To John Hall Wheelock
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 1, 1937
I always thought Denman Ross’s portrait of me rather absurd.1 It makes a giant with a Japanese mask of a poor ordinary Caucasian, far from tall but rather amiable. Ross was an amateur painter and not in any way gifted; but this picture adorns the College, and you were quite right in reproducing it.
1. Ross’s 1909 portrait of Santayana hangs in Emerson Hall at Harvard.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ