Toledo Museum of Art lands stunning 1898 photo in record buy
The Toledo Museum of Art has acquired “The Seven Words” (1898), a rare F. Holland Day photograph that shows the American artist posing as Jesus Christ on the cross. The piece is made up of seven tightly framed platinum prints set in a single wooden frame. According to The Art Newspaper, it is the most expensive photograph the Ohio museum has ever bought and the first work by Day to enter its collection.
Why the Toledo Museum of Art wanted ‘The Seven Words’
“The Seven Words” captures Day in the final moments of the crucifixion, a deeply theatrical project that changed his own body. Day, a leading figure in the Pictorialist photography movement, grew his hair long and fasted for the role. Raised a Unitarian Universalist, he was moved by the religious traditions he encountered in Europe, including a Passion play he saw in Germany.
Adam M. Levine, director of the Toledo Museum of Art, calls it “the most important photograph that people don’t know about,” adding that the work can be placed alongside performance art and “anticipates what will happen with cinema.” Erin Corrales-Diaz, the museum’s curator of American art, points to the artist’s commitment: “Day grew his hair long and fasted, changing his own body for this role.”
Getting the images right took enormous effort. Day made about 250 plate studies, and only around a dozen of them worked.
A rare work with a long history
Only three original versions of “The Seven Words” are known to exist. Besides the Toledo Museum of Art’s copy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, each own one. Toledo’s print once belonged to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which let it go around 1928, about the time that museum moved into its current building.
The work first appeared in 1898 at Philadelphia’s first Photographic Salon, where not everyone welcomed it. “Some people questioned its legitimacy, as they didn’t like using photography for spiritual subjects,” Corrales-Diaz said.
Corrales-Diaz first encountered Day’s work in graduate school and later noticed a gap in the museum’s holdings. “When I did a collection assessment here at the museum, I realized that we have a dearth of early photography,” she said. That led to talks with museum leadership and, eventually, the purchase, arranged through New York’s Bruce Silverstein Gallery and completed at the Paris Photo fair in 2023.
When the Toledo Museum of Art will show it
Visitors will be able to see “The Seven Words” starting in fall 2027, when the Toledo Museum of Art unveils its reinstalled permanent collection galleries. Levine says the piece will sit in the center of a gallery. “It’ll be in a sort of shrine, like a very important carpet at the Victoria and Albert Museum,” he said.
Because the platinum prints are fragile, the museum’s conservators are working out the right light levels so the photograph can stay on view for the long term. For more on the fall arts season, see our special interests coverage and our look at the Academy of Natural Sciences museum closing.
Source: The Art Newspaper
Featured image: Photo: F. Holland Day, The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Wikimedia Commons (CC0). The image shows the Met’s print of “The Seven Words,” not Toledo’s.
