The Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum will host a lecture featuring celebrated historian and scholar William Hosley on Thursday, October 11, 2012. The lecture will be preceded by a wine reception (by donation) at 6 p.m.
During his lecture, Hosley will discuss the colorful life and career of one the Colonial Revival period’s strongest proponents during his lecture: “Wallace Nutting: A Search for New England's Past.” At the beginning of the 20th century, Wallace Nutting (1861-1944) emerged as a popular photographer whose pictures of farm life, rural beauty, old houses and colonial interiors earned him a national reputation. As a leading spokesman for the Colonial Revival and Country Life Movements, Nutting rapidly expanded his involvements to include antique furniture collecting, reproduction-furniture manufacturing, and the writing and publishing of books on New England travel and antiques. According to Hosley, no other figure in the 20th or 21st centuries did more to advance the study and public awareness of early-American life. Hosley’s lecture provides an overview of Nutting's remarkable career, from his beginnings as a minister in Rhode Island, through his years in Connecticut—where he first achieved national recognition—to his final years at the helm of a vast
Colonial Revival business empire in Massachusetts.
