Background
The son of a minister, his childhood was spent in Honolulu with his family for a few years before moving to Oakland, California in 1859.
The son of a minister, his childhood was spent in Honolulu with his family for a few years before moving to Oakland, California in 1859.
Joseph Dwight Strong, Junior. (1853–1899) was an artist from the United States. He later enrolled at the California School of Design.
Residents of Oakland, California raised funds to send Strong to Munich for four years of further study under Carl von Piloty and Alexander Wagner.
He was also an early photographer. There are photos of Berkeley attributed to Strong.
Stevenson described Joseph in The Silverado Squatters as a great omelet maker. The couple traveled to the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1882, where they lived for several years.
In 1886, King David Kalākaua appointed Strong governmental artist on the expedition to Samoa headed by John Edward Bush aboard the Kaimiloa.
A second son was born to the Strongs, but he died before his first birthday. Strong had an affair with a Samoan girl, which resulted in his divorce from Isobel and his rejection by Stevenson. Many of the diaries and letters which Stevenson and his family published after the divorce were edited to remove all reference to Joseph Strong, and several photographs were destroyed or altered.
In 1895, Strong returned to San Francisco.
He died on April 5, 1899. The Honolulu Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts) are among the public collections holding work by Joseph Dwight Strong.
