Current Exhibition

'READER'S ROOM' EVOKES TWAIN'S OWN GENEROUS HOSPITALITY

"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it." So reads the etched brass motto Mark Twain had mounted over the hearth in his Hartford house, and the author lived the motto, ornamenting his library and parlor with friends great and humble.

The Mark Twain House and Museum is similarly ornamenting its museum's second-floor exhibit space with its guests, providing a place for visitors to relax on sofas --- or on the floor - and read Twain's books. Or they can simply play: There are blocks, word searches, connect the dots and coloring games. Or they can watch a television, placed, living-room-like, in front of a comfortable sofa you can sink into: The screen provides some vintage documentaries, including flickering silent images from the only known film of Mark Twain himself, walking around his final home, Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut.

The user-friendly exhibit has been given the name "Stories by the Fireside: A Readers' Room."

Placed carefully around the room are references to the interior of the house that visitors have just toured under more controlled circumstances. There's a chance to really examine and take in the wallpaper in Twain's daughters' nursery; savor visual Victorian jokes like the lithograph of two children whose forms, when you step back from the picture become the eyes of a skull. (Twain cherished such macabre visual tricks.) And a marble statue surrounded by potted plants, overhung by Chinese lanterns, evokes the home's dramatic glass-walled conservatory.

Copies of Mark Twain's books are set on shelves, and the exhibit's planners have provided a way for visiting school groups to feel real involvement: Scenes from Mark Twain's tales, done by students, are hung in frames on the wall shortly before the students themselves visit - so they can see their handiwork hung in a museum, with an elegant curatorial label on the wall nearby.

"We wanted a space in the Museum Center where visitors could sit down, relax, and experience Mark Twain," said Chief Curator Patti Philippon, "whether they do this by reading one of his books, watching the film of him walking around his Stormfield home, or by creating their own artistic representation of his Hartford home."

The exhibit was made possible by Eugene and Anja Rosenberg with support by IKEA and LEGO Systems, Inc.

THE MARK TWAIN HOUSE'S LEGO DOUBLE

It was part of a traveling LEGO road show in the 1980s: The seven-and-a-half-foot-long model of the Mark Twain House was among a collection of iconic American structures, along with the Liberty Bell and Boston's Old North Church, that the Enfield-based company took from city to city to showcase its famous toy building blocks.

The house model has finally made it home: It's on display in the facility's exhibit space, on long-term loan from Enfield-based LEGO Systems, Inc.

The model of the Hartford author's famous crazy-brick mansion on Farmington Avenue was built by LEGO master builders, employees of the company who "get paid to play" according to LEGO spokesman Vince Rubino. They did their work before an audience at the Eastern States Exposition - the "Big E" - in Springfield, Mass.

The house went off the road in the 1990s and was offered to the Mark Twain House for display. But the historic house had nowhere to display it, and instead it went on view in front of LEGO corporate headquarters in Enfield. There it stood in snow, rain and sun until, a little the worse for wear, it was put in storage.

Then came a fortunate meeting: Edward S. Carrier, a trustee of the Mark Twain House & Museum, ran into a LEGO official at a Hartford function and the talk turned to the model. Now that the House had a museum to go with it, Carrier asked, why not take LEGO up on its offer?

The company sent the model to its model shop where it was spruced up and recovered with UV-resistant coating. In early April it arrived and was installed in a prepared space in the museum.

The significance of the display to the Mark Twain House & Museum is twofold, said Chief Curator Patti Philippon: "There's the popular culture aspect - the fact that the legacy of the Mark Twain House is represented in terms of a LEGO structure, one of the great pop culture artifacts of the time," she said. "It's also part of a trend at the museum to be family-friendly, fun and accessible to everyone."