Item 3: Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photograph of Max Beerbohm (1908)

If Beerbohm, who first achieved literary fame at 21, was a sort of “infant prodigy,” so was the acclaimed American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, who had a studio in New York City at the same age. Coburn traveled across the Atlantic to capture what he called, in a 1913 volume of 33 celebrity portraits, Men of Mark. Beerbohm was among the distinguished subjects, alongside William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, J.M. Barrie, John Singer Sargent, and the writer whom Beerbohm most revered, Henry James. What Coburn’s camera recorded was Max’s public persona: perfectly turned-out clothing, graceful pose, and an ambiguous, almost unreadable expression.