Portrait of native girl

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20068

Title

p. 79, Portrait of native girl

Description

A portrait of a Samoan girl. She is sitting in a chair, resting her chin on her left hand. At her back is a patterned pillow. She has no top on and strings of beads across her chest. She is wearing a grass skirt. In her right hand she is holding a straw fan and in her left a bunch of flowers. She is wearing a unicorn headdress.

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

Andrew, Thomas

Date

1889

Size

14.4 x 16.2 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

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 images

Related subjects

Clothing and dress > Accessories > Headdresses

Clothing and dress > Accessories > Necklaces

People > Adults > Women

Places > Oceania > Samoa

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