389
Harker, Margaret, The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in
Photography 1892–1910, Heinemann, 1979.
Obituaries: The British Journal Photographic Almanac, 1932,
331; The Photographic Journal, February, 1931, 95.
DAVY, SIR HUMPHREY (1778–1829)
English chemist and inventor
Davy’s name is forever linked with his famous miner’s
lamp introduced in 1815. His name is also linked that
of Thomas Wedgewood and the experiments conducted
by the two men, together and separately, towards the
establishment of a photographic process.
He was born in Penzance in 1778, moving to Bristol
where he was apprenticed to a surgeon, and in 1797 he
embarked on a course of study in the sciences.
The Wedgewood/Davy experiments with silver ni-
trate in the early 1800s, place Davy’s work at the dawn
of photography. The two men reportedly produced vis-
ible imagery on both leather and paper, which continued
to blacken as they could not ultimately stop the action
of light and ‘fi x’ the image. Much of the work was
Wedgewood’s, with Davy adding important notation
before presenting the paper ‘An Account of a Method
of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and Making Profi les
by the Agency of Light upon the Nitrate of Silver’ to the
Royal Institution, London, in 1802. These experiments,
however, are not his sole contribution to the evolution
of the medium.
In 1802 he was appointed Professor of Chemistry at
the Royal Institution, and during the period 1800-1815,
his chemical exploration and experimentation identi-
fi ed and isolated the elements sodium and potassium,
so central to photographic chemistry, and by 1815 he
had discovered iodine, another key component of the
photographic process.
John Hannavy
DAY, FRED HOLLAND (1864–1933)
American photographer and philanthropist
Day was born in South Dedham (later incorporated
into Norwood), Massachusetts on 23 July 1864, the
only child of wealthy and supportive parents. His father
Lewis, a successful leather merchant and entrepreneur,
was based in Boston where the Day family also had an
apartment. Day’s mother, Anna Smith Day, was phil-
anthropic and individualistic, involved in the cultural,
social, and charitable life of Boston. Day inherited this
trait of helping and supporting and had the time and
wealth to pursue the altruism which was to become the
most important aspect of his life after 1900.
Day’s lifelong passions were literature, art, pho-
tography, and aesthetics. By his early twenties, he had
amassed large collections of works relating to the Eng-
lish Romantic poet John Keats and the French writer
Honoré de Balzac. He had also become interested in
photography, writing to a friend, Ada Langley, in the
summer of 1887 “[I] have become a full-fl edged amateur
in the art of photography, and a most delicious time I’ve
had of it, too....”
This same year, he struck up a relationship with the
forthright Boston Irish Catholic poet, Louise Imogen
Guiney. The question of romance was soon removed
from the equation but the two remained friends for over
30 years. Day never married and, while it is widely as-
sumed that he was homosexual, his sexual orientation
was, like much else about him, a very private matter
which remains unclear.
Until 1888, Day fi tted his photography around work
as a depository secretary witha bookseller. After he
left this employment he regularly travelled to Europe,
especially London, for several months at a time, pur-
suing Keatsiana (eventually unveiling a bust of John
Keats at Hampstead Parish Church in July 1894, paid
for by public subscription organized and collected by
Day and Guiney in Boston) and meeting luminaries like
William Morris, William Butler Yeats, Arthur Symons
and Oscar Wilde (whose autograph Day had secured as
a schoolboy in 1882 during Wilde’s U.S. lecture tour)
thus establishing connections that would bear fruit in
both his publishing and photographic careers.
During 1889 or 1890, Day also met the British book-
seller turned photographer, Frederick H. Evans. Evans
not only involved Day in the British photography scene
but also got him interested in the powerful and stylized
drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, then still a teenager.
Day and Evans had much in common—books, art,
photography and a fascination with visionaries, and they
remained close friends, exchanging photographs and
ideas, for the rest of their lives. Day’s increasing links
with the British photographic scene, through Evans and
George Davison and the growing confi dence and excel-
lence of his own photography meant that he was elected
to the British photographic society, the Brotherhood of
The Linked Ring, on 26 November 1895. By this time,
Day had begun to use the name F. Holland Day for his
photography, fi nding it more appropriate to his status
as an artist than the colloquial “Fred.”
From 1893 to 1899, Day set up and self-fi nanced
a publishing house with the writer and editor Herbert
Copeland. The publishing company of Copeland and
Day, based in Boston, was initially much infl uenced by
the ethos and style of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press
(set up in 1891) and the resurgent Arts and Crafts move-
ment in Europe and the United States. Copeland and Day
never made a profi t during its six years of operation but
produced almost a hundred courageously and beautifully
designed and printed books, gaining notoriety (and
much needed sales) by publishing the American edition