Punch, May 2, 1874, 189.
TEA-POTS AND DOTING COUPLES
My recent post about Whistler’s long ladies of the six marks featured the famous Du Maurier cartoon, from Punch magazine in 1880, about a couple longing to live up to the blue china of their ‘Six-Mark Tea-Pot’. The cartoon was widely understood to be channeling Wilde because he is reported to have done the same thing in his rooms at Oxford.
But doting couples cradling tea-pots was nothing new even then.
Six years earlier the cartoon featured above had appeared, also in Punch, depicting the habitually invertebrate husband pining for possession of the family porcelain.
CIRCULAR ARGUMENT
As this earlier cartoon appeared in 1874, just a few months before Wilde began attending Oxford, perhaps it can be seen as influential. Not only the inspiration for Oscar’s potty college predilection, but also the moment for him to inaugurate the maxim that life imitates art.1
If so, then the cartoons taken together neatly document Wilde’s life imitating Du Maurier’s art, followed by Du Maurier’s art imitating Wilde’s life.
© John Cooper, 2024.
Footnote:
- The Decay of Lying – An Observation, 1889-1891. ↩︎
One has to imagine that there must have been long conversations about which teas could be considerd as “living up to the pot”, and then there would have been aesthetic concerns about the kettle used to boil the water…etc
Sacré bleu china! It’s not actually for making tea. All art is quite useless.
Thanks John