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FREDERICK H. EVANS

measurements note
9 by 4 1/2 in. (22.7 by 11.5 cm.)

platinum print, mounted to gray paper within the original gray paper folio with window mat, inscribed 'Edward Steichen' by Frederick H. Evans in pencil on the mount, a Milwaukee Art Center Exhibition label on the reverse, matted, circa 1900

PROVENANCE

The photographer to Frederick H. Evans, circa 1900

By descent to Evans's son, Evan Evans

Lee Witkin, New York

Sotheby's New York, 7 May 1985, Sale 5318, Property from the Estate of Lee D. Witkin, Lot 589

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1985

EXHIBITED

Milwaukee Art Center, The Wisconsin Heritage in Photography, September - October 1970

LITERATURE

Another print of this image:

Dennis Longwell, Steichen: The Master Prints 1895 - 1914, The Symbolist Period (The Museum of Modern Art, 1978), pl. 15

Joel Smith, Edward Steichen: The Early Years (Princeton University Press and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), pl. 15

James Crump, F. Holland Day: Suffering the Ideal (Santa Fe, 1995), pl. 37, variant cropping

NOTE

The image offered here is a clever, composite portrait of three photographers: Frederick Evans, the English bookseller-turned-photographer, whose back faces us as he observes a photograph on the wall; the subject of the photograph on the wall, F. Holland Day, the Boston brahmin, who has posed himself as Jesus Christ and then taken his own self-portrait; and the photographer of this mise en scene, Edward Steichen, whose presence is felt in the compositional echoes of his own self-portrait taken in Milwaukee in 1898: the placement of the sitter to the right, the rectangle on the wall, the dark, high baseboard in the background.

The photograph is believed to have been taken in London in the fall of 1900, when Steichen traveled there from Paris to submit his photographs to the English salons. He quickly made the acquaintance of F. Holland Day (1864 -- 1933), who had himself arrived in London only months before with grand plans to mount a mammoth show of 'The New American School of Photography' at the galleries of the Royal Photographic Society. Day accepted a number of Steichen's works for his 'New School' exhibition, and soon enlisted Steichen's aid, as had Stieglitz before him, in the hanging of the show. Day's magnum opus, the Seven Last Words of Christ, the serial photographic self-portrait of Day as Christ during the crucifixion, was featured in the 'New School' exhibition, and it may have been around this time that the present image was made. Evans appears to be looking at the first portrait from the Seven Last Words series, which Day, in his original framing of the series, paired with the phrase, 'Father forgive them; for they know not what they do.'

With its subtle gradations of tone and layered paper mount and mat, the print offered here is in one sense an homage to Frederick Evans (1853 -- 1943), whose own photographs were known for their delicate and complex tonal ranges. When asked what works reproduced in Camera Work were his favorites, Evans is reported to have replied that the very things that would have made certain pictures his favorites were the first things to be lost in reproduction. Nothing could be more applicable to the photograph offered here. With its subtle and almost imperceptible delineation of forms in its layers of shadow, the actual print defies reproduction. It is best viewed in its original state to be fully seen.

At the time of this writing, two other prints of this image have been located. One, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, was, like the present print, originally owned by the photographer's son Evan Evans. Another, with much wider cropping, in the Royal Photographic Society collection, now at Bradford, England, is catalogued by the RPS as a Steichen photograph, although Day author James Crump speculates that it was taken by F. Holland Day.