Where is the last portrait of Mark Twain?

When Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) arrived at Genoa, Italy, in November 1903, a reporter was lying in wait for the celebrated author and his family party:

“I caught him while he was getting out of the train, surrounded by a whole outfit of nice little brass-studded trunks and portmanteaus of all sizes. With him were his daughters, lively girls with the real American freedom of manner; his wife, whose face looks dry and severe under the large spectacles which bestride her thin nose; and a smooth-faced young valet of the proper woodenness of bearing. With the purpose of avoiding any indiscreet questions, he seized some cushions, a shawl-strap, and a bag or two, huddling them together under his left arm, while a large book peeped out from under his right. Thus loaded down, he went off towards the custom-house at a rapid pace.”

Quoted in Raffaele Simboli’s “Mark Twain from an Italian Point of View,” in The Critic 44 [June 1904]: 318

The Clemenses were on their way to the sumptuous Villa di Quarto a few miles outside Florence, which they had rented for a year at the imposing price of 20,000 francs, hoping that the Italian country air would benefit Olivia Clemens’s failing heart. But the Villa proved an unhappy location. The Clemenses were at odds with their landlady, and Olivia’s health worsened throughout the winter and spring.

In April 1904 Clemens found some diversion in a series of five sittings which he granted to Edoardo Gelli, portrait painter to the court of Italy and professor at Florence’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The completed oil portrait was dispatched to St. Louis to be exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Clemens wrote to David R. Francis, governor of Missouri, on 26 May 1904 from the Villa di Quarto:

“It has been a dear wish of mine to exhibit myself at the Great Fair and get a prize, but circumstances beyond my control have interfered, and I must remain in Florence. . . . Although I cannot be at the Fair, I am going to be represented there anyway, by a portrait, by Professor Gelli. You will find it excellent. Good judges here say it is better than the original. They say it has all the merits of the original and keeps still, besides.”

Edoardo Gelli’s 1904 portrait of Samuel Clemens

Just a few days after that letter was written, Olivia Clemens died. By late June the grieving family was returning to America for the funeral. A full-page engraving of Gelli’s portrait was published in the Harper’s Weekly of 3 September 1904. The printing plate from which that engraving was made—a heavy, 7-by-12-inch rectangle coated with copper and showing both halftone and relief elements—survives in The Bancroft Library’s Mark Twain Papers. Peter Koch, printer and Bancroft Friend, generously agreed to print some sample proofs from the 1904 plate. Surprisingly, the location of the original oil painting (“the last portrait of my father,” according to Clemens’s daughter Clara) is unknown. The portrait—so characteristic of the author, with his signature cigar in hand, white mane, bristling white eyebrows, and sad, penetrating gaze—may be languishing forgotten in some attic.

Lin Salamo is a Senior Editor
with the Mark Twain Project.

Volume 112
Spring 1998

Table of Contents

DeFeo, Conner papers add to Bancroft’s Beat collection

From the Director: What does Bancroft collect?

New Acquisitions

Lizardi manuscript discovered

Papyri on the Internet

The Digital Scriptorium
Towards a Renaissance in medieval manuscript studies

Robert Frost Collection includes photos inscribed by the poet

Bancroft Fellows research images of the American West, history of Mexico’s Cora Indians

Freshmen discover the wonders of Bancroft

Bancroft staffer in the spotlight

An Oral History of Jack Stauffacher From letterpress to computer-designed fine printing

Where is the last portrait of Mark Twain?

Mark Twain Project Tonight!