Martin Gayford

Lost in the Pacific

Though many of the objects are marvellous, intellectual clarity is lacking in this Royal Academy exhibition

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  • Oceania

    Royal Academy, until 10 December

At six in the morning of 20 July 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson first set eyes on a Pacific Island. As the sun rose, the land ‘heaved up in peaks and rising vales’. The colours of the scene ‘ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive’, rising into ‘opalescent clouds’.

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