Robert Louis Stevenson

He stayed at the Hôtel Baudy in 1887, the year Willard Leroy Metcalf was to include him in his painting “The Ten Cent Breakfast”, now at the Denver Art Museum.

Dates1850 — 1894
NationalityScottish
DisciplineWriter
Place of birthEdinburgh, Scotland

Biography

Scottish writer born in Edinburgh, author of “Treasure Island”, “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and “Kidnapped”. Frail health kept him travelling all his life, from the Riviera to California and at last to Samoa, where he died at forty-four. He lived in France as a young man, among painters: at the Hôtel Siron in Barbizon and the Hôtel Chevillon at Grez-sur-Loing, where in 1876 he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, whom he would marry.

Around Giverny

He stayed at the Hôtel Baudy in 1887, the year Willard Leroy Metcalf was to include him in his painting “The Ten Cent Breakfast”, now at the Denver Art Museum. An inscription on the back of “The Ten Cent Breakfast” counts Robert Louis Stevenson among the four men at table in the dining room of the Hôtel Baudy. It reads: “The Ten Cent Breakfast by Willard L. Metcalf, Giverny 1887 / portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson, John Henry Twachtman, Charles Birch (standing), Theodore Robinson (rear seated)”. The canvas itself is signed lower right “W. L. Metcalf-Giverny-1887”. The inscription is recorded by the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s inventory of American paintings. It is the only document tying the writer to this house, and its fragility must be stated: the inscription is neither dated nor attributed, the Denver Art Museum which holds the work identifies no figures in its own entry, and the fourth name given, “Charles Birch”, is documented nowhere in the Giverny colony. Stevenson’s chronology stands against it. In 1887 he was living at Bournemouth; he travelled to Edinburgh, where his father died on 8 May; he left Britain for good on 22 August aboard the S.S. Ludgate Hill, which called at Le Havre on 23 August before making for New York, and Saranac Lake by 3 October. Apart from that one day in a Normandy port, he was not in France that year. The simplest explanation may be a confusion of places. Stevenson did live in a village inn among a colony of painters, several of them American: at Grez-sur-Loing, a hundred kilometres away, and ten years earlier.

Relation with the Hôtel Baudy

His name does not appear in the part of the hotel register transcribed so far. The complete register holds about seven hundred entries, preserved on microfilm at the Archives of American Art; the check against the whole document remains to be made.

Key points