In the summer of 1885, American painter John Singer Sargent visited the English seaside town of Bournemouth where Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was temporarily living with his wife Fanny. The two men had been friends since they met in Paris in the mid-1870s. At the time of his visit to the Stevensons, Sargent was going through a difficult period in his career, following the Madame X scandal the previous year. With his portrait commissions drying up due to the scandal, Sargent reportedly considered abandoning painting altogether. The portraits he did make during this period were mostly of his friends, including a portrait of Stevenson and his wife, which was painted in Bournemouth.
While Sargent is regarded today as the leading portrait painter of his generation, his painting titled Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife was not a conventional portrait. When it was exhibited in Paris in 1885 and later in London in 1887, reactions to the painting were very mixed. Author George Bernard Shaw, for example, found it "humorous and interesting", while the prominent magazine The Art Journal described it as "almost grotesque as portraiture". As a portrait, the work is strange indeed, especially its composition with Fanny almost cut out of the painting. At the time it was painted, Stevenson —then 34 and five years older than Sargent— was less than a year away from publishing his masterpiece Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; it has been suggested that Sargent had captured Stevenson just as the author was thinking of his book while pacing the room.
Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife was eventually gifted by Sargent to the Stevensons, who hung it in the drawing room at Skerryvore (the name of their Bournemouth residence). About the painting, Fanny wrote to her mother-in-law in August 1885: "It is lovely, but has a rather insane appearance, which makes us value it all the more. Anybody may have a ‘portrait of a gentleman’ but nobody ever had one like this. It is like an open box of jewels. I am dying for you to see it." A few months later, Stevenson himself shared his thoughts on the portrait in a letter to American artist and close friend Will Hicok Low.
Skerryvore, Bournemouth, October 22, 1885... Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in my own dining-room, in my own velveteen jacket, and twisting as I go my own moustache; at one corner a glimpse of my wife, in an Indian dress, and seated in a chair that was once my grandfather’s; but since some months goes by the name of Henry James’s, for it was there the novelist loved to sit—adds a touch of poesy and comicality. It is, I think, excellent, but is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress, and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end; between us an open door exhibits my palatial entrance hall and a part of my respected staircase. All this is touched in lovely, with that witty touch of Sargent’s; but, of course, it looks dam [sic] queer as a whole.
Notes:
-Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife was sold at auction for $8.8 million in 2004. Today, the painting is on display at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, USA.
-Sargent painted Stevenson three times. The first portrait was done in 1884 but was later reportedly destroyed by Fanny; the double-portrait with Stevenson and Fanny was the second painting; and the third, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson, was painted in 1887.
Source letter (excerpt): The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (1906), selected and edited by Sidney Colvin
Via: Project Gutenberg
Images from top to bottom:
-Collage: John Singer Sargent, photographed by James E. Purdy in 1903 // Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne and Robert Louis Stevenson in Sydney, 1893
-Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife (1885), by John Singer Sargent
-Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson (1887), by John Singer Sargent
Source images: Wikimedia Commons
0 comments