A Rare, Oversize Mark Twain Signed Photograph, Picturing Him In an Iconic Pose
The only signed example of this famous portrait we can find, showing him dressed in all white, seated in a chair, and smoking a pipe.
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An adventurer and wily intellectual, Mark Twain wrote the classic American novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The photography studio of Underwood and Underwood came to prominence in the early 1880s, popularizing the stereograph and later pioneering in the field of photojournalism. In the 1900s the...
An adventurer and wily intellectual, Mark Twain wrote the classic American novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The photography studio of Underwood and Underwood came to prominence in the early 1880s, popularizing the stereograph and later pioneering in the field of photojournalism. In the 1900s the studio expanded its coverage from news photography to the world of literature and entertainment with an emphasis on celebrity portraiture, and made an early specialty of candid shots of well known figures, usually seen at home. Among the most famous of these pictures featured Mark Twain.
A majestic, beautiful, and rare 1907 Underwood and Underwood photograph of Twain showing him in the finest pose imaginable – seated in a chair, dressed in all white, and smoking a pipe, inscribed to Mrs. Doubleday and signed “Affectionately, Mark Twain, Jan. 14/08.” We have found no other signed examples of this photograph, let alone one this large, selling at public sale.
So who was Mrs. Doubleday? Frank Doubleday founded and operated the eponymous Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897, which is still in business today as Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. He developed long lasting friendships with a number of prominent authors and publishers, including Mark Twain. Twain and Doubleday were not only close friends, but Twain was on Doubleday’s roster of authors, and Doubleday printed several editions of Twain’s novels. A review of Twain’s papers finds no reference to another Mrs. Doubleday, making it quite possible that Twain inscribed this photograph to Frank Doubleday's wife.
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