Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day

5. “The Embodiment of a Prayer”

• 87 • five “The Embodiment of a Prayer” ∂¥ When English photographer George Davison wrote to Alfred Stieglitz in June 1895 that he had“happened on one excellent artist out there.Mr.Day (a publisher ) of Boston,” Day had been involved in serious photography for only a few years.1 As he began to see photography as a vehicle for his own artistic expression, he simultaneously experimented in both portraiture and allegorical studies, using subjects and themes from history and literature. Some early attempts resulted in mini–tableaux vivants, such as depicting designer Ethel Reed as the enigmatic shepherdess from Chloe (plate 7) and actress Julia Arthur as a dramatic Salomé or an exotic Sapphira (figure 29).2 Although some of these were successful, even Guiney knew that Day was capable of more original work.“[A]nybody can photograph an actress,” she wrote early in 1895.“I want to keep your camera‘high and aloof,’ sacred to inspired nonprofessionals with unstudied charms.”3 The resulting compositions, many of them stylized images of Nancy Lovis and Angelina Grimké, the teenaged daughters of family friends, or character studies of classmates Gertrude Savage and Isabelle Giles, were deemed by some, including Herbert Taylor, to be“so utterly different from any other photographer’s that we must turn to the painters for a comparison.”4 This effect was no accident. 88 • chapter five As he had studied William Morris for inspiration in book design, Day had similarly absorbed the arrangements and style of master artists, including Whistler , Sargent, and Rembrandt, to inform his photographic portraiture, a method he advocated repeatedly in his published articles and lectures.5 Cognizant of this process, Guiney referred to Day’s“Franz Hals Goodhue” on more than one occasion and suggested that he take a portrait of Cora Brown Potter“after Greuze.”6 The critics agreed. “His ‘Vas Lacrymarum’ has the profoundly mystical quality that we find in the paintings of Elihu Vedder,” intoned a Chicago observer, while Photo-Era’s Herbert Whyte Taylor referenced Whistler and Chavannes when discussing“the symbolism of some of Mr. Day’s composition.”7 “Symbolism,” a literary term of the 1880s, was introduced to painting by the art critic Albert Aurier, who argued that the goal of art was “not to create accurate representations of objects but, using symbols, to capture the more elusive ideas and emotions hidden beneath the surface.”8 Still embracing the antimodern sensibility of his Visionist contemporaries, Day sought to evoke this idealism and beauty in his photographs. His aim was understood by critic William M. Murray, who noted that although the meaning of Day’s pictures was sometimes difficult to understand,“they are intended to be regarded not so much as representations of external nature as the embodiment of mental creations in which the imagination of the spectator is called upon to do its part in the rendering of the ideal. They are, in other words, suggestive rather than imitative.”9 Drawing upon his substantial knowledge of “classical art, old masters, and romantic and decadent literature,” Day often echoed masterworks, sometimes explicitly as in The Question (figure 32),“directly derived from Belgian symbolist artist Fernand Khnopff ’s 1894 chromolithograph Across the Ages (figure 33),” or in Evening (figure 34), modeled after a figure study painted by Jean Hippolyte Flandrin (figure 35), and sometimes more suggestively, as in The Marble Faun (plate 4), a homage to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of the same name.10 In an astonishingly short period of time, within a decade of his first picking up a camera, Day had amassed a number of distinctive artistic portraits. In the fall of 1895, perhaps encouraged by English bookseller and fellow photographer Frederick Evans, Day submitted three figure studies to the Third Photographic Salon of the Linked Ring, a photographic exhibition held at the Dudley Gallery in London.11 Founded in the spring of 1892 to protest the artistic inadequacy of the displays mounted by the Photographic Society,the prestigious group stood at the forefront of the redefinition of photography as a fine art. This quixotic quest “the embodiment of a prayer” • 89 aside, the Linked Ring, with its secret handshakes and quaint rituals, embraced the trappings that had always appealed to Day.12 Much like his own Visionists, the “Links” called themselves a “Brotherhood”; like his Mahogany Tree coterie, they anointed one another with pseudonyms; and like the Pewter Mugs, their meetings...