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Wallace Nutting and the Invention of American Antiques
Photography, Furniture, and the Colonial Revival Business

Book Details
About this book:

Wallace Nutting and the Invention of American Antiques Before Colonial Williamsburg or Old Sturbridge Village, before "antique picking" became a national pastime, there was Wallace Nutting—a broken minister who turned his nervous collapse into a multimillion-dollar empire selling America a past that never quite existed. From a single hand-tinted photograph to a vast industrial apparatus of reproduction furniture, chain-store distribution, and bestselling travelogues, Nutting didn't just document early American style; he invented the visual grammar of "Old America" that still haunts our parlors, our museums, and our imagination of national heritage.

This is the story of how a neurasthenic clergyman became the Henry Ford of the Colonial Revival, employing hundreds of immigrant craftsmen on assembly lines to hand-build "Pilgrim Century" heirlooms while preaching that each purchase was a moral strike against modernity. It's a tale of J.P. Morgan buying Nutting's fabricated Pilgrim collection for the nation's museums, of ruthless trademark wars and Madison Avenue psychology deployed to sell pine trestle tables as patriotic duty, and of a man who staged his own life as meticulously as his colonial tableaux—right up to the final, desperate liquidation of his empire in the Great Depression.

With the narrative drive of a Gilded Age novel and the analytical bite of the best cultural history, *Wallace Nutting and the Invention of American Antiques* reveals the commercial grit and calculated deception behind the warm glow of the colonial hearth. It asks why a nation of immigrants and factories fell in love with a myth of homogeneous, agrarian purity—and shows how the hunger for "authenticity" became the most profitable product of the twentieth century. Essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered why that Windsor chair feels like home.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 The Pulpit and the Breakdown: The Early Life of a Restless Minister
  • Chapter 2 Recovering with a Camera: The Healing Power of the Picturesque
  • Chapter 3 The Hand-Tinted Vision: Creating the Platinum Print Empire
  • Chapter 4 Staging the Past: Models, Costumes, and Colonial Nostalgia
  • Chapter 5 The Parlor Aesthetic: Domesticating History for the Middle Class
  • Chapter 6 Collecting as Crusade: The Quest for Pilgrim Century Artifacts
  • Chapter 7 The Nutting Houses: Restoring and Curating Living Museums
  • Chapter 8 Photography as Commerce: The Chain Store Distribution System
  • Chapter 9 The Saugus Iron Works Experiment: From Ruins to Historic Relic
  • Chapter 10 The Woodworker’s Bench: The Decision to Reproduce History
  • Chapter 11 Windsor Chairs and Joint Stools: Crafting Reproductions in Park Street
  • Chapter 12 "Old America for Modern Homes": The Art of Commercial Sloganeering
  • Chapter 13 The Beautiful States: Landscape Books and Literary Tourism
  • Chapter 14 The Furniture Treasury: Compiling the Canon of Early American Style
  • Chapter 15 Authenticity vs. Invention: When Restoration Became Fiction
  • Chapter 16 The Labor of Nostalgia: Immigrant Craftsmen and the Colonial Myth
  • Chapter 17 The J.P. Morgan Transaction: Selling the Pilgrim Collection
  • Chapter 18 Competition in the Marketplace: Rivals and Imitators of the Nutting Brand
  • Chapter 19 Marketing the Primitive: The Romance of Pine, Maple, and Iron
  • Chapter 20 Peddling Patriotism: Antiques as Antidote to Modernity
  • Chapter 21 The Great Depression and the Decline of the Reproduction Empire
  • Chapter 22 The Final Catalogs: Liquidating the Past to Stay Afloat
  • Chapter 23 The Death of a Taste-Maker: Nutting’s Final Years in Framingham
  • Chapter 24 From Kitsch to Collectible: The Changing Fortunes of the Nutting Print
  • Chapter 25 The Manufactured Heritage: Wallace Nutting’s Enduring Myth of Early America
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Author:

Paul C. Brown

Published By:

MixCache.com Extended Catalog

Type:

Nonfiction

Date Published:

October 21, 2026

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