Joseph Dwight Strong

[3] The residents of Oakland and the Mayor, raised funds to send Strong to Munich for four years of further study under Karl von Piloty and Alexander Wagner.

In 1886, King David Kalākaua appointed Strong governmental artist on the expedition to Samoa headed by John Edward Bush aboard the Kaimiloa.

[5] In Hawaii, Strong had a severe sunburn and suffered from a mental illness and alcoholism, which eventually forced him into a sanitarium and placed strain on his marriage.

[2] As a result, Stevenson and his family (wife Fanny and Isobel's brother, Lloyd Osbourne) sailed to Hawaii to release Strong.

[2] Strong was invited to go island hopping in the South Pacific with the Stevenson family, leaving Isobel and their son in Hawaii.

In 2018, the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, in cooperation with Prof. Martin Dusinberre, dedicated a whole exhibition to the painting, Japanese Laborers on Spreckelsville Plantation (1855).

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.