Web Sight (unseen)

In a recent article I featured the university photographs of Oscar Wilde taken by Hills and Saunders.

Now it is the turn of another Oxford photographer, J. Guggenheim, whose photographs include one which, I believe, has never before appeared online.

The full photograph is shown below.

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Recovered Photograph of Oscar Wilde

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The Cardew Discovery

In October 2007, the Oscar Wilde Society was contacted by a descendant of the Cardew family alerting the Society to the above photograph in their possession.

The photograph was by the J. Guggenheim studio, and like some of those produced by Hills and Saunders, it was a group portrait of Magdalen College friends taken c. 1875. This one featured the owner’s grandfather, Arthur Cardew, pictured to the right. But of more pertinent interest to the Society was that the photograph also brought to light a previously unknown image of Oscar Wilde.

The exciting discovery was duly published in the Society’s journal The Wildean along with a research article by Geoff Dibb. The article also explored the connection between Wilde and the Cardews, and the use by Wilde of the name Cardew in his works.¹

Since that time, however, this rare and interesting photograph has remained virtually unknown.

It is with the kind permission of the editor of the The Wildean, that I am now pleased to be able to reproduce the picture above—almost certainly for the first time online,

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J. Guggenheim

Julius N. Guggenheim was a lesser-known photographer of the late Victorian period. He maintained studios at 12 Wardour Street, London (1874) and at Cowley Road in Oxford. As you can see from the advertisement above, he was no doubt aware of the market for student photographs, and he moved his premises to 56 High Street, Oxford (1875) close to Wilde’s own Magdalen College.

Below are other known photographs of Wilde taken by Guggenheim.

The first one, clearly a staged celebration with champagne, is the only known picture of Oscar Wilde drinking and holding a pipe.

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ON THE PICTURES ABOVE AND BELOW

“In the winter he used to wear an ordinary grey ulster. His hair which was brushed back from his forehead was not too long. The best known photograph of Oscar Wilde at this period—that is to say in 1878—is the “amateurish and therefore faithful” picture of him taken by a man who was then a well-known character in Oxford, whose name was Guggenheim. This man used to be known as “Gug” by the undergraduates. He was a kind of Hans Breitmann, a typical stage-German,with tasselled smoking-cap, carpet slippers, and a long-stemmed china pipe. His studio was in the ” High,” and he had a reputation for taking “College groups” in an effective manner.”

The Life of Oscar Wilde
Robert Harborough Sherard (1906), 136-7.

Taken at the same time as the photograph ABOVE.

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© John Cooper, 2024.

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Footnote:

1. The Wildean, No. 33 (July 2008), pp. 2-12 GEOFF DIBB.
   
   Back issues available by online subscription at:
   https://www.jstor.org/stable/45269085
   
   Print issues and membership:
   https://oscarwildesociety.co.uk/ ↩︎

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