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This photograph by Wallace Nutting, titled “Provincetown Hollyhocks,” appears in his popular guidebook, “Massachusetts Beautiful.” |
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Wallace Nutting in P'town
Wallace Nutting was one of the most well-known and prolific photographers of the early 20th century. Nutting’s mission was to preserve in his photographs an image of rural America he felt was disappearing. Although largely forgotten today except by a few devoted followers, Nutting sold millions of hand-colored prints. The images Nutting marketed were attractive and affordable, providing poor and middle-class Americans the opportunity to decorate their homes with beautiful pictures of the New England landscapes and interiors of classic New England homes.
A hand-colored photograph of a flock of sheep returning home at twilight along a tree-lined country lane hung in my mother’s kitchen when I was growing up. The warm, comforting, nostalgic image remains in my mind more than 50 years later. I think it may have been by Wallace Nutting and called “The End of the Day.” Recently I’ve begun to search for that print on the Internet. As often happens, when you’re searching for one thing, you find another. While looking for “my” print I was surprised to find that Nutting had written a hugely popular series of 10 “States Beautiful” guidebooks during the 1920s and ’30s. One of these was “Massachusetts Beautiful,” published in 1923. In it are two photographs and a description of Provincetown.
It’s interesting to read Nutting’s impressions of Cape Cod and Provincetown from the early 1920s. Some of his observations still ring true today; others strike me as strange. He says the first-time visitor will find it odd that “although Cape Cod is narrow and runs away into the sea, one may journey the length of the Cape and seldom see the ocean.” Visitors today, especially those from California, still remark about the lack of a coast highway where they can drive along the oceanfront. Curiously, he says the second thing a visitor will find surprising about the Cape is its “hilly nature.” He continues, “This notably uneven contour adds much to the charm of the Cape, which one would otherwise find monotonous. Of course the hill being no more than huge dunes are the effect of wind and sea, but some of them have great height.”
“Provincetown,” he writes, “ itself has of late, indeed, been seized by a new band of Pilgrims, the Portuguese who succeeded the Yankee in the fisheries, and who now themselves are finding other lines of effort more attractive. One finds himself as much in a foreign land, as is possible here in America, in Provincetown, in spite of the lofty monument which commemorates the first landing of our fathers.” Nutting’s observations confirm the European quality that led to the formation of the art colony here when artists were attracted to Provincetown during World War I because travel to Europe was forbidden.
According to Nutting, “The finest attractions connected with Provincetown are her back yards, her sea gardens as one may say, where the rollicking hollyhocks hold undisputed sway, towering over their humbler floral neighbors. There are little lanes and alleys and nooks loved by the artist and sought out by the tourist where the flowers, seeming to get a permanence of beauty by the seaside, are allowed full scope.”
Perhaps if we want to improve Provincetown’s appeal to visitors we should issue all new homeowners a welcome packet of hollyhock seeds to plant.
[Laurel Guadazno is curator of education for the Pilgrim Monument & Provincetown Museum.]
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Nov 2nd, 2006