Oscar Wilde Blog

The James E. Kelly sketch of Oscar Wilde

One of the reasons Oscar Wilde accepted the invitation to lecture in North America was the opportunity it gave him to meet people. In reality, this meant meeting people who might be able to help him achieve the fame he desired.

His manager, Colonel W. F. Morse, was ideally suited to oversee the venture. As a former military man turned theatrical manager he had a tactical grasp of public relations. One of the first things he did was to arrange a photo session for Wilde with the renowned portraitist Napoleon Sarony.

But Morse also needed a sketch of Wilde for promotional purposes, announcements, and the like. For this task he commissioned a New York artist named James E. Kelly.¹

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Clay bust of Oscar Wilde, 1914. Numa Patlagean (1888—1961).

Oscar Wilde’s modeling career has been under discussion recently.

I refer, of course, to the art of sculpture, a subject that held a fascination for Oscar: he referenced it in his essays on art, and in his reviews of art galleries; he bought sculptures, commissioned sculptures, and even had his hair styled after a bust of Nero in the Louvre.

Oscar used say that he could only think in stories and correspondingly asserted that a sculptor thinks only in the raw material of his art. He told André Gide, “the sculptor doesn’t try to translate his thought into marble; he thinks in marble, directly”. ¹

This thought echoes the symbolism of Oscar’s table talk about a man who thought only in bronze melting down the statue of eternal sadness that adorned his wife’s grave, and making of it a bronze homage to the joy which dwells only in the moment.

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Tag: James E. Kelly

The Kelly Sketch 1882

Numa Patlagean