After several years of travelling around the South Seas, gathering material for his writing and seeking respite from persistent ill-health, Robert Louis Stevenson finally settled on Western Samoa in 1890. Although he anticipated that this would be the ‘afterpiece’ of his life with ‘only the nurse and the undertaker to expect’, the author remained active and productive until his death in 1894. Together with his wife and extended family he set up home in a lavish new property where he offered generous hospitality to locals and foreign visitors alike. In addition to a steady stream of fictional writing, his letters documenting aspects of life and culture in Polynesia were published regularly in journals across the world.
Stevenson seems to have found a kindred spirit in the itinerant Italian painter Girolamo Nerli who stayed on Samoa for some thirteen weeks in 1892. Sometimes styled as ‘Count’ or ‘Marchese’, Nerli came from a patrician family in Siena. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in the late 1870s, eventually developing a competent realist style, enlivened by a more impressionist handling of paint and colour. In 1885 he travelled to Australia, working in Melbourne and Sydney, and in 1893 he established an art school in Dunedin, New Zealand. A colourful and flamboyant character and a compelling teacher, Nerli has been credited with encouraging several emerging talents among a younger generation of artists in Australia and New Zealand. Nerli came to Samoa ostensibly to paint the tropical scenery and to make portraits of the native Samoans, but the possibility of portraying the island’s most famous inhabitant must have seemed like a golden opportunity for the impoverished artist.He quickly engineered an invitation to Stevenson’s home and, although at first wary of the artist, Stevenson soon gave him permission to paint his portrait for sale in Australia. According to Stevenson’s wife Fanny, the portrait was made under trying conditions, as she later recalled:
The artist insisted, because of cross lights, on having every door and window in the room closed, and the heat was almost unbearable … The perspiration streamed down Louis’ face, and I can remember noticing drops of moisture falling from damp wisps of his hair. I am not sure who suffered more, the artist or the sitter.
In the end, Fanny took a dislike to the picture, but the author himself was apparently pleased with it. Stevenson was a man of unusual appearance and frail physique, described in the words of one visitor to his home in Samoa as ‘looking like an insane stork, very warm and restless’. Nerli’s portrait is fairly conventional, although he has made no attempt to disguise the nervous, haggard appearance of his sitter whose bleary eyes fix us with a benign yet fatigued expression. Nerli eventually made numerous other versions of Stevenson’s portrait in oils, watercolour and pastel which he attempted to market over the years with mixed success.
This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.