To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Paris. July 31, 1936
As to the illustrations, I am sorry to be helpless. I had a very nice little photo of myself at 18, my graduating school portrait, but somehow I have lost it. Possibly George Sturgis or his wife asked me for it when they were in Rome years ago. In that case he may be able to let you have it. Or the Latin School people in Boston: although I doubt that they collect photographs of their old boys. It was the class of 1882.
There was also a family group taken a year or two later in which I had rather long hair and little whiskers—bad form, but characteristic of the time before I had become a commonplace Harvard man. Otherwise, I don’t remember any picture of me in “early youth”.
The Denman Ross portrait is not a good likeness, but I am pilloried in it for all future time in Emerson Hall, and as it has a beard it will seem more like me to my old pupils between 1906-1912. All the rest of my life I have worn only a mustache.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933–1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.