Oscar Wilde Blog

Bonhams Catalogue, February 24, 1998.

No apostrophe in Bonhams, apparently.

In my last blog post about a picture that was Not Oscar, I related the story of how an image purporting to show a young Wilde in an assembly of pupils at Portora Royal School, had to be withdrawn from an auction at Bonhams in 1998.

Merlin Holland explained the reasons for the removal in his recent book After Oscar (pp. 576-578), also confirming that the withdrawal was made immediately prior to the sale.

On account of this last fact, I was asked whether the late decision had left Bonhams time to amend the offering of the withdrawn items, or had the catalogue already been printed?

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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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