Dirt Farmer

Richard Day

A dirt farming couple stands, dressed in black and heads bowed, before a tombstone monument, probably that of a child. The sharp, angular landscape and mountains in the distance accent the difficulty of trying to scratch out a living from the earth.

Richard Welsted Day, printmaker and art director, was born in Victoria, British Columbia on May 9, 1896. His education consisted of private tutoring, a natural talent for drawing which he developed without professional lessons, and voracious reading. After serving with the Canadian army in World War I, he returned to Victoria and began his career as a commercial artist.

In 1920, Day arrived in Hollywood hoping to find a career in the emerging motion picture industry. Befriended by director Eric Von Stroheim, he was hired as a scene painter for the film Foolish Wives but was soon elevated to art director. The pursuit of his new career led him to MGM and then to 20th Century Fox where he became Supervising Art Director. Day worked on hundreds of films which earned him twenty Academy Award nominations and his genius was awarded seven times with the coveted Oscar for Dark Angel, (1935); Dodsworth, (1936); How Green Was My Valley, (1941); This Above All, (1942); My Gal Sal, (1942); A Streetcar Named Desire, (1951); and On the Waterfront, (1954). He designed and built some of the largest sets of the era and, in 1935, during the Great Depression, Day was the highest-paid art director in Hollywood.

During the 1930s Day produced a number of very fine lithographs which were professionally printed by Paul Roeher in Los Angeles. These were shown at Jake Zeitlin's Book Shop in Los Angeles and, in 1932, Merle Armitage wrote The Lithographs of Richard Day. Day's lithographs were exhibited in 1935 at the California-Pacific International Exposition in San Diego and are represented in the collections of the Library of Congress and the National Gallery.

Richard W. Day died in Woodland Hills, California on May 23, 1972.