THE HILLS ARE ALIKE
Another match in the Hills & Saunders photographs of Oscar Wilde.
You will recall the article Double Take II which featured the Hills & Saunders photographs of Oscar Wilde and his fellow students taken at Magdalen College. In that article I identified five “pairs” of photographs alluding to the fact there are TWO similar versions of each photograph taken a few seconds apart [see Repeating Back below].
There was, however, another photograph for which I concluded there was no known counterpart.
Now, thanks to the astute eye and memory of fellow Wilde scholar Rob Marland, we can reveal a match for that photograph as well.
The pair of photographs in question are the ones taken of Oscar Wilde with his friend Rowland Childers. For one we have the full cabinet card, and for the other only a known snippet—the two are shown below.
In comparison the differences are quite subtle. In the latest one Hoskie tilts his head a touch and smiles a hint more hospitably; while in contrast Childers remains quite chilled.
© John Cooper, 2025
Repeating Back
As I pointed out in my studies of the Sarony photographs, it was a fairly common practice in Oscar’s day to take successive exposures of similar poses using a repeating back camera. Many of the Sarony series were taken this way in pairs. To enable this, the camera had a draw-slide attachment which exposed the two halves of a single plate.
The Two Number Nines
For example, take these two nearly identical images of Oscar: in one Wilde is holding his book of Poems (1881/82) and in the other he is not. (Incidentally, BOTH of these are given the Sarony photograph number 9—which I’ve numbered 9A and 9B. For more on this see the article Twenty-Seven. and this page on the web site)