F. Holland Day

platinum print, a Library of Congress Fine Arts Division stamp and numerical notations in ink on the reverse, tipped to a paper mount, Library of Congress Fine Arts Division and Surplus Duplicates stamps and numerical notations in ink on the reverse, framed, circa 1906

Collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.

Acquired from the above, 1970s

Prints of this image in the collections of the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., and The Royal Photographic Society, Bath:

Ellen Fritz Clattenburg, The Photographic Work of F. Holland Day (Wellesley College Museum, 1975), p. 58 

Estelle Jussim, Slave to Beauty: The Eccentric Life and Controversial Career of F. Holland Day, Photographer, Publisher, Aesthete (Boston, 1981), p. 79 

F. Holland Day: Suffering the Ideal (Santa Fe, 1995), pls. 2 and 53 

Pam Roberts, F. Holland Day (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2000), c. 74 

This arresting early platinum print is on lightly-textured paper and exhibits a fine range of tones, from its cool creamy highlights to its lush charcoal blacks. It is a particularly nuanced rendering of the image, filled with evocative detail. Only visible upon very close examination are the following: a few expertly applied tiny deposits of original retouching overall; a faint milky area in the central portion in the sitter's torso; a tiny adhesion of indeterminate nature in the upper left corner; and 3 pin-point-sized impressions in the upper and lower portion of the image. There is a soft 1/2-inch depression along the lower edge, which likely occurred during processing. The photograph is tipped along its upper edge only to a thin paper mount. It is only slightly larger than the print and measures 9-3/4 by 7-1/2 inches. On the reverse of both the print and the mount, the numbers '340033' are written in an unidentified hand in ink. A very small tear along the right edge of the paper mount has been expertly reinforced with rice paper on the reverse.
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In his career as a Pictorialist photographer, the aesthete Fred Holland Day produced some of the most memorable allegorical photographs of the turn of the last century, of which St. Sebastian is an indisputable masterpiece.  This arresting early platinum print, with a fine range of tones from cool creamy highlights to lush charcoal blacks, is a particularly nuanced rendering of the image, filled with evocative detail. 

The genesis and execution of this photograph is well documented.  Its handsome subject was Nicola Giancola, an uneducated shoeshine boy that Day took under his wing and nurtured.  Nicola was a frequent and pliable sitter.  He served as the subject for several of Day’s most successful photographs from this period, including Pilat, Il Moro, and various portraits of St. Sebastian.

Day scholarship has fully explored the complex issues involved in our modern interpretations of his photographs.  Scenes of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, depicting the young man’s body pierced by arrows and tied to a tree, had long been a popular subject in art and literature.  While Day’s depiction of the Saint is of a barely clothed and tragically beautiful young man, seemingly in rapture rather than agony, a homoerotic interpretation of this image is too simplistic.  In many of Day’s own articles on photography, he champions the photographer’s right to attempt any subject, even the sacred. ‘There has never been, during the history of the world, any worthy period when these subjects were denied to the painter or the sculptor. . . There will always be narrow minds to question the rights of portraying sacred subjects in any medium: to them the less said the better; but to those who criticize only the photographers’ right to these subjects, I can but advise patience’ (‘Sacred Art and the Camera,’ from The Photogram, February 1899, quoted in Curtis & Van Nimmen, F. Holland Day: Selected texts and bibliography, pp. 62-3). 

Photographs by Day rarely appear at auction.  At the time of this writing, no other print of this image is believed to have been offered.  This photograph was deaccessioned by the Library of Congress which, along with the Royal Photographic Society, Bath, holds the largest collection of F. Holland Day photographs.  Four platinum prints of St. Sebastian, including a tondo, remain in The Louise Imogen Guiney Collection at the Library of Congress.