Scope and Content Note
The papers of Fred Holland Day (1864-1933) span the years 1793-2010, with the bulk of the material dating from 1883 to 1933. They document the life and activities of the photographer and publisher who was part of the American Arts and Crafts movement in the 1890s. Day co-founded the publishing firm Copeland and Day and was a leading figure in the pictorialist movement of photography. The papers are organized into four series: Family and Personal File, Alphabetical File, Miscellany, and Oversize.
The Family and Personal File contains letters written by Anna Smith Day and Lewis Day to their only child, Fred, and his letters to them. These include letters F. Holland Day wrote to his father as a boy in 1879 while he spent several months in Denver, Colorado, and his letters to his parents while on his first trip to Europe following his graduation from school in 1883. His travel journal from that trip is filed with the small group of diaries in this series. The other diaries date from the last ten years of his life, when he was homebound and in ill health. Other personal items include childhood memorabilia, school papers, and photographs of classmates from Chauncy Hall School in Boston.
The Alphabetical File makes up the largest portion of Day's papers and covers many aspects of his life. Arranged by name or topic, these files cover his work as a publisher, his photography and interaction with major figures in the field of photography, his philanthropic activities and relationships with a group of urban youth he met through his efforts with settlement houses in Boston, his chalet on the coast of Maine, and his varied interests including the poet John Keats, books, local history and genealogy, and horticulture. The series contains his extensive correspondence with photographers, authors, artists, clients, merchants, young people he befriended and assisted, and friends. Day's connection to a group of artists and intellectuals in Boston that included Herbert Copeland, Ralph Adams Cram, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Bertram Grovenor Goodhue is documented in their correspondence and in files relating to the group the Visionists, the literary magazine, The Mahogany Tree, and Copeland and Day. Day was a mentor to an immigrant Lebanese boy, Kahlil Gibran. Files relating to social workers Jessie Fremont Beale and Florence E. Peirce document their initial efforts to interest Day in Gibran's artistic talents. Among the material relating to the pictorialism and Photo-Secession movements aimed at promoting photography as a fine art is extensive correspondence from photographers Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, and Clarence H. White. There are also lengthy letters from White's wife, Jane Felix White, spanning almost thirty years. Because Day kept up an active correspondence with a wide-ranging group of people, letters include details about life in the late nineteen and first part of the twentieth centuries. There are letters from soldiers serving in World War I and many references to the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919. Letters from Kihachirō Matsuki include his account of the 1923 Kanto Earthquake in Japan. Additional material relating to some of the individuals and topics was added to the F. Holland Day Papers by the Norwood Historical Society.
Among the Miscellany series are letterbooks containing letterpress copies of Day's outgoing correspondence dating from 1884 to 1894. A group of writings by Day includes pieces entitled “Art and the Camera,” “Sacred Subjects in Photography,” and “Is Photography Art?,” and drafts of pieces he wrote for the Visionist's literary magazine The Knight Errant.