Edoardo Gelli's portrait of Mark Twain, 1904. From the Collections of Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village (id. # 00.3.8706).

In the spring 1998 issue of Bancroftiana, we asked the question, “Where is the last portrait of Mark Twain?” Now, finally, we can provide the answer. The oil portrait of the author, completed in Florence in the spring of 1904 by the distinguished Italian painter Edoardo Gelli, heretofore was known only in the form of an engraving reproduced in Harper’s Weekly in September 1904. The painting itself had been shipped to America and exhibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, but then it had dropped from sight. Lin Salamo of the Mark Twain Project suggested in 1998 that Gelli’s painting—which Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch (later Samossoud) claimed was the last one done of her father—might be “languishing forgotten in some attic.” Salamo has since tracked the painting down, by way of a listing in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery online database. It was in storage— miscatalogued as the work of “G. Eelli”—at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Curator Henry J. Prebys, alerted by Reference Archivist Carol Whittaker, was quickly able to locate the portrait—a small work on canvas (28 inches by 38 inches) in a “gilt composition frame”—in “good condition” in the museum’s storage facility. Unfortunately, because of the sketchy documentation of Ford’s many early acquisitions, the museum has not been able to provide any provenance information. A 1936 letter from Clara to Henry Ford indicates that she donated her father’s favorite writing desk to the museum, and there is a slim possibility that she also donated the Gelli portrait at that time. The portrait has now been photographed, and it is reproduced here courtesy of the Henry Ford Museum.