Portraits of Mark Twain, 1850-1909
Mark Twain, with John Lewis, a lifelong friend and inspiration for the character Jim in 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn',
Mark Twain liked to entertain and be entertained, but his 70th birthday party was truly an evening to be remembered. Thrown by Colonel George Harvey, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, at Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York, it included a souvenir pamphlet, and speeches were given by luminaries of the day.
The Clemens family in Hartford, Connecticut, 1884.
In 1855, when this image was made, Twain was approximately twenty years old. By this time, he had left Hannibal and found work as a printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cincinnati.
Samuel L. Clemens with kitten. Tuxedo Park, New York, 1907.
Mark Twain in Redding, CT in 1908
Mark Twain and a few of his 32 cats in Redding, CT in 1908
Clemens with kittens and the Little Girl’s Family, Norwegian Shanty Town, Great Falls, Montana. Photographed by James Pond, July 31, 1895. In the summer of 1895, Twain crossed the northern tier of states, speaking in towns great and small, here making an unscheduled appearance.
Photograph by Abdullah Freres, Istanbul, 1867 Twain thought Istanbul beautiful from afar, but ‘Ashore, it was—well, it was an eternal circus. People were thicker than bees in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that even a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of. There was no freak in dress too crazy to be indulged in; no absurdity too absurd to be tolerated; no frenzy in ragged diabolism too fantastic to be attempted. No two men were dressed alike. It was a wild masquerade of all imaginable costumes—every struggling throng in every street was a dissolving view of stunning contrasts…; drifting noiselessly about are squads of Turkish women, draped from chin to feet in flowing robes, and with snowy veils bound about their heads, that disclose only the eyes and a vague, shadowy notion of their features. Seen moving about, far away in the dim, arched aisles of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have looked when they walked forth from their graves amid the storms and thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the Crucifixion. A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once—not oftener.’
Mark Twain, detail of photo by Mathew Brady, February 7, 1871
Mark Twain iconic portrait in 1907
Twain and his wife had three daughters, Susy, Clara and Jean.
Samuel Clemens on a Ship in 1909
Samuel Clemens in 1907 with pipe and white suit
Mark Twain relaxing on a porch in New Hampshire, 1905
