Wallace Nutting Floral Still Life Scenes

Wallace Nutting (1861-1941): Wallace Nutting was probably the most famous photographer of the early 20th century. Between 1900 and his death in 1941, his hand-colored photographs of pastoral America achieved such enormous popularity that hardly an American middle-class household was without one. He even claimed in his 1936 biography that had he sold more than 10,000,000 pictures throughout his career.

Beginning in 1897, Wallace Nutting went on to take nearly 50,000 different pictures. Most failed to meet his high standards and were destroyed and, by most estimates, only 2500 different titles were sold commercially. Nutting would always take his own photographs, which were developed through a glass negative onto a special platinum paper, and then colored entirely by hand by one of his "Colorists". And it is the individuality of each picture being hand-colored, and Nutting's sense of style, perfection and taste, that helped to make his pictures so popular during the early 20th century. They were beautiful, inexpensive, and provided much of America's growing middle class with the opportunity to decorate the walls of their homes at a very affordable price. Click here for full article.