Wallace Nutting (1861-1941)
Vermont in October
Hand-colored photograph, date unknown, 7” x 5”
Gift of Chris Olert, in memory of Sheila O’Mara

Wallace Nutting (1861-1941) is a minister, photographer, and antiquarian famous for his landscape photographs of New England. He is also an author, lecturer, and furniture maker. Nutting began his career as a Congregationalist minister but had to retire at age 43 because of poor health. He suffered from neurasthenia, and turned to bicycling as a means of relaxation. On one of his bicycle rides he started taking photographs. In 1904 he opened the Wallace Nutting Art Prints Studio in Manhattan; a year later moved his business to a farm in Connecticut, and later, in 1912, he moved to Massachusetts, to a studio and home he called Nuttingholme. That year he published a catalog of 900 of his photographs, and thereafter his popularity grew rapidly. He photographed pastoral scenes and portraits he called the “Colonialists,” which depict women in traditional 18th-century roles. Nutting also wrote about the scenic beauties of New England, England, and Ireland, and at the peak of his career he employed about two-hundred artists to hand-color his photographs. By his own account, he sold ten million pictures.