Nerli - An Italian Painter in the South Pacific

This is the first major book on the Italian painter Girolamo Pieri Nerli, who spent the last two decades of the 19th century in Australia and New Zealand and is best known as a teacher of Fances Hodgkins and Charles Conder and a portraitist of the ailing Robert Louis Stevenson. The fruit of many years of research, this thoughtful book will show this gifted painter in a new light and will be of considerable interest to art historians and art lovers. This book contains chapters on Nerli's life and personality, both colourful and somewhat exotic, and on his painting, skillfully adapting traditional European training and techniques to a new setting. It is printed in full colour throughout, with black and white photographs and colour reproductions setting the context and evoking the era and 41 full page plates reproducing the most important paintings, each with commentary on the facing page. There is also a chronology, a bibliography, an appendix reproducing some vivid letters written by Nerli and his wife, and a list of exhibitions...