Beautiful thoughts

While many people today recognize Wallace Nutting as a collector of early American furniture, author of the Furniture Treasury, and self-styled expert on interior decoration in the 17th and 18th centuries, Nutting first earned fame and fortune throug!J. the sale of his art photographs. According to his own account, perhaps 10 million of these were sold between 1900 and 19361. Nutting's customers, for the most part, were the women of America's affluent middle-class, who bought the prints to hang on their walls. His great success with the sale of his photographs no doubt helped to convince him that he had a role as a leader of public taste, for so he came to consider himself. However, study of his photographs, and of the commentary on them found in his books, reveals that he was much more a follower than a leader. On the other hand, he enjoyed enormous popularity, and his photographic work can thus be considered important documentation in the history of American middle-class taste in pictorial matters

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