Bermuda was called “the Isles of the Blest” by Mark Twain, who often holidayed here in his later years — deeming the Island “the right place for a jaded man to loaf in”.

Those Bermudian sojourns are among the travels commemorated at the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, which has just been loaned a gem from the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art for its upcoming exhibition on the author.

The seascape painting by Winslow Homer is a prize from the Bermuda collection — so much so that insurance rules dictated that curator Elise Outerbridge had to accompany the artwork to Hartford without letting it out of her sight.

The Homer piece depicts the SS Trinidad, which plied the New York to Bermuda route in Twain’s time.

For Masterworks founder Tom Butterfield, the dark tone of the picture recalls Twain’s classic remark about Bermuda: the Island was Heaven, he said, but “you have to go through Hell to get there”.

“There’s a sense of brooding in that painting, which shows the ship heading back to New York, which gives you a sense of the hell he’s going to have to go through,” Mr Butterfield said.

The Hartford museum contributed to last year’s Twain exhibit at Masterworks, and responding with a Homer painting loan “seemed a natural fit, a cultural exchange between two great American icons”, Mr Butterfield added.

The Bermudian exhibit was comprehensive enough to get noted by the Times in London.

Starting on March 19, the Mark Twain House and Museum will show the Bermuda artwork along with other tokens of Twain’s prodigious travels, to Bermuda and elsewhere.

The exhibition is entitled “Travel is Fatal to Prejudice” — a line from his travel classic The Innocents Abroad.