My recent article Basil Hallward showed how Charterhouse Press in the era of unauthorized publications added a preposterous preface to their 1904 edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray.
To summarize: their idea with this so-called “Artist’s Preface” was to pass off the novel’s fictional painter, Basil Hallward, as a real person who in 1884 had known Wilde and a Radiant Youth—a “Dorian” prototype—and this meeting was supposedly the origin of Wilde’s novel released six years later.
The problem with the preface, apart from its implausibility, was that it would be slightly more plausible had it been written by someone other than the fictitional Basil Hallward.
And so it came to pass. A story gained currency that the artist who had revealed the origin of Dorian Gray in that preface was in fact a painter named Basil “Ward”.
The difficulty with that idea was that Basil Ward, whose name is only marginally more plausible than Basil Hallward, was equally fictitious. He did not exist.
And yet, generations of biographers believed in his identity, effectively giving as fact an unverified account of a unlikely story that had derived from a hoax.
We can now conduct the research neglected by those biographers.
Curiously, the ‘Artist’s Preface’ by “Basil Hallward” continued to appear in subsequent editions issued in 1906 and 1911 by Brentano’s—who had effectively taken over the titles and publishing rights of Charterhouse Press in 1905.
The writers who get their wires crossed about Basil Ward include Hesketh Pearson who blithely borrows the yarn; Montgomery Hyde (in The Annotated Oscar Wilde) who studiously suggests it; Vyvyan Holland who innocently invokes it; Sheridan Morley who asserts it; and Richard Ellmann who reports it among other unlikely inspirations for the ever-youthful portrait. And it also appears in many an article, either scholarly, newspaper, or otherwise including the Wikipedia entry for Dorian Gray (until very recently…)
And as a curiosity, in the 2004 American film The Picture Of Dorian Gray the character of Basil Hallward is a woman named Basil Ward. Given how woeful this film is one assumes the misnomer was similarly misguided.
Norbert Kohl, on Basil Ward:
“…the development of this anecdote from an advertising stunt by an imaginative publisher to an accepted fact is a fine illustration of how literary legends may arise, but it also sheds a rather gloomy light on the state of Wildean research, which all too often has mixed truth and fiction inextricably together.
“Oscar Wilde, The Works Of A Conformist Rebel”
English translation, Cambridge University Press (1989). 140
The above was sound judgment in 1989, but by now we should know well enough not to overestimate the diligence of Wilde’s 20th century biographers. But a question remains: where did Basil Ward come from?
Let us trace our way back along the garden path.
Richard Ellmann (1987)
Richard Ellmann’s landmark biography of Wilde maybe magisterial in its prose, but is often not so in its particulars. Ellmann, while not entirely convinced about the legend of Basil Ward, does manage to misread it, making the portrait sitter not some Radiant Youth but Wilde himself. (UK edition, p.295).
Ellmann locates the story in Hesketh Pearson’s 1946 biography of Wilde, although he looks no further. Had he done so he might have realized that Pearson did not originate it.
Rupert Croft-Cooke (1972)
Another writer who traces the story back no further than Pearson is Rupert Croft-Cooke. This is surprising because Croft-Cooke took a skeptical approach to the Wilde story in the first chapter of his The Unrecorded Life of Oscar Wilde1 unravelling what he termed “fables” produced by “a rigid crocodile” of biographers. He rather unkindly denounces them as clumsy, pompous, and humorless eccentrics, mountebanks, and honest fools. Pity then that Croft-Cooke joined their ranks by wrongly accusing Hesketh Pearson of “rather irresponsibly” creating “his ‘Basil Ward'”.
Such was his conviction that it may have persuaded the august imprint the Oxford University Press in its Complete Works also to imply that the story originated with Pearson in 19462.
Hesketh Pearson (1946)
While the Basil Ward does appear in Pearson (p. 145)—and he may have being responsible for popularizing the story—he did not dream it up.
We can in fact go back further, starting with one biography further.
Boris Brasol (1938)
In Boris Brasol‘s Oscar Wilde: The Man, the Artist, the Martyr, (1938)3 it is claimed that Basil Ward was Dorian’s “true genesis”.
Brasol regales us with fluff such as, “Oscar frequently visited Mr. Ward’s studio…” before transcribing the relevant portions of the Charterhouse Press preface.
(Author’s collection)
But Brasol, who was a “virulent anti-semite,” did not make up the story either, no doubt being too busy in 1938 organizing an “Anti-Comintern Congress in Germany with the support of the Gestapo”,4 —so perhaps we should look to Miss Parker McCormick5—then a 19 year old ingenue with four divorces and a modest acting career ahead of her—whom Brasol acknowledges for her “studious library research”.
Perhaps it was such imprecision that prompted Francis Winwar at the time to say, “Mr. Brasol has added only another stone to the mound under which Oscar Wilde lies buried”.6
A more recent scholarly article to recognize Brasol as Pearson’s source can be found in the essay collection Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies7—although that article concludes that Brasol was the originator when in fact the fable predates even him. To be fair, Brasol is probably the earliest biography with the story—as it is not in any of eight possible biographies that preceded him.8
So to find Ward further back, we should end Croft-Cookes “rigid crocodile” of biographical steps, and see if he can be found elsewhere. As it happens, we can skip back 31 years.
A. R. Keller & Co. (1907)
We now enter uncharted territory.
In the vacuum between Wilde’s death and Robert Ross’s fourteen-volume Collected Works (Methuen, 1908), there was a rush to capitalize on Oscar Wilde.9 Against this backdrop, and predating Ross by a year, came one of the first attempts at a uniform multi-volume set by A. R. Keller & Co.: The Writings of Oscar Wilde (1907).
The Keller edition is schizophrenic. At once a quasi-scholarly limited edition that has become a deluxe collector’s object; and an unauthorized publication with no intention to be authoritative. Given this latter point it should come as no surprise to know that a chapter on Dorian Gray in the Keller edition contains the Basil Ward story.10
The essay on Dorian Gray in the Keller edition (1907) is the earliest-noted reference to the Basil Ward story in a published volume. It was not identified by scholars and previous biographers so has lain dormant for 120 years.
But even if it had been found, there are two questions still to ask:
- Was there actually a painter named Basil Ward working in London in the 1880s?
- Where did A. R. Keller & Co. get the story?
The first question is easier to answer. Of course, Basil Ward is a fabrication. And if there had been such a painter with apparent access to Wilde, he would have left traces: studio addresses, sitters, mentions in Wilde’s correspondence, &c. Biographers could have reached this conclusion by going to the contemporaneous record to see if the story was supported. None of them did.
The second question, however, is more intriguing. It seemed likely to me that Keller would also not have made up the story: their publishing raison d’etre was to plagiarize authors’ works not spend time being creative themselves.
This last inference is borne out by a recent discovery of an earlier reference to the story which goes a long way to explaining the birth of Basil Ward.
It will be the subject of a subseqeunt article.
© John Cooper, 2026.
Afterword
Out of a sense of completeness there is one more Ward in the story. You might also recall the firm that published Wilde’s first authorised edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray in book form back in 1891 was Ward, Lock & Co.
Lest you wonder whether that Mr Ward was any source of inspiration, I can confirm his first name was not Basil. It was Ebenezer.
A NOTE ABOUT Mason (1908)
In 1908, Stuart Mason (Christopher Millard) edited Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A Defence of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” containing a bibliography of the novel.
In his entry for the Charterhouse edition Mason notes the original Artist’s Preface by “Basil Hallward” but without further comment.
VII. THE PICTURE OF/DORIAN GRAY/by/OSCAR WILDE./New York: Charterhouse Press, 1904. Size 8-3/4 by 6-1/4 in. Limited to 800 numbered copies. Top edges gilt, sides uncut. Contains Publisher’s note, Artist’s preface, and a short Biography of the Author. Facing title is a full-length portrait of “Dorian Gray,” by “Basil Hallward,” which inspired the story. Pp. xv., 334. Price $3.50c. With loose outside wrapper. The publisher was Donald Bruce Wallace. The edition was transferred to Brentano’s of New York, in 1905. Price $3.00 net.
Footnotes:
- The Unrecorded Life of Oscar Wilde, D. McKay Co., (1972). ↩︎
- The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde Volume 3: The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts (2005). 368-9 (‘Commentary On Page 3”, lines 23-4). Link. ↩︎
- Oscar Wilde: The Man, the Artist, the Martyr, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, (1938). 197. ↩︎
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Brasol ↩︎
- Oscar Wilde: The Man, the Artist, the Martyr, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, (1938).: Acknowledgements. ↩︎
- The New York Times, August 7, 1938, Section Book Review, Page 74. ↩︎
- Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, (2004). Chapter 2 ‘Wilde the Writer’, Footnote 51. Ironically, in the preceding chapter of the same book a more circumspect scholar reminds us that biographies of Wilde, “remain pitted with errors that are repeated from one untrustworthy source to another”. Chapter 1, p.7 ↩︎
- The story is not found in any the following Wilde biographies that appeared between the Charterhouse preface in 1904 and Brasol in 1933:
—Robert Harborough Sherard: The Life of Oscar Wilde (1906)
—Arthur Ransome: Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study (1912)
—R. Thurston Hopkins: Oscar Wilde: A Study of the Man and the Work (1913). An early attempt to balance biographical detail with literary criticism.
—Lord Alfred Douglas: Oscar Wilde and Myself (1914): Primarily a defensive work ghost-written during a period of bitterness.
—Robert Harborough Sherard: The Real Oscar Wilde (1916)
—Frank Harris: Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (1916).
—Lord Alfred Douglas: My Friendship with Oscar Wilde (1932): A later, somewhat more reflective account.
—G.J. Renier: Oscar Wilde (1933). A concise biography published as part of a “Short Biographies” series. ↩︎ - For more on Wilde and international copyright during this period see John Cooper & Philip R. Bishop: ‘A Wilde Ride for Mosher: Thomas Bird Mosher’s Oscar Wilde Publications”, The Wildean No. 66 January 2025. 55-58, ↩︎
- A. R. Keller & Co., 1907. 15 octavo volumes: vol. 15 “His Life: With a Critical Estimate of His Writings” – Ch VIII Page 196-7. ↩︎
Discover more from Oscar Wilde Blog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
One thought on “Faulty Basil”