Editorial Journal of John Cooper on Oscar Wilde
My recent post about Whistler’s long ladies of the six marks featured the famous Du Maurier cartoon, from Punch magazine in 1880, about a couple longing to live up to the blue china of their ‘Six-Mark Tea-Pot’. The cartoon was widely understood to be channeling Wilde because he is reported to have done the same thing in his rooms at Oxford.
But doting couples cradling tea-pots was nothing new even then.
Continue reading “Tea in China”
In my recent article about the Whistler painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I admitted to being no expert in art appreciation. I now realize that was a needless confession.
Apparently, the amateur aesthete can abandon artistic authenticity.
Continue reading “How To View Art”
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.
Continue reading “Ilyssus”