Peters Portraits

The young and ill-fated American poet William Theodore Peters was integral to the clique of 1890s British decadents. One fact upholding this claim is that even the doyen of the movement, Oscar Wilde, had a portrait of him hanging in his Tite Street drawing room.

But which portrait of Peters was it?

As Bertrand de Roaix

Until quite recently speculating about this point was extremely limited as there was only one commonly known portrait of Peters (right) in which he is dressed as the lovelorn Bertrand de Roaix from his own pastoral masque “Le Tournoy d’Amour” (The Tournament of Love).¹

However, it is difficult to imagine that it was this picture that made it into Oscar’s drawing room—and not because it was latterly thought to be a photograph of an unknown woman (for it was recognized at the time to be Peters). But perhaps in a related way because it was Constance’s drawing room too, and she was not given to memorializing Oscar’s decadent adherents—who are also notably absent from her autograph album. Besides, the photograph first appeared in a Paris gallery only towards the end of Wilde’s tenure in Tite Street.

As The Pierrot

Consider instead a second image of Peters which, for a separate article, I unearthed from the depths of the ‘Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection” at the Library of Congress.

In this picture, Peters takes the role of another forsaken character—The Pierrot of the Minute—from the one-act play of that name written for him by Ernest Dowson.

The Pierrot portrait is more likely to have been found amongst Wilde’s artwork² because around the time Peters’s debuted the rôle he visited Tite Street to conduct a newspaper interview with the Wildes. Further, there is a clue given by Robert Sherard in whose memoir we first learn that Peters was: “…the poor pierrot whose portrait used to hang in the drawing room in Tite Street…”³

A Sketch in Ordinary Dress

To these two known photographs of Peters I can now add a third image which has recently come to light: a hand-drawn pencil sketch on thick card made in 1896, presumably from life.

As this image of Peters is new to scholarship I shall append the visual and historical provenance.

There should be little doubt about the identification of Peters in the sketch.

The internal evidence is that on the back of the card is his name: “Wm Theodore Peters”—along with a cropped, but still discernible, date of “Paris ’96”. Also compelling are the visual similarities between the sketch and other images of Peters (shape of the nose, downturn of the mouth, &c.).

It is also worth noting the marked resemblance between Peters in the sketch and a known photograph of his father, Dr DeWitt Clinton Peters Sr., a Civil War Union Army Surgeon.

The provenance is that the card comes down to us along with a copy of his best known book of light verse Posies Out of Rings (John Lane, Bodley Head) which belonged to Mary Kent Davey who signed and dated the book in 1896, the year of its publication. Mary Kent Davey was a native of Boston who was resident in Paris for four years in the mid 1890s, studying to teach languages.

Shortly after Davey appended her name to the free end paper, Peters also signed the same page in his characteristically ornate style, and provided two lines of original verse.

The book also contains the sticker of ‘Brentano’s’—the international bookseller and (sometime French) publisher whose Paris location was on the Avenue de l’Opera.

The association copy is supported by the fact that she and Peters were not just compatriots in the American literary colony in Paris, but both wrote for expatriate paper The Quartier Latin⁴ in which their names often appeared together in the list of contents.

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Other Likenesses of Peters

On July 7, 1914 the publisher Thomas Bird Mosher wrote to his friend Washington Irving Way when lending him a copy of Peters’s Tournament of Love. He said:

“Peters was a curious old boy and I have a portrait of him in my office with his signature. He sent it to me years ago and I always felt that he had something worth while which he never managed to express.”⁵

The portrait of Peters that once hung in Mosher’s office has never been found, despite the best efforts of the world’s leading Mosher scholar.⁶

Finally, and quite remarkably, a semblance of the Brooklyn-born Peters may still be seen today hiding in plain sight in a New York City monument.

In City Hall Park there is statue of the American patriot, soldier, and spy Nathan Hale rendered in bronze by Frederick William MacMonnies—the American sculptor who was also expatriated in Paris at the Beaux-Arts school.

When the statute was erected in 1893 the Brooklyn press reported that, in the absence of a likeness of Nathan Hale, MacMonnies had found inspiration for the requisite “delicately featured, half-feminine” facial type in the model of William Theodore Peters.

© John Cooper 2025.

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Footnotes:

1. First published in English by Brentano’s in Paris, 1894, ↩︎
2. For more on the artwork owned by Wilde see Marland: Oscar Wilde’s art collection. ↩︎
3. Robert Harborough Sherard, Twenty Years In Paris Being Some Recollections Of A Literary Life, (Hutchinson & Co,/Philadelphia : George W. Jacobs & Co.) 1905, 392. See Twenty Years in Paris: Clipping below.  ↩︎
4. A magazine devoted to the arts, published monthly from 1896 until 1899. It was compiled in Paris by the American Art Association of Paris, an organization of American expatriates, [Wikipedia] ↩︎
5. Letter from Thomas Bird Mosher to Washington Irving Way, July 7, 1914, Portland, Maine. [Huntington Library] ↩︎
6. Philip R. Bishop: https://thomasbirdmosher.net/ ↩︎

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Afterword

If Mary Kent Davey, who owned the book that accompanied the sketch, also owned the sketch itself, it is worth pointing out that her traveling companion in Paris was a sketch artist (Elisabeth de Reichard).

Thus, it may have been she who made the sketch of Peters, although the faded and partly cropped signature on the card does not appear to resemble her name.

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Robert Sherard

“…the poor pierrot whose portrait used to hang in the drawing room in Tite Street…”:

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