Painted in England by American expatriate artist John Singer Sargent, this work presents an intimate, if not awkward, view of the author Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny. Stevenson remarked, “It is, I think, excellent, but is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one extreme corner; my wife in this wild dress, and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end. All this is touched in lovely, with that witty touch of Sargent’s; but of course, it looks damn queer as a whole.”