Twain’s Favorite Painting

Without a doubt, my favorite book on Art History was written by Mark Twain.  It is a splendid reference book on the European Renaissance that covers artworks displayed from Spain to Italy.  Twain, a noted expert on Western Art, wrote a series of newspaper articles as he traveled across Europe and the Holy Lands and these were collected in 1869 in a single volume, The Innocents Abroad.

After weeks of travel and study, Twain was able to wisely comment, “Who is this Renaissance?  Where did they come from?  Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?”

This is the kind of deep insight that only travel to foreign lands provides.

Naturally, Twain didn’t intend to write a textbook on art history and I may be the only person who thinks he did. Twain’s real aim was to provide a great travel book—one that would correct the many mistakes and overwhelmingly sugary prose of a popular contemporary travel volume written by William Cowper Prime.  Technically, Twain lampooned Prime’s book, but a more accurate description would be that Twain ravaged his competition like a pack of hungry wolves descending on a daycare right about lunch time. 

In particular, Twain was somewhat contemptuous of the tour guides who attempted to elevate every piece of art into a masterpiece simply because it had been around for five centuries.  And Twain was deeply puzzled by the tourists who seemed to believe everything these tour guides said, no matter how ridiculous.  Eventually, Twain summed up his feelings about the staggering accumulation of exaggerations and outright lies of the region with a single statement:

"If all the poetry and nonsense that have been discharged upon the fountains and the bland scenery of this region were collected in a book, it would make a most valuable volume to burn."

Actually, Twain did appreciate some art, and he even had a favorite painting—one that you have probably never heard of.

Frederic Edwin Church was a mid-nineteenth century American landscape painter who was a part of the Hudson River School of painters.  The School’s members were known for their attention to detail and their realistic approach to portraying nature.  Their goal was to be as accurate as possible while emphasizing light as much as possible in their paintings.  Usually, their landscapes were very large and depicted a tranquil while majestic view of nature.  Or to put it more clearly, imagine one huge, highly-detailed painting with half of Yellowstone Park in it.

As the name of the school implies, the Hudson River Valley provided Church with scenes for his early works, but he soon expanded his source of inspiration to places that were “less civilized” than the Eastern United States.  Besides traveling across the United States, Church made two trips to South America, in particular, visiting the volcanoes of Ecuador.  He returned to the States with his sketchbooks filled with highly detailed drawings he later used as the basis for his paintings.

The Heart of the Andes was one of those paintings.  Roughly 5 ½ by 10 feet in size, the painting depicts a large plain in front of the volcano Mount Chimborazo, with a jungle in the foreground. Completed in 1859, the painting quickly became famous in the United States.  Church exhibited the painting in several cities, always carefully arranging the painting so that it was well lit from above.  

People stood in long lines to pay a quarter for the privilege of taking their turn to stand close to the painting.  Those people later said that they seemed to be absorbed by the painting, believing that they were entering the forest.  Many of the patrons said that the experience of viewing the landscape made them dizzy and that they seemed to forget where they were.

Twain went to one of those exhibitions while in St. Louis and wrote his brother about the experience:

“Pamela and I have just returned from a visit to the most wonderfully beautiful painting which this city has ever seen––Church’s “Heart of the Andes”––which represents a lovely valley with its rich vegetation in all the bloom and glory of a tropical summer––dotted with birds and flowers of all colors and shades of color, and sunny slopes, and shady corners, and twilight groves, and cool cascades––all grandly set off with a majestic mountain in the background with its gleaming summit clothed in everlasting ice and snow! I have seen it several times, but it is always a new picture––totally new––you seem to see nothing the second time which you saw the first… When you first see the tame, ordinary-looking picture, your first impulse is to turn your back upon it, and say “Humbug”––but your third visit will find your brain gasping and straining with futile efforts to take all the wonder in––and appreciate it in its fulness––and understand how such a miracle could have been conceived and executed by human brain and human hands. You will never get tired of looking at the picture, but your reflections––your efforts to grasp an intelligible Something––you hardly know what––will grow so painful that you will have to go away from the thing, in order to obtain relief. You may find relief, but you cannot banish the picture––It remains with you still. It is in my mind now––and the smallest feature could not be removed without my detecting it.”

Over the years, Twain visited the painting he said was the “most wonderfully beautiful painting” many times and even mentioned it a few time in his stories.  Today, you can judge the painting for yourself, as it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Twain never claimed to be an expert about art, and cheerfully admitted that none of the works by the ‘old masters’ impressed him.  But like everyone else, he knew what he liked and didn’t pretend otherwise.  Or, as he once said:

“It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.”