Mobility and the Matter of Memory: John Singer Sargent's Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife

John Singer Sargent's ‘queer’ portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife from 1885 has confounded critics since its first public exhibition in Paris. This essay resituates Sargent's painting of the Stevensons within wider discussions of the ‘specious present’, and the nineteenth‐century philosophical texts of William James, in order to identify a larger group of images to which this picture belongs. Sargent's interior portrait, it is argued, betrays the passage of time through the vestigial traces of past sites and sitters. Specifically, the open doorway, which Sargent uses to cleave interior space, flickers between immediate perception and memory, between embodied perception and lived experience, predicated on an uncannily plural sense of time.