Robert Louis Stevenson portrait set for US sale

Published on Wednesday 17 March 2004 00:00

AN OIL painting of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife that the author once described as excellent but "damn queer" is expected to fetch up to $7 million (£3.9 million) when it goes on sale at Sotheby’s in New York.

Dating from 1885, by John Singer Sargent, a celebrated American portrait painter, it shows the Scottish novelist with his wife, Fanny, ten years his senior.

She was married with two children when Stevenson met her, but he pursued her across the Atlantic, travelling steerage on the crossing and ending with a gruelling overland trek to California.

Sargent painted Stevenson three times, determined to capture the man he described as "the most intense creature I have ever met".

He was unsatisfied with his first effort, which was later destroyed, probably by Fanny herself. The artist, aged nearly 30, then tried again.

"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," wrote Stevenson, in an 1885 letter describing the result.

"It is, I think, excellent, but is too eccentric to be exhibited."

Sargent painted the couple at Skerryvore, the home in Bournemouth inherited from Stevenson’s father and named after a lighthouse the family firm built in Argyll, Scotland. He subsequently gave the work to the author, signing it to RL Stevenson, from "his friend", John S Sargent, and dated 1885.

The painting is described in the catalogue as "the best known and most widely recognised of the striking, informal portraits John Singer Sargent began painting in the early 1880s".

The painting was bought by Mrs Payne Whitney in 1914, and passed to her son, newspaper owner, John Hay Whitney. It is one of 44 paintings, including works by Picasso, Manet and Degas, being sold to benefit the Greentree charitable foundation set up by Whitney’s widow.

Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife goes on sale on 19 May, and is expected to sell for between $4-7 million (2.2-3.9 million).