The Toledo Museum of Art has made the most expensive photography purchase in its history, acquiring The Seven Words (1898), a landmark work by the American Pictorialist F. Holland Day. The piece comprises seven tightly framed platinum prints, set in a single wooden frame, showing Day himself posed as Jesus Christ on the cross in his final moments. It is also the first work by Day to enter the Ohio museum's collection, and it will go on view in autumn 2027 when the museum reopens its reinstalled galleries. Day staged the photographs near his home outside Boston, rigging a mirror to his camera so he could compose himself in the frame. He grew his hair long and fasted to play the role, having been deeply moved by a Passion play he saw while travelling in Germany — an experience that reshaped the faith of the Unitarian Universalist-raised artist. 'This is the most important photograph that people don't know about,' the museum's director, Adam M. Levine, said. 'We can situate it with performance art, and it's a work that anticipates what will happen with cinema.' The work debuted at the first Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1898 and immediately provoked debate: some questioned whether photography was a legitimate vehicle for spiritual subjects, while 29 of the 30 Boston religious leaders Day showed it to approved. The Toledo version is one of three known originals — the others are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — and it was deaccessioned from the Philadelphia Museum of Art around 1928. Only the Toledo and Boston versions retain the artist's original inscribed frames. The museum's curator of American art, Erin Corrales-Diaz, has pursued the work since joining the museum in 2021, after a collection assessment revealed a gap in early photography. The purchase was agreed at the Paris Photo fair in 2023 through New York's Bruce Silverstein Gallery. Day made some 250 plate studies for the series, of which only about a dozen succeeded — a measure of one of the most ambitious photographic projects of its era.