Rediscovering Walter Barnett

I’ve been asked how I came to rediscover the photographer, Walter Barnett. This is what happened.

I was writing a little book* on some portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa painted by Count Nerli. It gradually became clear that only one, maybe two of them – there were over twenty in total – had been actually painted there in 1892. The rest had been painted later, a lot later, in a studio lent to Nerli in Knightsbridge, London, by Barnett.

Barnett had been approached by his friend, the Australian artist Arthur Streeton, on behalf of Nerli, who was finding it tough to break through in London.

Then it dawned on me that two pastels of Stevenson by Nerli (above) were based directly on a photograph of the writer (taken by Barnett in Sydney in 1893, the year after Nerli was in Samoa).

And a pencil drawing of the writer, now in the State Library in Sydney, carried the inscription: “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 souvenir of Samoa.)

All of this was enough to encourage me to explore the life and work of Walter Barnett.

It turned out that the work was primarily to be found in four places – in the State Library in Sydney, in the Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and in the National Portrait Gallery also in London.

*Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli in Samoa: The Story of a Portrait, Red Lion Press, 1997

Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli and Ernest Mehew

I had always thought of myself as a writer. But in truth all I had ever done in practice was to write some articles on marketing communications and innovation.

So, when we visited Samoa in pursuit of Robert Louis Stevenson in the mid-1990s, I was standing in the large main room of the house he built there, Vailima, when he appeared over my shoulder.

“This book you’ve been talking about,” he said, “how far have you got with it?”

“Well, to be honest,” I replied, “I haven’t started it”

“But you’ve been talking about it for a long time. Maybe you think it’s not worth doing?”

“No, I do think it’s worth doing.”

“Do you think someone else will write it?” he asked.

“No, if I don’t do it, I don’t think it will ever be done.”

“Well perhaps you’d better get started.”

At the height of his fame, author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and much else, Stevenson had died in that house in December 1894 aged just forty-four.

That evening, we retired to Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Apia. I got out a blank sheet of paper and started on the book which I’d been researching and thinking about over several years. It was published some eighteen months later as Robert Louis Stevenson and Count Nerli in Samoa: The Story of a Portrait.

I was cheeky enough to send an early draft to the leading Stevenson scholar in the world, Ernest Mehew. He thought it a worthwhile project and gave me several pages of handwritten notes containing suggestions of all kinds.

Dear Ernest died four weeks ago (on 24 October 2011) at the age of eighty-eight. RIP.

[Above, Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson by GP Nerli, painted in Samoa in 1892, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.]