>From today's NY Times, local boy makes good.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ June 12, 2003 Before Martha Stewart: Nutting By PHIL PATTON HOW is this for a business plan: find a charismatic expert in household products, add personal appearances and new media, and create a vision of an ideal lifestyle. Offer lyric simplicity. Champion traditional values. Wait for the cash to roll in. And do all this 75 years before Martha and Ralph came on the scene. Wallace Nutting, who learned stage presence as a Congregationalist minister, built a splendid collection of Colonial furniture a century ago, took pictures of it and made reproductions to sell in department stores across the country. His empire is the subject of an exhibition, the first ever devoted to all of his work, at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. Talk about synergy and cross-marketing: Nutting wrote magazine articles about furniture and the Colonial era in America that often appeared in Good Housekeeping and Ladies' Home Journal alongside ads for his photographs. Those photographs were the hallmark of middle-class American life, and his slogan was "Pictures make a house into a home." His travel books steered people to houses to see his furniture, and his lectures mixed sales pitch with inspiration. A graduate of Andover and Harvard, Nutting provided a symbolic link to the Mayflower families. To say "Nutting's New England" was tantamount to saying "Martha Stewart's Westport style." Thomas Denenberg, the curator of the exhibition, said: "If you happened not to have been born with the right ancestors, you could at least acquire their furniture." But you had to have a considerable bankroll. "The wonderful irony of the story is that Nutting employed modern technology to flee modernity," Dr. Denenberg said. Nutting recreated the past with a camera, printing and woodworking machinery. And he made use of a new hobby, Kodaking by car. Nutting left the pulpit in 1904 after suffering a mid-life crisis and threw himself into rumbling across New England looking for Colonial houses and landscapes. He sold some five million hand-tinted platinum photographs. Nutting prints, tinted in his shops, must have seemed as amazing as holograms. His guidebooks "New Hampshire Beautiful" and "Maine Beautiful" directed travelers to 18th-century farmhouses. But he was also still delivering sermons. "He would say how shocking it was that women were appearing in public in pajamas," Dr. Denenberg said. He attacked flappers and fake "olde inns" equally. Nutting hired the Batten advertising firm later part of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn (BBDO) to design print ads for his furniture in Good Housekeeping and Vogue. He bought and refurbished five Colonial buildings in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts in cooperation with the infant Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. Then he installed his furniture and began charging admission. (He did not miss an opportunity either; he sold guidebooks, photographs and furniture in what he called the Chain of Colonial Picture Houses.) >From 1904 until his death in 1941, Nutting rode the Colonial revival, which gained force in the 1920's when the Rockefellers restored Williamsburg. Today the Colonial ideal lives on not only in Drexel Heritage bedroom suites but, Dr. Denenberg notes, "in the suburban vision of the single-family white house on a separate lot with white picket fence." And Nutting's visions of New England town greens may well have inspired the New Urbanists. Nutting was an expert marketer, but he was also a collector's collector. "His books have remained in print," Dr. Denenberg said. "They remain a basic starting point for scholars." The Wallace Nutting Collectors Club, organized in 1973, is now 400 members strong. It will hold its national convention on Saturday in East Hartford, a few miles from the Wadsworth Atheneum. Nostalgic for nostalgia, Nutting collectors have driven up his prices over the last few years. Expensive in his own day his Windsor chairs sold for $50 each in the 1930's the chairs now sell for $1,000, Michael Ivankovich, a Nutting dealer, said. The record price for Wallace Nutting furniture was set last year when a Goddard secretary desk sold for nearly $37,000. Nutting pictures are also still being collected. Several prints of one, "The Guardian," have sold for $8,000 to $10,000. Dr. Denenberg said that considering Nutting's love of modern conveniences, he would have loved the Web. Surely he would have created www.wallacenuttingcolonialliving.com. Copyright 2003The New York Times Company To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body "unsubscribe frambors" (the subject is ignored).
