Lockwood de Forest was one of the Associated Artists group, led by Louis Comfort Tiffany, who were brought into the Clemens home in 1881 to “revamp” the decoration, as Samuel Clemens described their task. De Forest was a painter and designer with a particular interest in Indian art and design. The painter Frederic Church was a mentor to de Forest during his European travels in the 1860s, and he later set up a studio in New York. After he joined Tiffany and designer Candace Wheeler in the Associated Artists firm de Forest traveled to India with his wife, Meta Kemble, on their honeymoon.

“When I reached Ahmedabad [in the current state of Gujarat] … and saw street after street of carved houses and the many beautiful mosques of yellow sandstone, also elaborately carved, with their wonderful tracery windows, I made up my mind to have copies made of some of them no matter what difficulties I had to meet,” he wrote. De Forest ended up spending two years in India, ultimately setting up a teak carving and brass metalwork company in Ahmedabad, a city in eastern India in the state of Gujarat. This company supplied many prominent homes with décor and furniture, including Olana, the mountaintop mansion of the artist Church, and the New York home of the industrialist Andrew Carnegie.

At the Mark Twain House, de Forest’s firm created the pierced brass sheets around the fireplace in the front hall and another in the drawing room. Of the first fireplace, Clemens suggested in a letter “to paint the white marble (which immediately surrounds the hall fireplace) the same strong red of the hall walls, & then cover it with Mr. de Forest’s thin arabesque cut brass sheets, which will let the red show through.” And so it appears today.