Tautira

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20048

Title

p. 71, Tautira

Description

An atmospheric image of Tautira on Tahiti. A young man stands in the water spearing fish whilst a group of young men look on from the waters edge. The shoreline has lush vegetation along it and dramatic sharp hills behind it.

The image is from the photograph album entitled 'The Cruise of the Equator' of Robert Louis Stevenson's travels around the Gilbert Islands and Samoa in 1889.

Artist / maker

Spitz, Charles Georges

Date

1889

Size

20 x 22.5 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Tautira is a village on a promontory on the south eastern coast of Tahiti in the Pacific Ocean.

A pencil note on the photo indicated that it is by Spitz, a photographer at Papeete on Tahiti.

Born in Edinburgh on 13th November 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, playwright and travel writer. Although he was plagued by ill health all his life, he was extraordinarily well-travelled, visiting Europe, America and the South Seas. He married American born Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in 1880 and is best-known for works like Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (both 1886). From the late 1880s, Stevenson stayed in the South Pacific with his family on his own estate in Vailima in Samoa. He died here on the 3rd December 1894 of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 44, leaving what many consider his best work, Weir of Hermiston (1896) unfinished.

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Related subjects

Landscape > Land > Coastlines

Landscape > Land > Hills

People > Adults > Men

Places > Oceania > Tahiti

Plants > Trees > Trees

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