Category: Article

Article

Six Marks

Oscar Wilde Blog9 Comments

PURPLE AND ROSE: THE LANGE LEIZEN OF THE SIX MARKS.
J. M. Whistler, 1864.

I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently to see James McNeill Whistler’s 1864 work “Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks”

The painting depicts Whistler’s model (and of course, partner) Joanna Hiffernan in a classic Whistler composition, here given an oriental setting in the sitting-room of his studio. The details in the picture display some of Whistler’s personal collection and reveal his burgeoning interest in East Asian art.

Being no expert on the artistic merits of the painting itself, I thought I would concentrate instead on the terminology of its title, littérateur that I might be.

And as Wildean that I am, I was drawn immediately to the reference to “Six Marks” because the expression The Six-Mark Tea-Pot is the caption to a well-known cartoon satirizing the aesthetic movement, and I was anxious to decipher its coupling with the “Lange Leizen” of the low-country.

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Article

Elf Exemplaren

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

WELL DONE, IT’S RARE

Assessing what is the rarest printed work by an author is not an exact science. For instance, a book might have many known copies but appears to be rare because it seldom comes up for sale. This is often the case if the present owners are institutions or collectors who have little interest in selling. We would call this scarce.

A better way to look at the question, perhaps, is to consider how many copies of a particular work actually exist?

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Article

Ilyssus

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PRIGSBY ON FORM

The image above is a detail from George Du Maurier’s original artwork for a cartoon that appeared in Punch magazine in 1880 featuring a “distinguished amateur” art-critic.

You may be familiar with the cartoon because it is often associated with Oscar Wilde, who had similarly taken to art criticism with his debut piece of journalism—a review of the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery for the Dublin University Magazine in 1877, an exercise he repeated in 1879 for the Irish Daily News. This cartoon appeared some months later and features the character Prigsby who, despite the pince-nez, has a Wildean aspect.

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Article

Stood Ever Woman So Alone?

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Woman Alone, from the series: The Dancing Pair Vigano
Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850)
[The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 49.21.90]

OSCAR WILDE ON SEXUAL POLITICS

If we wish to gauge our men of the past, should we not determine on which side of history they stand? Or is that presentism?

To help you decide, take the political rights of women, for instance. At the time of the suffragist movement in Britain, women were second-class citizens under the law. One honorable gentleman in the House of Commons asked, “is the House prepared to hand over the government of this country to women, the majority of whom…do not understand the responsibilities of life?”

This was a view that resounded to the crown of the establishment. In 1907, King Edward VII wrote to the Liberal Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman: “I rejoice to see that you put your foot down regarding the Channel Tunnel…I only wish you could have done the same regarding Female Suffrage. The conduct of the so-called Suffragettes has really been so outrageous and does their cause (for which I have no sympathy) much harm.”

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Article

Family Tree

Oscar Wilde Blog2 Comments

“By what then are the appetites restrained?”

…so pleads Herbert Beerbohm Tree as the High Priest petitioning virtue in False Gods, a cobwebby tragedy by Eugene Brieux set in the upper reaches of the Nile during the Middle Empire.

But this time-honored question of restraint is not one which genealogists of the family ‘Tree’ would recognize—certainly not if bound by moderation or bond of matrimony. For instance, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, priest though he portrayed, was appealing enough to be patriarch to three families across two continents, with a composite of ten children—seven of whom were illegitimate. Evidently he didn’t walk about dressed like an ancient Egyptian priest all the time.

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