Beschreibung:

Original painting of Mark Twain, signed.
Original oil portrait of Mark Twain by his confidante and business manager, Franklin G. Whitmore. [Hartford: ca. 1885]. Oil on canvas, (420 x 530mm., 16 1/2 x 20 3/4 inches), with keys at the comers of the stretchers bearing cast dates of 1883 and 1885. Written onto the lower stretcher in block letters is "BY FRANKLIN G. WHITMORE". The portrait is of near life-size dimensions and shows a still quite youthful Twain, with a very slight reddish tinge in his hair and not the billowing full head of white hair of popular imagery. Franklin G. Whitmore was Mark Twain's business advisor, private secretary and confidante, and a member of the Friday Evening Club, a gathering of whiskey drinking, cigar-smoking, billards-playing men who met on the third floor of the Clemens home at 351 Farmington Avenue, Hartford, every Friday for most of the 1880s. Whitmore's obituary in the Hartford Times (June 15, 1926) states: "Mr. Whitmore had considerable ability as a painter and on the walls of his home are two pictures [by Whitmore] of Twain, one of the author as a man of early, middle life [offered here] and the other of Twain when his head was crowned with abundant white hair." Whitmore's probated will indicates that all his property was to go to his many living heirs, save for the specific items mentioned in a letter "attached hereto." Public record does not show the contents of that proabate letter. From there, both paintings mentioned passed into obscurity, their full history known only to those who owned them. We have not been able to locate the other painting. F. G. Whitmore came into the lives of the Clemens family on New Year's Eve of 1876. He was one of a group of spiritual mediums brought together by Isabell Hooker at an unsuccessful séance at her house in Nook Farm in order to usher in a 'new world' at the stroke of midnight. (Nook Farm was the name given to an artistic part of Hartford that was home not only to Hooker but to two of America's great writers; Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The name of the community derived from the curve of the river by the baseball diamond. By 1820 there were twenty publishing houses in Hartford, the reason for it attracting such a wide literary community.) The 'seance' produced no transformation, spiritual or actual, but Whitmore, shortly and not as a consequence of his failing as a medium, became an essential part of Samuel Clemens' life and business affairs. Whitmore moved permanently to Hartford in 1880, establishing a real estate business. From then on, he was as integral to the Clemens' household as any living relative, and all else in Whitmore's life took second place to the business and personal needs of Mark Twain (including day-to-day requests, correspondence and business matters). After the Clemens' family left Hartford in the 1890s, Whitmore remained in the service of the family and in 1902 he brokered the sale of the Clemens' home. The present painting originally turned up as property from an unnamed Hartford area estate.