Clemens in his Oxford robes. Autochrome by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Original at the Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut. [note]

In late 1908, Mark Twain was twice photographed using this method. William Ireland Starr visited him at his home in Redding, Connecticut, but reported on December 20 that "all his photographs (the colored ones) had come to nothing in the developing except one." No color print of even that one has been found. Yet on the very next day, December 21, Mark Twain was successfully photographed in color (and in black-and-white) by twenty-six-year-old Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), a precocious young star in the growing world of serious photography.

Coburn had earlier met and photographed Mark Twain in March 1905. Now he was invited to visit him at Stormfield, his newly completed home in Redding, Connecticut, along with Archibald Henderson, a young professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina who was then gathering materials for his Mark Twain, a critical biography that would be published in 1911. Mark Twain's secretary at the time, Isabel V. Lyon 1863-1958), was herself an avid amateur photographer, and she recorded their visit December 21, both with her camera and in her journal:

Autochrome by Alvin Langdon Coburn, reproduced from Archibald Henderson's Mark Twain.

He made a lot of photographs, color prints too, of the King & he got some plain ones of me. After dinner he showed us a few of the very wonderful photographs he has made of Bernard Shaw, George Meredith, George Moore, Yeates—oh, a wonderful Yeates [i.e., W. B. Yeats], May Sinclair, Chesterton, Henry James, Rodin & others.

Coburn had obviously shown his hosts a preview of his book, Men of Mark, which in 1913 would include a photograph of Mark Twain taken on this day, as well as portraits of the other famous men (33 in all) mentioned by Miss Lyon. In the commentary provided there, Coburn recalled the December 21st visit in this way:

Coburn's version of Clemens "as a living statue," reproduced from Archibald Henderson's Mark Twain.

Coburn gave a slightly more detailed account in a 1954 radio broadcast:

One [photograph] I especially recall. At his new home, Stormfield, . . . there was a circular basin of a fountain under one of the pergolas which was eventually to have a statue in it. At the time, the central pedestal was empty. Mark Twain said, "Why should not I be the statue?" "Why not indeed!" I answered, so he mounted the pedestal, cigar in one hand and staff in the other, an erect and dignified figure. The sun shone on the background of snowmottled yew trees, and thus was made a unique picture of Mark Twain as a living statue.

He was never long parted from a cigar, and in most of the photographs I made of him a cigar is in evidence. The one I took when he was in bed in the red dressinggown is an exception, for there he has a pipe. I suppose this was because he did not wish to drop ashes on the bed-clothes.

Clemens "as a living statue," photographed by Isabel V. Lyon, Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.

All of the photographs reproduced on these pages were taken on this day. Two of the autochromes were engraved as halftones, printed, and then tipped into copies of Henderson's biography, along with a dozen of the black-and-white photographs. Among the latter was one of Clemens in his white suit, which he told Coburn was "the best yet," and one of him "as a living statue," reproduced here.

A photograph taken at virtually the same moment, from a slightly different angle, by Isabel Lyon, is in the Mark Twain Papers, and is likewise reproduced here.

Autochrome by Alvin Langdon Coburn, reproduced from Archibald Henderson's Mark Twain.

Perhaps the most striking image Coburn made that day is a third autochrome—preserved as a print owned by the Mark Twain House in Hartford, which has very kindly allowed us to reproduce it on page 1: Mark Twain in his white suit and Oxford robe —as good an excuse for color photography as he or anyone else ever needed.