Testing the Waters: The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition of 1909

The story of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which opened in 1924, really begins with the museum’s Hudson-Fulton Exhibition of 1909. The first exhibit of American furniture at an art museum, the Hudson-Fulton served as a way to “test the waters” to find out if there was an audience for American decorative arts. At the time, there were still many people who doubted the artistic value of American things and did not consider them worthy of being in museums. 

Portrait of Robert W. de Forest from
the collection of the Metropolitan Museum

But a group of progressive museum administrators who had come to the Met in the early 1900s believed that exhibiting American decorative arts would help open the museum to a broader audience. People who were not regular museum-goers might be intimidated by their lack of knowledge about fine art—painting and sculpture—but ordinary household things were potentially more accessible. Museum administrators also hoped that decorative arts displays would help teach good design and workmanship to visitors, who would use that knowledge to beautify their own homes and communities. 

The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum was due largely to the work of two administrators, trustee Robert de Forest and his assistant, Henry Watson Kent. They planned the exhibit to correspond with events that were happening all over New York to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the Hudson River as well as the (slightly belated) centennial of the launch of Robert Fulton’s first steamboat in 1807. De Forest and Kent hoped to capitalize on the excitement generated by the celebration, as well as a planned exhibit of Dutch master paintings at the Met, to draw visitors to the American decorative arts display.

Promotional brochure produced by the
New York Central Railroad

Because the Met had no permanent collection of American objects, everything in the exhibition had to be borrowed from private collectors. The task of finding suitable objects fell almost entirely to Henry Watson Kent. Over the course of his career, first at the Slater Museum in Norwich, Connecticut, and then at the Grolier Club in New York, Kent had made many personal connections with collectors all over the United States. He was able to recruit R. T. H. Halsey and Luke Vincent Lockwood, two well-known experts on American furniture, to serve as advisory members of the exhibition committee.

Most of the seventeenth-century pieces on display were owned by a single collector, H. Eugene Bolles, a somewhat eccentric Bostonian lawyer who began collecting American antiques long before it became fashionable to do so. His cousin, George Palmer, lent many pieces from his collection of eighteenth-century furniture, while R. T. H. Halsey lent items from his collection of furniture made by Duncan Phyfe in the early nineteenth century. Other collectors lent portraits, silver, ceramics, and pewter, in addition to furniture.

Late-17th century chest with drawers
from the H. Eugene Bolles collection

The Hudson-Fulton Exhibition was a wild success, setting a record for attendance that would stand until the opening of the American Wing. While art critics had focused their attention on the exhibit of Dutch painting, visitors flocked to the furniture galleries. De Forest and Kent were vindicated in their belief that Americans would accept decorative arts as museum pieces. Soon after the exhibit ended, the Met acquired the Bolles collection for its permanent collection (philanthropist Margaret Olivia Sage purchased it, then donated it to the museum), intending for it to become the nucleus of a future American Wing.

However, the exhibition also made museum curators realize that some changes needed to be made to the way the items were displayed. At the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition, the furniture pieces were lined up in chronological order along the walls of the galleries. This method of organization was in accordance with accepted curatorial practice, but was thought by some observers to be a bit dull. Moreover, the relatively small scale of the pieces meant that they looked inconspicuous and out of place in the soaring Beaux-Arts galleries of the Met.

View of the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition. Note architectural wall fragment at far right.

Creating a series of period rooms seemed to be the perfect solution. The smaller scale of the rooms would complement the furniture as well as provide the broader context for the history of American decorative arts. Creating home-like settings would allow visitors to enter imaginatively into the scenes being depicted and, it was hoped, encourage them to think about the ways they could apply ideas from the exhibits to their own homes.

Over the next fifteen years, Robert de Forest and Henry Kent, along with curator R. T. H. Halsey, would work to build the Met’s collection of American decorative arts and to create a proper setting for their display. By the time the American Wing opened in 1924, much had changed in the world of art and antiques—and the colonial revival was about to become more popular than ever.

“In the Brave Days of Old”: Wallace Nutting’s Colonial America

“In the Brave Days of Old”

In the Miner Room on the third floor of the Alice, there are two photographs that look like they could have been taken in the Museum. One shows a woman descending an elegant staircase, and the other a woman stirring a pot over an open fire. Both photos are the work of Wallace Nutting, the man who perhaps did more than any other individual to popularize the Colonial Revival. Nutting’s vision of “Old America,” transmitted through historic homes, reproduction furniture, and most of all, photography, shaped the way Americans in the early 20th century envisioned the colonial past.

“The Elaborate Dinner”

Wallace Nutting was born in 1861 in Rockbottom, Massachusetts and enrolled at Harvard in 1883. During the summers he worked in hotels at various popular resorts in New England—Campobello Island, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket—that he would later return to as a photographer. After graduating from Harvard, he went on to Hartford Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary, becoming a Congregational minister in pulpits around New England.

In the early 1900s, however, Nutting began to suffer from neurasthenia--a disease peculiar to the Victorian era, characterized by fatigue, anxiety, and weakness, and thought to be caused by the stresses and strains of modern urban life. He left the church for good in 1904, and he and his wife, Mariet, purchased a derelict farm in Southbury, Connecticut. Nutting had been a dedicated amateur photographer since his college days, and photography was in fact often recommended as therapy for neurasthenia, because it combined artistic pursuit with healthful outdoor activity. He now turned to photography as a means of supplementing his income.

One of the many versions of “Cherry Blossoms”

The subjects of Nutting’s photos were almost exclusively rural, and rarely showed any indications of modernity. Pastoral fields of cows, country lanes, blossoming trees, and old barns were some of his favorite subjects. These scenes of an unspecified but clearly pre-industrial era were enormously appealing to middle-class urban dwellers.

Between 1905 and 1912, Nutting (with Mariet’s assistance) perfected a system for producing high-quality colored photographs on a large scale. The photos were printed using the platinotype process and then tinted with watercolors, following a model, by a carefully-trained staff of young women. Nutting produced his first catalog in around 1910; it depicted over 500 photos and noted that many more were available. Prices ranged from $1.25 for the smallest pieces (5” x 7”) up to $20.00 for the largest (20” x 40”)—well within the reach of most middle-class consumers.

A typical Nutting colonial vignette

While the outdoor views made up the bulk of the catalog, it was Nutting’s colonial interiors that were the most popular. By 1911 he was offering about 200 different interior scenes, which accounted for about a quarter of his total picture sales. Mariet Nutting had first suggested staging scenes with models—usually the young women who worked as colorists—to create “period vignettes.” 

Though Nutting was producing his photos in the age of the “new woman,” the suffragette, and the flapper, his pictures showed women in decidedly traditional roles. Either they were shown engaged in genteel leisure activities—reading, writing letters, drinking tea—or in productive (but still genteel) work—spinning, sewing, cooking. In a time when gender roles were rapidly changing, Nutting’s pictures offered a reassuring vision of the past.

In order to make sure that the settings in his photographs were authentic, Nutting began to collect furniture, rugs, costumes, and other items that could be used as props. Then, to ensure that he always had suitable backgrounds, he began to purchase the historic properties which eventually would become the Wallace Nutting Chain of Colonial Picture Houses. The five houses, purchased and restored between 1914 and 1916, included the Joseph Webb House in Wethersfield, Connecticut; the Wentworth Gardner House in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; the Hazen Garrison House in Haverhill, Massachusetts; the Cutler-Bartlett House in Newburyport, Massachusetts; and the Ironmaster’s House in Saugus, Massachusetts. 

17th-century cupboard made by Wallace Nutting

As a financial investment, the houses never lived up to Nutting’s hopes, because their opening coincided with the first World War and the imposition of gasoline rationing, which severely curtailed tourism. But they did help solidify his reputation as an expert on historic architecture and furnishings. Nutting also started to manufacture his own line of reproduction furniture in 1917. He considered the colonial-inspired pieces produced by the big companies to be “humbug furniture,” while his own pieces were worthy of being called the “antiques of tomorrow.” Nutting’s furniture was authentic in appearance, though his workers did use modern construction techniques and machinery.

In addition to all his other ventures, Wallace Nutting was a prolific writer and lecturer. In the 1920s he began writing travel guides, the States Beautiful series, that took readers on virtual tours (illustrated with his own photographs, of course) of the states of the eastern seaboard. He also bolstered his reputation as a furniture expert with three books on the history of American furniture: American Windsors (1917), Furniture of the Pilgrim Century (1924), and Furniture Treasury (3 volumes; 1928 and 1933). Alice owned all of these books on furniture.

Photo by Wallace Nutting taken in the parlor of the Webb House.
Note that the murals depict two of Nutting’s other properties,
the Hazen Garrison House and the Saugus Iron Works.

Although Nutting was convinced of the superiority of the past, he nonetheless was a very modern businessman. Nutting employed an advertising agency beginning in the early 1920s, which produced print campaigns for magazines like Antiques. These advertisements were carefully targeted at middle-class customers—people who did not have their own family heirlooms that “came over on the Mayflower” but liked to think of themselves as people who should have such fine items. All of his ventures were carefully planned to work together: the historic homes provided settings for his photographs; the books educated consumers about the furniture; and the photographs generated interest in the historic properties and the furniture. 

Above all else, Wallace Nutting saw himself as an educator, one with a very specific moral lesson to impart about the values of rural, pre-industrial America. That this idea owed as much to his imagination as it did to reality was unimportant. Nutting’s vision, combined with shrewd business tactics, tapped into a vein of nostalgia about the past and made him the foremost popularizer of the Colonial Revival in the early 20th century.


Sources:

Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

Richard Guy Wilson, Shaun Eyring, and Kenny Marotta, Re-Creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

Joyce P. Barendsen, “Wallace Nutting, an American Tastemaker: The Pictures and Beyond,” Winterthur Portfolio 18, no. 2/3 (July 1, 1983): 187–212.

First Impressions

before

after - including the settee and barometer

Every winter we keep our maintenance man Steve busy by renovating a room in the museum. In all of the rooms and halls, with the exception of the third floor ballroom, the wallpaper dates to some time in the 1950s or 60s - it is dingy and repaired in places. The tired old wallpaper does nothing to accent the collection or the wonderful building details and construction. So we remove the paper and choose an appropriate paint color - and then move objects around to fit the space and the theme of the room or hall better. Often the pictures on the walls seem haphazardly hung so this is our opportunity to bring an aesthetic eye to the walls and to create a more inviting and lovely room.

looking north - before

after... this little south hall holds the Battle of Plattsburgh exhibit

After finishing renovation of the third floor last winter, this winter we moved to the first floor hall and Steve renovated this very important space over the months of January, February and March. The results are stunning. The collection shines and the hall is so inviting now! I have taken the liberty of placing the wall objects so they relate better to the furniture and themes. I have also moved a few pieces that were easily overlooked in their previous homes, such as the handsome barometer.

below the stairs - before

after

Along with new paint and a fresh view, we have the newly conserved settee back from Williamstown Art Conservation Center. It is a George III carved mahogany settee from 1820 that has received a new show cover of crisp black hair cloth. You can read about the process and what the conservators discovered in my Wednesday, October 2, 2013 post, ‘Touring the Settee’. Stay tuned for a post about the completed settee. And come in for a tour! We are open Tuesday - Saturday with tours at 10am, Noon and 2pm.

look at the lovely settee!

Touring the Settee

We recently made another trip to Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Williamstown, MA. This time we were picking up the two tables on which we had necessary work done. While there I had a tour of our early 19th century settee - currently in the process of conservation with furniture conservators Hugh Glover and Gretchen Guidess. 

Gretchen and I examine the original fabric and hair stuffing on the arms of the settee

Furniture conservators employ a method I affectionately call "furniture forensics" to determine the many lives and looks a piece like this settee has gone through over the years. They photograph the object as it looks before work begins and then strip it's show cover to determine the history of the piece. From the description written by the conservators, "By examining and comparing the relative position of the layered textile attachments and the location of occupied and unoccupied tack holes, the following items were determined:

The settee has had four show covers... a black cotton satin weave fabric, followed by a gold fabric of undetermined weave structure, and finally the jacquard tapestry (on the settee since approximately the 1920s). The earliest show cover was a dark colored hair cloth, remnants of which were found under two tack heads along the underside of the front seat rail... the textile structure was observed to have two different elements woven together - one thick and one fine... most likely linen warps and horse hair wefts..."

"The haircloth show cover was decorated with a row of domed nails that were used to outline the seat back, the bottom of the sides and along the front seat rail of the settee. The broken shanks remaining in the frame are square and are corroded green, indicating copper containing metal alloy. The shank shape and alloy components signal early historic brass domed nails. The close spacing and clustering of broken nail shanks suggest two campaigns of decorative domed nails applied to the frame."

The parts remaining on the settee that are original include linen webbing, loosely woven linen base cloths, and curled horsehair stuffing. "During the investigation some inscriptions were revealed. 'AH Bullard/Winchester, Mass' was penciled down the frame element support of the proper right seat back. The proper right arm letters run vertically upward along the top third of the arm: 'Hooky??? Bi???' The outside seat back appears to have several inscriptions but they appear too faint to decipher..."

Gretchen explains the textile structures of the settee, and those of it's original fabrics and elements that are still intact - you can see the curled horsehair stuffing on the settee arm. The white cloth and new stuffing are being added before the new haircloth show cover is applied

Inscriptions too faint for the naked eye were revealed through UV light photographs

"This is an early 19th century straight back sofa with six mahogany legs, brass casters and concave armrests on the ends. The only show-woods are the legs and one stretcher; the front legs have a tapered saber form with reeding on their forward faces; the rear legs are slightly curved..."

Hugh shows the options for domed nails

Tools of the trade

Christine Puza, Gretchen Guidess, Amanda Palmer and Hugh Glover after a wonderful tour of the settee, and a tasty lunch in Hugh's garden

A Trip to Williamstown

One of my roles as a museum director is to oversee the process of conservation of the Alice's collection. This requires looking at priorities designated by a conservator who surveyed our objects years ago as well as heeding the recommendations of our collections committee in light of the inherent value of the objects to the museum. "Value" can be a very subjective term, so I'll clarify that by saying we decide what to send for conservation based on what is valuable and necessary for telling the story of this museum, it's founder, and it's wonderful collection.

(All photos courtesy PHOTOPIA/Shaun Heffernan)

the furniture conservation studio at Williamstown

We recently delivered two tables from the collection to Williamstown Art Conservation Center in Williamstown, MA. Although it requires a very long day of driving, I really enjoy this aspect of my job. The drive is lovely and what awaits in Williamstown is always interesting and stimulating. Unless I am in a hurry to get back on the road home I always happily accept a tour of the conservation rooms. I find it really exciting to see the works of art being gently and painstakingly cared for by skilled and patient professionals.

highly skilled furniture conservator Hugh Glover points out a music bench currently undergoing conservation

detail of the music bench

Included in the many pieces currently in process in the furniture conservation studio is the ornate music bench pictured above. The work that furniture conservator Hugh Glover is doing on the bench is very detailed. The inlay was damaged in several places and  the ivory-monogrammed initials of the original owner had for some reason been crudely gouged out of the piece.  Hugh was able to obtain a cast made from a companion piece but subsequently found it was slightly too large. He will need to work to make a new one the proper size and will then carefully affix it in the original place.

At Williamstown it never fails that I will see pieces by artists familiar to me. This time the paintings conservators had about half a dozen George Inness works in their studio. They are in the midst of conserving the pieces for the Clark museum, which is affiliated with the art conservation studios and is located on the same campus. Inness (1825-1894) was an American landscape painter whose influences included the Hudson River school.

one of a group of George Inness paintings in the conservation studios

Hugh Glover explains work in progress on a mirror in the furniture conservation studio

Hugh and I examine the drawers from one of our objects brought for conservation

The two tables I left with Hugh for conservation will likely be at Williamstown for months as they undergo treatment. The museum will get a detailed report on the work completed as well as before and after photographs taken at the studios. Later this year I will drive back to see what new works are in progress and to usher our collection items back to their home in the North Country. Hopefully I will have time for another tour. Aside from the variety of wonderful artwork, furniture and objects in progress at Williamstown, the studios are the envy of any serious artist or craftsperson. The recently erected facility has very well planned studios with state of the art lighting, ventilation, storage and workspace - so much wonderful space! As an artist I dream of having just a portion of one of these wonderful studios within which to do my printmaking, drawing, painting and dreaming!

a sculpture from the New York State art collection