An Eventful Journey

Blog Post #9

This blog post knocks me off track a little, as it shifts the discussion away from David Davidson and back to years ago when my collecting focused on Wallace Nutting. A discussion worth having, as it leads to putting a Wallace Nutting picture in the limelight. The hand colored photography movement of the early 1900’s is presently having a revival, and this becomes a small part of it!

So let’s go back for a moment to the beginning of my collecting. The year is 1970. Soon after I got married, my wife and I bought our first Nutting at a tag sale. Of course, this picture is still part of my collection.

Happy Valley Road, by Wallace Nutting.

My wife and I were bitten by the bug, but we had very little money to spend on pictures. So we were buying pictures “on time” from local dealers and antique shops, making weekly payments. In the 1980s we discovered the Wallace Nutting Auctions that we attended every spring and fall. The dates were saved on our calendar as if they were holidays. From that point forward, our collecting of hand colored photography turned into a frenzy.

At the first Wallace Nutting auction we went to, we were like kids in a candy shop, not knowing which way to turn first. It may have been at this first auction that one picture in particular caught my eye. An old wooden stagecoach with two woman in colonial garb, one wishing the other An Eventful Journey. I loved it. Great look. Great title. The problem was, a friend of mine was at the auction and he had the same thoughts about that same picture. Not wanting to bid against him, I decided to step aside. My buddy went home with the picture. Oh well maybe next year!

It was that next year, An Eventful Journey was on the auction block. That same day the Nutting picture Rapid Transit, which was almost the same picture, was also up for auction. My thought was that possibly Rapid Transit might draw more attention. Maybe it did, because I won the bidding on An Eventful Journey and it became one of the special pictures my Nutting collection.

Fast forward to February of this year. The James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art in St. Petersburg Florida, reached out to one of the senior officers of the Wallace Nutting Collectors Club (Hi Jim) looking for a picture that the museum could use in an exhibit they were doing on photographer Edward S. Curtis. This memo was passed on to other officers in the Nutting Club and I was quick to respond. All I knew about Edward Curtis was that he had taken pictures of Native Americans. The only other photographer I knew that took these pictures was David Davidson and I had a collection of them. I was wrong with my assumption about them looking for this type of picture, but I may have opened up a door for future discussions with the museum.

The James Museum was looking for a Wallace Nutting picture that could be used in the exhibit. The exhibition: Edward S Curtis Photographer of his time.

This exhibit just opened on November 8th. It would be tracing the evolution of Curtis’ photography and comparing his work to other artists.

Not knowing exactly what they were looking for, I started sending them suggestions. Their final choice was, An Eventful Journey. So at this moment, my Nutting picture An Eventful Journey is on display in the James Museum in Florida at the Edward S Curtis Exhibition. Quite a journey for a picture Nutting took in Vermont 125 years ago.

An Eventful Journey, by Wallace Nutting

“Seasons Greeting from the Davidsons”……a story for another day.