Davidson, David

David Davidson. A well-known commercial photographer in Providence, Rhode Island who created hand-tinted platinum photographs were taken between 1907 and 1912.

Emulating the hugely popular Wallace Nutting, whose pastoral and colonial scenes decorated the walls of middle- class homes across America, Davidson photographed the interior, exterior, and surrounding landscape of the historic house to create vivid colonial vignettes, using their wives and members of the Talbot family, dressed in colonial outfits, as models.

Davidson’s images are expressions of the Colonial Revival movement, a nostalgia for the preindustrial era was a response to unsettling social changes—the rapid expansion of cities, the influx of immigrants, changing roles of women, and the growth of an impersonal modern economy.

Hand-painted photographs were, of course, an alternative to color photography before the latter was widely available. But it was also an era when photography was still a new and contested medium, not yet considered art. Hand-tinting the photographs made them look more like watercolor paintings and less like mechanically reproducible prints.

Ironically, this commodified nostalgia was good business. Davidson created more than one thousand titles over the course of his career and sold more hand-tinted photos than any of his contemporaries except his mentor, Nutting, whom he met when Nutting was still the minister of the Union Congregational Church in Providence, before he reinvented himself as a photographer and entrepreneur. Nationally recognized, Davidson won a bronze medal in the category of hand- painted photography at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

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