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For a painter whose later life and works seemed to vaporize entirely, Girolamo Pieri Nerli made quite an impression during the 19 years he resided in Australasia. According to the Australasian Art Review of 1899, Signor Nerli (as he liked to be called despite being a marchese from an aristocratic Sienese family) brought to the colonies "the daring independence of Southern néo-Continentalism," a euphemism for his signature sketchy style. In 1890 Australian painter Tom Roberts, who had just arrived back from Europe himself, professed a liking for Nerli and looked forward to exhibiting with him in Melbourne. Around the same time, a critic from Table Talk magazine observed a Nerli sketch in the studio of Charles Conder, a fellow pioneer with Roberts of Australia's Heidelberg School. And in 1892, it was noted in the Samoa Times: "By the Lubeck last trip there arrived … Signor Nerli, an Italian artist."

Girolamo Pieri Nerli (1860-1926) was the Zelig of Australasian painting. An artistic backpacker who was most likely trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Nerli arrived in Melbourne in late 1885, just as Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Arthur Streeton were about to take their easels out into the bush and beaches of Box Hill and Mentone. Fresh from his own country's unification, and the Macchiaioli art movement it helped inspire, Nerli might have found synergy with Australia's quest for a national art. Instead he took himself off to Sydney, where he befriended Conder, a young aesthete dispatched to the colonies. The rest is art history. As a teacher, Nerli helped to relax Conder's style, introducing him to a wet and wintry palette, and Australian Impressionism was under way. Historian Ursula Hoff would refer to the Italian's legacy as the "Nerliesque umbrella."

But Nerli didn't stick around long enough to take any credit, moving across the Tasman in 1893 to New Zealand, where he was based for the next five years. In Dunedin, he introduced watercolor to the young artist Frances Hodgkins, but didn't wait to see the career of the celebrated modernist unfurl; by then he had returned to Europe, where he would die a forgotten man in a beachside suburb of Genoa. "In the meantime what we know of the man and his art resembles one of his sketches," writes scholar Michael Dunn (New Zealand Painting: A Concise History), "suggestive and detailed in parts but obscure and unresolved in others."

Now, in a thrilling feat of detective work, Dunn, a professor at Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts, has brought the man's body of work to light. While interest in Nerli was sparked by a retrospective at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1988, the show didn't travel widely, and his work was not fully reproduced - until now. Nerli: An Italian Painter in the South Pacific (Auckland University Press; 154 pages) not only illuminates the artist's shadowy life but, with more than 40 handsome color plates, shows the influential teacher to have been a gifted artist in his own right - and an always passionate purveyor of paint. Southern néo-Continentalism has never looked this good.

In many ways, Nerli imported the boldness of Macchiaioli artists such as Giovanni Fattori and Silvestro Lega to the Antipodes. But into their Impressionistic takes on ordinary life (Macchiaioli is derived from the Italian word macchia meaning dab or blot) he mixed a taste for decadence. A Bacchanalian Orgy, c. 1888, now in the National Gallery of Australia, is lurid only in its high color and elegant élan. To these traits he would add a whiff of Whistler. The expatriate American can be felt in the smokier palette which descends like a London fog on A Wet Evening, c. 1889, and The Beach at Port Melbourne from the Foreshore, St Kilda, c. 1889. Nerli also shared Whistler's love of the Orient, and Evening has an almost calligraphic flourish. The two sides of Nerli - the Italian and the orientalist - coalesce wonderfully in The Sitting, 1889, where an olive-skinned young woman stands holding a Japanese fan in Nerli's studio. It is as if a Macchiaioli peasant has been made over by Marvellous Melbourne (in fact, painted in the artist's Hunter St, Sydney studio). Apart from the delightful sketch, A Morning at the Baths, North Shore, Sydney, c. 1892, it's the closest we get to a Nerli self-portait. What has clouded our view of him until now, apart from his vexing failure to date his work, was the man's almost compulsive traveling. Nerli would think nothing of a short trip from Sydney to Hobart or Apia or Dunedin. But while this will-o'-the-wisp quality added allure to his artistic standing, it has proved a nightmare for scholars. Which is why it has taken Dunn more than three decades to research his subject, first suggested to him by lecturer Franz Philipp at Melbourne University in the late '60s. As Dunn puts it, "That guy sure moved around." So, too, has the scholar. Leaving Auckland, from where Nerli mysteriously decamped with his young wife Marie Cecilia in 1898, perhaps because of bad debts, Dunn traveled to Edinburgh, where the painter's most famous work hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Nerli had captured a pasty-looking Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa two years before the author's death in 1894. "He hasn't glamorized him," says Dunn. "He's actually shown him as a rather pale guy not long to live." The portrait would haunt Nerli for the rest of his life, the artist being forced to reproduce the picture several times while struggling to earn a living in London, before returning to Italy to die in 1923.

London proved more fruitful for Dunn. In the vaults of the British Library, he found the only known copy of Dodici Anni della Mia Vita, the memoir of Nerli's father Ferdinando, an artistic dilettante who recounts losing his family's fortune in land speculation in Tuscany. "I read the story with absolute amazement," recalls Dunn, who saw in Ferdinando's words the genetic seeds of Girolamo's swift rise and fall. These days, Nerli's achievements remain largely unknown to his countrymen, something Dunn hopes his book will help to remedy. "This is not the end of the Nerli story," he says. "It's really the beginning." It will take more than a book to do justice to the painter's legacy - an exhibition seems ripe for the mounting - but with Dunn's dogged scholarship, Nerli has leaped from footnote to foreground with style.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• In the 1890s, artist Girolamo Pieri Nerli popped up all over the South Pacific - and then vanished. A new book illuminates his influence