Some of the U.S.‘s great­est sec­u­lar sages also hap­pen to be some of its great­est cranks, con­trar­i­ans, and crit­ics. I refer to a cat­e­go­ry that includes Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Menck­en, and Hunter S. Thomp­son. The many dif­fer­ences between these char­ac­ters don’t eclipse a fun­da­men­tal sim­i­lar­i­ty: not a one embraced any of the usu­al pieties about the inher­ent, infal­li­ble great­ness of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, though each one in his own way made a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the West­ern canon. We would be great­ly remiss if we did not include among them per­haps the great­est Amer­i­can satirist of all, Mark Twain.

Twain skew­ered all com­ers, usu­al­ly with such wit and inven­tion that we smile and nod even when we feel the sting our­selves. Such was his tal­ent, to deflate puffery in West­ern lit­er­a­ture, pol­i­tics, reli­gion, and… as we will see, in art. “Through­out his career”—writes UC Berke­ley’s Ban­croft Library—“Twain expressed his strong reac­tions to West­ern paint­ing and sculp­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Old Mas­ters, both in his pub­lished works and in pri­vate.” He offered up some hilar­i­ous­ly irrev­er­ent takes on some of the most revered works of art in his­to­ry: “his opin­ions are often pas­sion­ate, some­times eccen­tric, and always live­ly.” Take for exam­ple Twain’s tepid assess­ment of that most rec­og­niz­able of Renais­sance mas­ter­pieces, the Mona Lisa. In an unpub­lished draft called “The Inno­cents Adrift,” an account of an 1891 boat trip down the Rhone Riv­er, Twain “admit­ted to being puz­zled by the adu­la­tion accord­ed” the paint­ing.

To Twain, the Mona Lisa seemed “mere­ly a good rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a serene & sub­dued face… The com­plex­ion was bad; in fact it was not even human; there are no peo­ple of that col­or.” The paint­ing’s green­ish hue prompt­ed one of Twain’s com­pan­ions, pos­si­bly an inven­tion of the author’s, to exclaim in response, “that smoked had­dock!” “After some dis­cus­sion,” write the UC Berke­ley librar­i­ans, “the trav­el­ers con­cede that it requires a ‘trained eye’ to appre­ci­ate cer­tain aspects of art.” Such train­ing in art appre­ci­a­tion seemed to Twain as much gen­uine edu­ca­tion as instruc­tion in stud­ied, insin­cere pos­es.

The author took his first “grand tour” in 1867—travelling through Europe and the Lev­ant on the cruise ship Quak­er City in the com­pa­ny of many “prosperous—and very proper—passengers.” Unlike these bour­geois trav­el­ling com­pan­ions’ “con­ven­tion­al appre­ci­a­tion for all that they saw,” Twain—writing as a cor­re­spon­dent for the San Fran­cis­co Alta Cal­i­for­nia—con­fessed him­self under­whelmed. In par­tic­u­lar, he described anoth­er Da Vin­ci, The Last Sup­per—“the most cel­e­brat­ed paint­ing in the world”—as a “mourn­ful wreck.” (The work was then unre­stored; see it above as it looked 100 years lat­er in the 1970s.) Twain lat­er revised his obser­va­tions for his first full-length book, 1869’s Inno­cents Abroad, a car­i­ca­ture of ugly Amer­i­can tourists filled with what William Dean How­ells called “deli­cious impu­dence.” While the oth­ers mar­veled at Da Vin­ci’s crum­bling fres­co, Twain, in the cur­rent par­lance, expressed a great big “meh.”

The world seems to have become set­tled in the belief, long ago, that it is not pos­si­ble for human genius to out­do this cre­ation of Da Vin­ci’s.… The col­ors are dimmed with age; the coun­te­nances are scaled and marred, and near­ly all expres­sion is gone from them; the hair is a dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in the eyes.… I am sat­is­fied that the Last Sup­per was a very mir­a­cle of art once. But it was three hun­dred years ago.

Twain and the pro­fes­sion­al crit­ics did not always dis­agree. Take J.M.W. Turn­er’s famous­ly riotous can­vas Slave Ship (or Slavers Over­throw­ing the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Com­ing On), above. John Ruskin may have praised the work as the “noblest sea… ever paint­ed by man” and it has come down to us as a vio­lent rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the hor­rors of the slave trade, occa­sioned in part, writes Stephen J. May, by Turn­er’s sense of “shared guilt about his own role and Eng­land’s role in con­don­ing and per­pet­u­at­ing slav­ery’s malev­o­lent lega­cy.” The anti-slav­ery, anti-impe­ri­al­ist Twain would sure­ly have appre­ci­at­ed the sen­ti­ment; the paint­ing, how­ev­er, not so much. Oth­er crit­ics felt sim­i­lar­ly, one call­ing Slave Ship a “gross out­rage on nature.” Twain’s sum­ma­tion in an 1878 note­book is much more col­or­ful, a piece of vin­tage Samuel Clemens under­cut­ting: “Slave Ship—Cat hav­ing a fit in a plat­ter of toma­toes.”

For all his snide por­traits of con­ven­tion­al mid­dle-class atti­tudes toward art, Twain could also be a bit of a prig, as we see in his response to Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In this, he was not so far removed from our own cul­tur­al atti­tudes (or Face­book and Google’s atti­tudes) about nudi­ty. The cen­sored ver­sion of the paint­ing above (see the orig­i­nal here) comes to us via Buz­zfeed, who write “Remem­ber kids, blood and gore are fine but boobs will make you blind.” Twain seemed to have uniron­i­cal­ly agreed, rail­ing in his 1880 trav­el book A Tramp Abroad against the “inde­cent license” afford­ed artists and call­ing Titian’s sug­ges­tive reclin­ing nude “the foulest, the vilest, the obscen­est pic­ture the world pos­sess­es.” (Ah, if only he had lived to see the inter­net’s foulest depths.)

Twain’s own mea­ger con­tri­bu­tions to the visu­al arts—consisting of a dozen sketch­es, like that above, made for A Tramp Abroad—fall some­what short of the stan­dards he set for oth­er artists. Nev­er­the­less, he recalled in The Inno­cents Abroad his dis­may at the “acres of very bad draw­ing, very bad per­spec­tive, and very incor­rect pro­por­tions” in the muse­ums and church­es across Europe. What, we might won­der, could pos­si­bly move such a harsh, unspar­ing crit­ic? In art, it seems, Twain val­ued “strict real­ism, grandeur of theme and scale, and propriety”—all on dis­play in abun­dance in Amer­i­can artist Fred­er­ic Edwin Church’s The Heart of the Andes, below.

After view­ing this ide­al­ized South Amer­i­can land­scape in St. Louis, Twain called the enor­mous (over five feet high by ten feet wide) can­vas a “most won­der­ful­ly beau­ti­ful paint­ing.” “We took the opera glass­es,” he wrote to his broth­er, “and exam­ined its beau­ties minute­ly…. There is no slur­ring of per­spec­tive about it.” He rec­om­mend­ed mul­ti­ple view­ings: “Your third vis­it will find your brain gasp­ing and strain­ing with futile efforts to take all the won­der in… and under­stand how such a mir­a­cle could have been con­ceived and exe­cut­ed by human brain and human hands.”

Twain, won over by this sub­lime spec­ta­cle, seems to have tem­porar­i­ly sur­ren­dered his crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties. In read­ing his response, I found myself want­i­ng to egg him on: C’mon, what about this soft, gauzy light­ing, those lumpy moun­tains, and the kitschy, over­ly-sen­ti­men­tal look of the whole thing? But there was room enough in Twain’s crit­i­cal arse­nal for gen­uine awe as for amused con­tempt at what he saw as pho­ny expres­sions of the same. And that breadth of char­ac­ter is what made Mark Twain, well, Mark Twain.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Cre­ates a List of His Favorite Books For Adults & Kids (1887)

Mark Twain Drafts the Ulti­mate Let­ter of Com­plaint (1905)

Mark Twain Writes a Rap­tur­ous Let­ter to Walt Whit­man on the Poet’s 70th Birth­day (1889)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

In William Faulkner’s 1936 Absa­lom, Absa­lom!, one of the novel’s most eru­dite char­ac­ters paints a pic­ture of a Goth­ic scene by com­par­ing it to an Aubrey Beard­s­ley draw­ing. Ref­er­ences to Beard­s­ley also appear in oth­er Faulkn­er nov­els, and the Eng­lish artist of the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry also influ­enced the Amer­i­can nov­el­ist’s visu­al art. Like Faulkn­er, Beard­s­ley was irre­sistibly drawn to “the grotesque and the erot­ic,” as The Paris Review writes, and his work was high­ly favored among French and British poets of his day. The mod­ernist’s appre­ci­a­tion of Beard­s­ley was about more than Faulkner’s own youth­ful romance with French Sym­bol­ist art and mor­bid roman­tic verse, how­ev­er. Beard­s­ley cre­at­ed a mod­ern Goth­ic aes­thet­ic that came to rep­re­sent both Art Nou­veau and deca­dent, trans­gres­sive lit­er­a­ture for decades to come, pre­sent­ing a seduc­tive visu­al chal­lenge to the repres­sion of Vic­to­ri­an respectabil­i­ty.

Beard­s­ley was a young aes­thete with a lit­er­ary imag­i­na­tion. In his short career—he died at the age of 25—he illus­trat­ed many of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, fore­fa­ther of the Amer­i­can Goth­ic.

Beard­s­ley also famous­ly illus­trat­ed Oscar Wilde’s scan­dalous dra­ma, Salome in 1893, to the sur­prise of its author, who lat­er inscribed an illus­trat­ed copy with the words, “For the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the Dance of the Sev­en Veils is, and can see that invis­i­ble dance.” Beard­s­ley’s draw­ings first appeared in an art mag­a­zine called The Stu­dio, then the fol­low­ing year in an Eng­lish pub­li­ca­tion of the text.

Beard­s­ley and Wilde’s joint cre­ation embraced the macabre and flaunt­ed Vic­to­ri­an sex­u­al norms. After an abrupt can­cel­la­tion of Salome’s planned open­ing in Eng­land, the illus­trat­ed edi­tion intro­duced British read­ers to the play’s unset­tling themes. The British Library quotes crit­ic Peter Raby, who argues, “Beard­s­ley gave the text its first true pub­lic and mod­ern per­for­mance, plac­ing it firm­ly with­in the 1890s – a dis­turb­ing frame­work for the dark ele­ments of cru­el­ty and eroti­cism, and of the delib­er­ate ambi­gu­i­ty and blur­ring of gen­der, which he released from Wilde’s play as though he were open­ing Pandora’s box.”

Wilde’s play was osten­si­bly banned for its por­tray­al of Bib­li­cal char­ac­ters, pro­hib­it­ed on stage at the time. Fur­ther­more, it “struck a nerve,” writes Yele­na Pri­morac at Vic­to­ri­an Web, with its “por­tray­al of woman in extreme oppo­si­tion to the tra­di­tion­al notion of vir­tu­ous, pure, clean and asex­u­al wom­an­hood the Vic­to­ri­ans felt com­fort­able liv­ing with.” Wilde was at first con­cerned that the illus­tra­tions, with their sug­ges­tive­ly posed fig­ures and frankly sex­u­al and vio­lent images, would “reduce the text to the role of ‘illus­trat­ing Aubrey’s illus­tra­tions.’” (You can see some of the more sug­ges­tive images here.)

Indeed, it is hard to think of Wilde’s text and Beardsley’s images as exist­ing inde­pen­dent­ly of each oth­er, so close­ly have they been iden­ti­fied for over a hun­dred years. And yet the draw­ings don’t always cor­re­spond to the nar­ra­tive. Instead they present a kind of par­al­lel text, itself dense­ly woven with visu­al and lit­er­ary allu­sions, many of them drawn from Sym­bol­ist preoccupations—with women’s hair, for exam­ple, as an allur­ing and threat­en­ing emblem of unre­strained female sex­u­al­i­ty. Pub­lished in full in 1894, in an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Wilde’s orig­i­nal French text, the Beard­s­ley-illus­trat­ed Salome con­tained 16 plates, some of them tamed or cen­sored by the pub­lish­ers. Read the full text, with draw­ings, here, and see a gallery of Beardsley’s orig­i­nal uncen­sored illus­tra­tions at the British Library.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of William Faulkn­er: Draw­ings from 1916–1925

Stephen Fry Reads Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Sto­ry “The Hap­py Prince”

Gus­tave Doré’s Splen­did Illus­tra­tions of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (1884)

Alber­to Martini’s Haunt­ing Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy (1901–1944)

Pablo Picasso’s Ten­der Illus­tra­tions For Aristo­phanes’ Lysis­tra­ta (1934)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness