🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
Eating oysters in Connecticut is a big thing; and when in Hartford, CT, there was only one place to go: Honiss’ Oyster House.
In 1981 the New York Times ran an article about the famous old place, now long since gone:
Continue reading “Oscar’s Oyster Supper”
A podcast worth noting for Wildeans is Rosebud—a series of interviews conducted by the estimable Gyles Brandreth. Notable not because Gyles is now a podcaster—surely a part preordained for a journalist, novelist, non-fiction writer, publisher, television presenter, after-dinner speaker, theatre producer, university chancellor, former politician, and perennial novelty knitwear model.
No—it is more pertinently notable because Gyles is also the Honorary President of the Oscar Wilde Society. And it’s more recently notable because on March 21, 2024 his guest on the podcast was Rupert Everett, an actor who also has strong connections to Oscar Wilde.
Continue reading “Rosebud”
The irresistible force of the industrial revolution meets the
immovable objection of the aesthetic movement.
The reasons for Oscar Wilde’s much-heralded lecture tour of America seemed clear enough: to promote Gilbert & Sullivan’s latest operetta, Patience, while conducting a series of lectures on subjects of his own choosing.
At least that was the undertaking devised by the theatrical impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte.
Any suggestion that Oscar might, meanwhile, attempt to inculcate the American masses with what he perceived as much-needed ideas about art and aesthetics, would be entirely ulterior.
But Oscar made it his self-imposed mission to do just that.
Continue reading “Turn of the Crank”
Wilde Sunflowers – original painting by Gerard Byrne, Signed.
Oil & acrylic border on canvas. Bespoke tray frame.
FUNDRAISER EXTENDED INTO THE NEW YEAR
—A Chance To Own This Original Painting—
The Oscar Wilde family home, built in 1760 at 1 Merrion Square North, Dublin, has embarked on a much-needed restoration to the annex that houses Sir William’s former consultation room, a gallery, and the balconied first floor orangery.
Here is an opportunity to support the project and in the process win an original artwork by one of Ireland’s leading contemporary artists, and artist-in-residence, Gerard Byrne—the painting was made in the Speranza lounge of the house during the recent Oscariana festival.
Artist Gerard Byrne with Oscar Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland,
who visited the house recently and lent his support to the project.
Closing Date is Thursday, 7th December 2023 @ 10pm
© John Cooper, 2023.
Related Links:
The Oscar Wilde World of Gossip (American Edition)
by Neil Titley
(Dan Shepelavy, Vanessa Heron, Editors)
Universal Exports of North America. (Philadelphia), 2023.
In case it was missing.
Here is the link to the original blog post.
[To be consumed only with yellow food.]
© John Cooper, 2023.
The Oscar Wilde World of Gossip (American Edition)
by Neil Titley
(Dan Shepelavy, Vanessa Heron, Editors)
Universal Exports of North America. (Philadelphia), 2023.
ORDER ONLY FROM THE PUBLISHER’S WEBSITE
If you are about to start reading hundreds of biographies, memoirs, and diaries in search of informative or amusing (and preferably salacious) anecdotes about the Victorians in general, and Oscar Wilde in particular, then Stop!—you don’t have to. Neil Titley has done that for you.
Continue reading “Gossip”Wilde Sunflowers – original painting by Gerard Byrne, Signed.
Oil & acrylic border on canvas. Bespoke tray frame.
—A Chance To Own This Original Painting—
The Oscar Wilde family home, built in 1760 at 1 Merrion Square North, Dublin, has embarked on a much-needed restoration to its annex that houses Sir William’s former consultation room, a gallery, and the balconied first floor orangery.
Here is an opportunity to support the project and in the process win an original artwork by one of Ireland’s leading contemporary artists, and artist-in-residence, Gerard Byrne—the painting was made in the Speranza lounge of the house during the recent Oscariana festival.
Artist Gerard Byrne with Oscar Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland,
who visited the house recently and lent his support to the project.
Closing Date is Thursday, 7th December 2023 @ 10pm
© John Cooper, 2023.
Related Links:
Max Beerbohm
Having begun a personal resurgence of interest in Max Beerbohm (exhibition, article) it would be remiss not to also allude to the special role he had with regard to Oscar Wilde.
Max Beerbohm first met Oscar in 1888 while a student at Charterhouse School, but it was not a moment likely to engender an immediate affinity. For Max it was just a brief campus introduction. Whereas Oscar, now a decade removed from the callowness of college days, was about to seriously decamp for a term of decadent Bunburying.
Continue reading “The Spectator”
Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (1872—1956)
If you have the opportunity to study Max Beerbohm’s satirical sketches in the current exhibition Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity (NY Public Library), it will not escape your notice how the writer and cartoonist ‘Max’, as he was familiarly known, was himself a consummate subject for caricature.
As we shall see, the idea of a Beerbohm burlesque was not lost on contemporary artists, nor, indeed, on Max either, for he caricatured himself more than any other subject.
Continue reading “MiniMax”
Exhibition at the New York Public Library
Through January 28, 2024
Celebrity became an international industry in the late nineteenth century, and the English artist, author, and dandy Max Beerbohm (1872–1956) was at the center of it.
From the 1890s through the 1920s, to be a celebrity meant the hope—and fear—of turning up in a drawing or a parody by “Max,” as he was known in both Britain and the U.S. His brilliant skewering of famous people in his visual caricatures and of their writing styles in his satirical works made him a celebrity himself. This was an idtity he enjoyed, but later shrank from. In essays and fiction, he explored the price in human terms of achieving and maintaining celebrity status in ways that still resonate with us now.
Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity maps Beerbohm’s career in relation to the idea of celebrity, following him from his early days in the social and artistic circles of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley through his late career as a radio performer on BBC broadcasts during World War II.
Drawn from across the Library’s collections, as well as loans from private and institutional collections, the exhibition includes rare original caricature drawings, manuscripts, photographs, books from Beerbohm’s library, and personal items, most on public display for the first time.
Text from the exhibition’s Printed Guide available here.
Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity
The exhibition is organized by The New York Public Library and curated by Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware, and by Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, with the assistance of Julie Carlsen, Assistant Curator, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library.
John Cooper, 2023