Writers' portraits - Robert Louis Stevenson

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    This is the Robert Louis Stevenson panel from The Great Tapestry of Scotland. It includes the door knocker from the Stevenson family's house at 17, Heriot Row*, Leerie the Lamplighter, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Fidra, the island in the Forth on which RLS is said to have based his map of Treasure Island, The Land of Counterpane, his Samoan name Tusitala, that is Teller of Tales, and other references.

*There's more at RLS in Edinburgh: his homes and haunts.

    Here is RLS painted by John Singer Sargent, and here the same painter has captured him in an informal scene with his wife Fanny. Sargent said "he seemed to me the most intense creature I had ever met."

    There are two portraits of Stevenson by Count Girolamo Nerli, and the sitter said of them "the oil [above] represents me as I am, the pastel as I would like to be”.

    This last is a sad picture, I think, because it seems to speak of what might have been; it was painted two years before his death at the age of only 44.

    Although he was a literary celebrity in his day, RLS's writing was greatly out of fashion for much of the 20th. century, but according to this article, critical interest has been increasing and "reading this Mozartian and mercurial writer remains for many as for Borges, despite critical neglect, quite simply 'a form of happiness'."

Comments

[Juxtabook]

A lovely piece and I adore that panel!

I think you're right about critical interest reviving in recent years. I have noticed an upturn in my sales of books about RLS in the last year.

[B R Wombat]

I think he's a wonderful writer - one of my favourites. Kidnapped would be one of my Desert Island books.

[Cornflower]

Good!

[Cornflower]

I've just looked him up in The Novel Cure, and he's there re. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde in the entry on 'violence, fear of', as the book is "a deep excavation of the latent possibility of violence within us".

[Martin Edwards]

Love the tapestry panel. And RLS's wonderful writing too.