Editorial Journal of John Cooper on Oscar Wilde
Given that the most familiar impression of Oscar Wilde derives from photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony, a retrospective of the famous nineteenth-century portraitist should be much anticipated by Wildeans, particularly as Sarony has for some time been a neglected figure. Erin Pauwels’s new book attempts to redress the balance.
Continue reading “Penn Pictures”
SARONY’S LIVING PICTURES
In my recent book review of Penn State’s Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York by Erin Pauwels (2024)1, I made reference to a short-lived magazine that Napoleon Sarony, the famous Oscar Wilde photographer, produced towards the end of his career.
Continue reading “Sarony’s Living Pictures”
Whitman and Wilde Part 2:
Oscar Wilde in New York, 1882
The Gilded Gentleman is a history podcast hosted by Carl Raymond in New York City that launched in 2021–and already it has garnered a million downloads.
In a series of bi-weekly interviews with academics, authors, and experts in their relevant fields, The Gilded Gentleman tells the story of the society, culture, architecture, food, fashion, design, music, and literature of Paris’ Belle Époque and England’s Victorian and Edwardian eras.
I was asked to contribute to a two-part episode contrasting how—thirty years apart—Oscar Wilde’s and Walt Whitman’s arrivals in New York inspired them to move onto greater fame and celebrity.
Click on the link below to listen to the show on the Gilded Gentleman Episodes page of the web site, or it can be found wherever you download your podcasts:
© John Cooper, 2023.