"A portrait is a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth." -- John Singer Sargent

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Samuel Clemens


This 1912 or 13 standing (or maybe floating) portrait of Samuel Langhorne Clemons by John White Alexander hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.
"Using the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens had become one of this country's favorite satiric writers by the early 1870s, routinely making light of every day human foibles. But it was the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) that assured him a lasting place in American letters. Inspired in part by his own boyhood, these two tales set along the Mississippi River did more than capture the rhythms of youth in antebellum America. In both novels, Clemens examined with sardonic wit various tensions that underlay contemporary society, including, most importantly, the question of race. In later years, his success in this country and abroad was tempered by financial and personal setbacks and by a contempt for American and British imperialism." -- National Portrait Gallery
Listen to Ben Click's Face-to-Face talk on Mark Twain (32:52) 

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