STEVENSON (ROBERT LOUIS)


Autograph letter signed ("R.L.S."), to "My dear Charles" [Baxter], informing that he has made a bill out to Augustus Saint-Gaudens of New York for £26 and that "this is to pay for a medallion of ME, sir, Me"; he goes on to ask Baxter to answer Mr Warne as he thinks fit and deal with other matters; docketed with date by recipient in red ink and in pencil "R L Stevenson/ Samoa", 1 page, integral blank laid onto an album leaf with letters by Peel and others, 8vo, [Vallima, Samoa, September 1893], docketed as received on 1 March 1894
|'A MEDALLION OF ME, SIR, ME' – STEVENSON PAYS AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS FOR HIS CELEBRATED BRONZE RELIEF PORTRAIT. Hugely impressed by Stevenson's stories, the Irish-born American sculptor had sought out Stevenson when he was staying in the United States in 1887-88, with sittings taking place in New York and New Jersey. The finished medallion, arguably the best-known likeness of Stevenson, shows him in profile, at work while lying on his sickbed, as was his wont, staring ahead of him in contemplation and with a cigarette in his hand. The medallion exists in many iterations (the last, on his memorial in St Giles's, with the writer's cigarette replaced by a more decorous pencil).Stevenson himself ordered three large-sized casts that May 'as gilt-edged and high-toned as it is possible to make them. One is for our house here' (letter 29 May 1893). That September Stevenson wrote to Saint-Gaudens that his copy had arrived at Samoa, although was too heavy to carry up to the house, ending his letter: 'I enclose a bill for the medallion'. That July, Stevenson was able to write: 'This is to tell you that the medallion has been at last triumphantly transported up the hill and placed over my smoking room mantelpiece. It is considered by everybody a first-rate but flattering portrait. We have it in a very good light, which brings out the artistic merit of the God-like sculptor to great advantage'. The bronze passed via Stevenson's widow to his step-daughter Isobel Strong and was purchased in 1915 by George Hewitt Myers, passing to his textile museum and being sold at Sotheby's, New York, on 1 December 2011, lot 1 ($362,500).Charles Baxter was one of Stevenson's closest friends and acted as his financial agent, being engaged at this time in planning the Edinburgh Edition in an attempt to ease Stevenson's monetary worries.