This is a color photograph of Mark Twain
It was done by a process called autochrome, and it was taken in 1908. Looks like a painting to me:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
It was done by a process called autochrome, and it was taken in 1908. Looks like a painting to me:
You know it was not colored later ?
There was color photography but that looks too intense color.
I’ve seen the Russian color photos before.
He’s white?
The very first colored photograph, in Mike K’s link, was demonstrated by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1861. But that was a one off. Autochrome and its contemporaneous competitors were mass-produced as well as (for Autochrome) the special viewers for them (they were more like slides, you need to look through them).
I’d never heard of the autochrome process. Pretty amazing especially since they used carefully sized grains of potato starch to hold the dyes.
So that was Twain late in life after a successful “second act.” He blew up his finances in the 1890’s, then recovered with the help of a friend. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in America. I guess he wasn’t much a history buff.
My ancestor had a large (8×10) color plate — reduced upon pure flat copper — that dates from the beginning of the process.
It’s no longer in the best of shape as the fools didn’t have it mounted in a frame, and copper bends.
It’s wandered off. I was told it used some rare process.
I was told that its technology — and size — was so rare for the period that it’s a collectable on that ground alone. Due to the effect of copper the blues come out with astounding intensity.
Unfortunately, my ancestors were not world renouned authors.
I have a Daguerrotype of my grandfather and his sister. He looks about 5 and was born in 1849 so it was made before the Civil War. No color, of course. My mother was born in 1898 and had me when she was 40, so I am only three generations from the Civil War. My other grandfather was born in 1865.
alnik on February 12, 2019 at 5:37 pm at 5:37 pm said:
He’s white?
yeah.. born on the day Hailey comet came a died when it came to pick him up!!
and like me, WAS red headed…
(and claimed red heads were descended from cats)
now if you want a black author that is loved and people dont know he is black try ALEXANDER DUMAS – but he wrote before racism was termed or anyone much cared… took later for people to do that by ginning up things… just ask othello or the ghost of trotsky who coined the term first…
dont tell neo, but there is a famous chrome of lumiere brothers…
it also looks like a painting..
anyway.. yes, there IS a autochrome of dumas…
in fact, lots of people if you see the work of felix nadar…
oh how art changed when you could expose concrete
but more so when camera obscura was an in thing..
ah well..
the family has some old things (like the bible on microfilm my uncle owned that a copy was in the Guinness books – bet they threw that out when he died!!!)… the coolest photo print i have is one of the first enlargements of the earth as seen from space (the only photo we have actually).. back then, the image was printed and put up on a wall and a camera put on it… I have one of those proof prints…
probably worthless…
lots of odd things like that gonna get tossed..
🙂
Alexander Dumas fought a number of duels with people who disparaged his kinky hair. His father was a mulatto and a Marshall of the French Army. His mother, Dumas grandmother, was a slave in Santo Domingo.
There is a story that the Directory was looking for a general to suppress rioting in Paris. They went to Marshall Dumas’ home but his wife, who wanted him to stay home, told them he was out riding. They went back to Paris and then went to find Napoleon. The result was the “whiff of grapeshot.”
By the way, I just reread “The Count of Monte Cristo.” A friend who had seen the movie said, “Oh that’s about love and redemption.”
Nope. It’s about revenge.
Interesting history of Dumas’ father here, with portrait (NOT an autochrome).
Another author of great renown who had some black heritage was Pushkin—his great great grandfather was “Abram Petrovich Gannibal (1696–1781), an African page kidnapped to Constantinople as a gift to the Ottoman Sultan and later transferred to Russia as a gift for Peter the Great.” Interestingly enough, if you look at the Wiki page of Dumas’ father, you will find the following:
Both of these men became generals, both were ancestors of great writers.
Mike K:
You and me both.
My paternal grandfather was born around 1869, my maternal grandfather was born around 1875. Lots of earlier daguerreotypes (pre Civil War) are in my possession, but I don’t know most of the identities. It’s frustrating. Maybe I’ll take photos of them and post a few online.
I reread some Mark Twain this past year, I especially enjoyed Huckelberry Finn which was an incredible novel that addressed the individual person of a man who was a black slave. In the preface Twain says the he used the vernacular of the people who lived in upper Missouri on the Mississippi river hence ‘Nigger Jim’ now this great novel which was a mile stone in American literature has been banned in a lot of schools. What the hell is wrong with people that they cannot recognize the context of a story?
I was also not aware that Twain died after both of my parents were born, I am an old man and I remember seeing a 16 mm movie in grade school where Twain, Samuel Clemens was being interviewed and he talked about being born when Haley’s Comet was coming around and living to see it come back.
Twain also was a good friend of U.S. Grant after he was president when he was in bad shape suffering from terminal cancer, living for years with a cigar in his mouth did not help, anyway Mark Twain help Grant finish his autobiography which is an excellent book so that Grant could have it published to give his widow an income since presidents just served and then int was so long, it’s been nice to see you.
For my money, Mark Twain was one of the most astute observers of human ever born.
OldTexan,
Especially true considering that, if you read the story, “Nigger Jim” is the smartest and wisest of all the characters in the book.
Yes, Jim was smart and the cornerstone of the book and when Tom Sawyer joined them at the end, Tom neglected to tell Jim he was free until he finished helping Tom along. A lot of human pathos?
“For my money, Mark Twain was one of the most astute observers of human ever born.”
Yes, he openly acknowledged the superiority of cats to humans: “Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.” –Entry from Twain’s 1894 notebook.
Maybe I’ll take photos of them and post a few online.
Do you use Ancestry? My aunt, when she moved to Sun City AZ, burned all the family photos that my grandparents had. I’ve been trying to find a photo of my great grandfather for years, I keep hoping someone in the large (very large) extended family has one.
Roy Nathanson on February 12, 2019 at 8:34 pm at 8:34 pm said:
For my money, Mark Twain was one of the most astute observers of human ever born.
Wouldnt it be a rip to see him, Baltasar Gracian, and Alexis de Tocqueville all getting drunk on commentary watching now…. though twain would have advantage of knowing the others, while they would not know him…
i always hated secondary sources so i like Gracian… “His writings were lauded by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche”…
oh boy…
PA Cat on February 12, 2019 at 10:10 pm at 10:10 pm said: e openly acknowledged the superiority of cats to humans: “Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash……”
“When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.”
? Mark Twain
[i started out straw, then strawberry blonde to later auburn, now just more brown…]
“While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.”
? Mark Twain
yeah… try to herd us, we never quite fit… we even have unique personalities born of our natural ostracism… and natural hatred… among other interesting qualities of bluies everywhere…
Permit me to strongly recommend Twain’s
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
Like Swift, Twain was an anti-vivisectionist. The short story “A Dog’s Tale” is written from a dog’s point of view, or at least a humorist’s take on it. It starts very wittily but slowly progresses to horrible, then horrific. Don’t read it if you are a hard core animal lover, but the writing is amazing.
I think Faulkner is America’s best, but Twain is a close second and very underrated by academia.
Jim is always called just “Jim” in Twain’s books, both by the characters and by the narrator. His n-word prenomen seems to have been given by commentators and critics.
He also has an interesting footnote in Tom Sawyer, when the boys refer to a dog as “Bull Harbison”. Harbison is the family name of the dog’s owner. A slave would have been called “Harbison’s Bull”, he notes.
An excellent stage adaptation of Twain’s “Diary of Adam and Eve” was done by PBS, starring Meredith Baxter Birney & her husband, David.
Our kids loved this when it aired, and wore out the VHS copy we made at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjFqkFW6PG4
Artfldgr on February 12, 2019 at 7:53 pm at 7:53 pm said:
* * *
Thanks for the tip on Felix Nadar. What a treasure!
Believe it or not – he pioneered the gif also, as shown in the beginning of this article. Dumas’ portrait is one of those included therein.
https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/photographs-of-the-famous-by-felix-nadar/
More here.
https://www.pinterest.com/hellengharibian/felix-nadar/
Neo, your grandmother was born in 1875? We have the year in common then — my maternal grandparents were born in 1875 and 1876. I have three Victorian-era photo albums of theirs, but I don’t know the names of any of the people in them, let alone whether they’re all relatives.
I wish I did.
Thanks to both Artfl (for bringing up Felix Nadar) and to Aesop for digging up her link to a collection of his photos of the famous, which I followed — very interesting. I must admit I had no idea that M. Dumas was part Negro. I was certainly a big fan of The Count of Monte Cristo, which I discovered as a teenager.
O/T: Dogs are my first passion, but cats aren’t all that far behind. While at Aesop’s site on Nadar, I followed a link to a delicious-looking collection of photos from the book Kittens and Cats: A First Reader, published in 1911 by Eulalie Osgood Grover. The title of the page is, “Kittens and Cats: A First Reader (1911) — Cats and Captions before the Internet Age.” It includes an interesting paragraph on the book and the photos:
https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/kittens-and-cats-a-first-reader-1911-cats-and-captions-before-the-internet-age/
This is a collection of photos from the book, with a link to the book itself, which can be downloaded from the Waybook Machine, at
https://ia601400.us.archive.org/9/items/kittenscatsbooko00grov/kittenscatsbooko00grov.pdf
Synchronicity strikes!: Currently, there is an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) featuring a French photographer who toured and photographed the Middle East, Egypt and Turkey in the mid-to-late 19th century.
On Twain’s tour of the Holy Land in 1867 (featured in his travelogue, “Innocents Abroad”), he would likely have seen quite a few of the sites just as they appeared in the photographs (daguerrotypes, actually).
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-earliest-surviving-photographs-of-jerusalem-live-on-in-historic-exhibit/
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2019/monumental-journey-girault-de-prangey-daguerreotypes