F. Holland Day was a largely self-taught photographer, connoisseur, and collector; a great admirer of Oscar Wilde; a publisher in the mold of British Arts and Crafts leader William Morris; and, briefly, an influential promoter of Pictorialism, as turn-of-the-century artistic photography was then called. His own photographs were daring and poetic, tackling subjects—such as the life of Christ—that most others felt were ill-suited to the medium. Even when masked in the guise of history, allegory, or religion, as in this image of a spear-carrier, Day’s male figure studies—many of them nudes—also have an undeniable element of eroticism.