Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1910

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1910

DG P2 / 48
Pencil drawing

Italian-born Count Girolamo Pieri Ballati Nerli (1860–1947) arrived in Australia in November 1885 and travelled regularly around Australia and New Zealand before heading back to Europe in 1904. In August 1892 he visited Apia in Samoa for a month where he met Robert Louis Stevenson who subsequently became Nerli’s subject for many portraits rendered in oil, pastel, watercolour, pencil, etching and charcoal.

Inscription

Inscribed at lower left:

‘Al mio caro amico H Walter Barnett, questo ricordo di Samoa Girolamo Pieri Nerli offre!’

[‘To my dear friend H Walter Barnett Girolamo Pieri Nerli offers this memento of Samoa’]