Napoleon Sarony’s contribution to the photographs of Oscar Wilde was not primarily technical. Instead, he drew upon his artistic background to create the mise en scène of the image; and drew upon his buoyant personality to create the right mood for his sitter.
Meanwhile, it was his first and only operator, Benjamin J. Richardson who assisted with lighting and attending to the mechanical aspects of camera technique.
The artistic importance of Sarony work on the photographs’ composition became evident quite early on in their history, with Sarony’s legal case for copyright infringement against the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company for producing unauthorized lithograph trade cards based on Sarony’s Wilde image No. 18.
The Federal trial court for the Southern District of New York awarded a $610 judgment to Sarony (the equivalent today of over $13,000). The judgment was affirmed by the U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, and subsequently by the Supreme Court of the United States. This landmark case has become well known not only to Wilde scholars, but also to students of copyright law and intellectual property.
The wording of the Supreme Court of the United States in establishing Sarony rights as the “author” is instructive as it establishes the value provided by the photographer:
“posing the said Oscar Wilde in front of the camera, selecting and arranging the costume, draperies, and other various accessories in said photograph, arranging the subject so as to present graceful outlines, arranging and disposing the light and shade, suggesting and evoking the desired expression, and from such disposition, arrangement, or representation, made entirely by the plaintiff, he produced the picture in suit.
A persuasive argument has been made that Napoleon Sarony, with his photographs, went a long way to inventing a persona of Oscar Wilde that persists today. Indeed, in my own article on ‘The Sarony Photographs’ (The Wildean 55, July, 2019) I alluded to this view by posing the question:
We each have our own Oscar Wilde. But it is only an impression, and one that exists, necessarily, in the imagination. It is informed variously by conception, appreciation and empathy; indeed, it defines our relationship with him. So if we wish to evaluate that relationship, imagine for a moment – and it might prove difficult – how that relationship would be if we had never seen the Sarony photographs?
Who Invented Oscar Wilde?
If we wish to couple the themes of image creation and copyright, then we need look no further than a recent AAP Prose Award Finalist book by David Newhoff, which does just that.
It is entitled “Who Invented Oscar Wilde? The Photograph at the Center of Modern American Copyright” which I highly recommend.
[David Newhoff, 2020 Potomac Books,
An imprint of The University of Nebraska Press.]
Photographic Evidence
There is a final aspect of the Sarony case that for many will be a revelation. It concerns the particular photographs used in the case.
This most familiar example of trade cards referenced in connection with the Sarony case are the ones produced for the New York department store Ehrich Bros., as can be seen in the graphic at the top of this page. However, although the Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company had made 30,000 of these cards, they are not the ones that Sarony used in the court filing.
As David Newhoff informs us, the problem for Sarony was that Burrow-Giles was about to deliver another 100,000 of the cards—this time imprinted to the Chicago department store Mandel Bros.—and further research shows that it was an example of the Mandel card that Sarony’s lawyers cited in the original case in the U.S. Circuit Court.
The rarely seen Exhibit A (photo of Oscar Wilde) and Exhibit B (example of the Mandel trade card) from the 1883 case can be seen on my web site at the links below:
Exhibit B (trade card and verso)
© John Cooper, 2023.
Clearly, Wilde’s image has been massively influenced by this series of photographs. The very fact that like his father’s reputation in Ireland in the 1860s and like his own in England in the 1890s this photographic image became part of a court case, this time in the USA in 1883, adds another poignant detail to the Wilde family’s history of court cases, ranging from being minor and private to becoming public and infamous. One might say that Oscar Wilde’s whole life is peppered by court cases lost and won, this one being particular in that what was at stake was not anything belonging to himself but the intellectual property Napoleon Sarony had established by creating a powerful image of the young Oscar Wilde shortly after his arrival in the USA.
Thank you, Jörg, well observed.