Masterworks To Host “Ever The Twain Shall Meet”
On January 17th, Masterworks Museum together with the Mark Twain House & Museum in Connecticut will present a special exhibit entitled, “Ever the Twain Shall Meet”, bringing Mark Twain’s time in Bermuda to life.
The exhibit runs until the end of June, and in addition to the exhibit, Dr Cindy Lovell from the Mark Twain House & Museum will deliver a lecture on January 20th.
This is the first in a series of collaborations between the two museums.
Masterworks said “Ever the Twain Shall Meet” will “take visitors on a journey through Twain’s visits to Bermuda, retracing the steps to his favorite haunts and places of inspiration.”
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, his pen name Mark Twain came from the call steamboat navigators used for the two-fathom mark when taking depth soundings on the Mississippi.
One of the island’s more well known visitors, Twain once famously remarked “You go to heaven if you want to, I’d rather stay right here in Bermuda.”
For the last three years of his life the island became his second home, with the author staying at both the Princess Hotel and the private residence “Bay House” just off Pitts Bay Road.
Between 1867 and his death in 1910, Twain visited Bermuda numerous times, enchanted by the inhabitants of “that happy little paradise”, once writing: “The spectacle of an entire nation grovelling in contentment is an infuriating thing.”
Mark Twain pictured on a donkey cart on Pitts Bay Road during his time in Bermuda:
The “Mark Twain in Paradise: His Voyages to Bermuda” book recounts a tale Twain told about how Bermudians often seem to know each other, a fact he found out while traveling one day.
“The island is not large,” said Twain. “Somewhere in the interior a man ahead of us had a very slow horse. I suggested that we had better go by him; but the driver said the man had but a little way to go.
“I waited to see, wondering how he could know. Presently the man did turn down another road. I asked. ‘How did you know he would?’. ‘Because I knew the man, and where he lived.’
“I asked him, satirically, if he knew everybody in the island; he answered, very simply, that he did. This gives a body’s mind a good substantial grip on the dimensions of the place.”
The writer of such perennial classics as “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “The Prince and the Pauper,” and “Life on the Mississippi”, he died at the age of 74 at his Connecticut home on April 21, 1910 — just days after leaving Bermuda for the final time. Bouquets of Bermuda Easter lillies garlanded his coffin at a funeral service at New York’s Brick Church.
The exhibit begins on January 17, 2014 and runs until the end of June, with Dr Cindy Lovell’s lecture taking place on January 20th from 5:30 — 7.00pm.
The Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art is located in the Botanical Gardens, Paget.
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