Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Robert Louis Stevenson and family, March 1893

Robert Louis Stevenson and family, March 1893

P3 / 218
Silver gelatin photoprint

This striking photograph taken by Freeman and Company in Sydney in March 1893 is an instance of late-Victorian studio photography at its best … Four stronger personalities than these it is hard to imagine, and they are here captured together: intense, separate, and yet relaxed, at ease in one another’s company, and also focused on the occasion. Belle’s leaning in behind the others is a brilliant stroke that gives the picture concentration, intimacy, intensity and depth.

Footnotes

Roger G Swearingen, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson in Australia: Treasures in the State Library of New South Wales’, 2013

The Library also holds an original dry plate negative (ON 219), possibly by William George Freeman of Freeman Brothers.

This photograph was probably taken on or a few days before Fanny’s fifty-third birthday on 10 March 1893. One of the reasons for the trip to Sydney at this time was to consult a medical specialist due to Fanny’s continuing poor physical and mental health in Samoa.

On this visit to Sydney Stevenson and his family stayed at the Oxford Hotel in Darlinghurst – possibly where this photograph was taken.

On Friday 17 March 1893 Stevenson sat for a pencil portrait by Australian artist Percy Spence, a member of the Cosmopolitan Club. Spence also drew a satiric cartoon of Stevenson as a puppeteer manipulating the German officials in Samoa for the cover of the Illustrated Sydney News, 25 April 1893.