement of the early twentieth century. Borne from a weariness with the fussy Victorian style, as well as alarm with rapid industrialization, that movement sought to define and preserve a national heritage, even if that meant, at times, creating it.

Nutting did this primarily through his hand-tinted, signed photographs of pastoral New England and Colonial interiors that always featured a slim, young woman. The photographs were wildly popular, especially as wedding gifts, in the 1920s and 1930s. By Nutting’s own reckoning, they hung in more than ten million American homes.
Many of the photographs are set in five historic houses Nutting bought, restored and furnished. His “Chain of Colonial Picture Houses” were open to the public for twenty-five cents a visit and included the Wentworth-Gardner House in Portsmouth, N.H.

“Undoubtedly, (Nutting’s) photos, dotted with clichés of Colonial style, left the kind of childhood memory that, even when supplanted by other treatments of the Colonial past, are hard to kill,” notes historian Richard Candee, author of Wallace Nutting’s Portsmouth.

Those clichés include a spaciousness that existed in the homes of only a few wealthy citizens during late 1700s America. Not a stickler for historical accuracy, Nutting also hung his own photographs on the walls of his restored houses and covered the floors with era-inappropriate hooked rugs made by his wife. He painted walls any color he fancied, commissioned murals without regard to whether they existed in the original home, and his female models were more likely to be costumed in the fashion of the 1830s than that of the 1790s.

However, he was widely respected as an authority on early American furniture; his catalogs, Furniture Treasury and Pilgrim Century, were the bibles for collectors for at least fifty years. Nutting and other proponents of the  Colonial Revival Movement were also responsible for the preservation of many historic houses that exist today, both those open to the public and privately owned, which might have been torn down if not for their glorification of the past.

More About Nutting
Want to find out more about Wallace Nutting and the Colonial Revival Movement? In Wallace Nutting’s Portsmouth, historian Richard M. Candee takes a close-up look at his time in the community, through many rarely seen photographs interpreted in his own words. Published by Back Channel Press and available from  RiverRun Bookstore, the Wentworth-Gardner House and other Portsmouth historic houses. $15 In addition, Portsmouth-based Pontine Theatre recently wrote and produced "Wallace Nutting's Old America,"which is now part of their touring repertoire.