The Pegram Sketch

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SKETCH OF OSCAR WILDE
By Frederick Pegram

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Frederick Pegram (1870-1937), was an English illustrator and cartoonist for various publications including Pall Mall Gazette, Punch, The Idler, The llustrated London News, Tatler, and The Daily Chronicle.

It seems that he made drawings wherever he went.

For such was the case between 1888—89 when he attended sessions of the Parnell Special Commission at the Royal Courts of Justice—which was a judicial inquiry investigating allegations against Charles Stewart Parnell, an Irish-born member of the UK Parliament.

While Pegram was at the hearings he made a set of 17 portrait sketches—mostly of the lecturer Alexander Gow, but also at least one of Oscar Wilde, who was frequently in attendance during Parnell’s testimony.¹

Wilde’s interest in the proceedings likely stemmed from an affinity with Parnell. Like Wilde, Parnell was born into an Irish Protestant landowning family, and like Wilde’s mother, he was also an Irish nationalist. Wilde had been following Parnell’s and Gladstone’s cause for Irish Home Rule throughout the 1880s, and had recently become a member of the Eighty Club² espousing Gladstonian liberalism.³

The two Pegram drawings on this page can be found at the Victoria and Albert Museum website at this link.

The one of Wilde is described as a preparatory sketch for an illustration on page 205, Volume 14 of The Pictorial World (New Series), 21 February 1889 [issue not found].

© John Cooper, 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. Sturgis, Matthew. Oscar: A Life (2018). 382. ↩︎
2. The Eighty Club was a political London gentlemen’s club named after the year it was founded, 1880. It was strictly aligned to the Liberal Party. H. H. Asquith was its first secretary. ↩︎
3. Sturgis, 358. ↩︎

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