🌻 The Leading Online Digest of Oscar Wilde Studies
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”
AMENDMENT ACT
You will recall the recent label to an Oscar Wilde photograph at the National Portrait Gallery (UK) that contained several errors. It has now been fixed!
Continue reading “Criminal Label”
CAPTION CONTESTED
It used to be that august institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery in London knew what they were talking about.
But there is a lot to object to in this caption to a Sarony cabinet card which came to my attention recently.
Noting the following errata for the record:
Continue reading “Object Label”
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”
A New Video Documentary by Erik Ryding
From Quill Classics comes a new full length video documentary written and directed by Erik Ryding: Wilde in New York.
Although Oscar Wilde is mostly associated with London at his zenith as a playwright, New York City also deserves a special place in his history. It was in New York, in fact, that his first two plays—Vera and The Duchess of Padua—had their world-premiere performances. During his yearlong tour of the United States in 1882, when he was a little-known poet associated with the comic character Bunthorne in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Patience, he sojourned in New York several times, establishing important social and artistic connections. Prompting newspaper stories wherever he went, he returned to Europe a genuine celebrity.
Continue reading “Film—Wilde in New York”
Napoleon Sarony’s contribution to the photographs of Oscar Wilde was not primarily technical. Instead, he drew upon his artistic background to create the mise en scène of the image; and drew upon his buoyant personality to create the right mood for his sitter.
Meanwhile, it was his first and only operator, Benjamin J. Richardson who assisted with lighting and attending to the mechanical aspects of camera technique.
Continue reading “The Sarony Case”
—by John Cooper and Erik Ryding—
Sarony photograph #19 must have been a favorite of Wilde’s as it is almost certainly the one he was referring to when, in March 1882, he wrote to his tour promoter, Richard D’Oyly Carte, to suggest that a lithograph of himself would help business. He said: “The photograph of me with head looking over my shoulder would be the best – just the head and fur collar.”
It is not surprising, therefore, that one occasionally sees this photograph signed by Wilde as a gift for friends, and two such examples can be seen in the footnotes.
However, a third example, featured above, is of more interest because it is inscribed: “pour mon ami, Carroll Beckwith” which, even for most Wilde scholars, invites two questions: who was Carroll Beckwith, and why is Wilde’s inscription in French?
Continue reading “Carroll Beckwith”
In a recent post I highlighted the difference between an illustration and a photograph of Oscar Wilde in the same pose—the result being that the photograph was the more authentic.
But what happens when there are differences between two versions of the same photograph?
Continue reading “One By One”
Here we see an illustration from Frank Leslie’s newspaper showing Oscar Wilde in a pose reminiscent of those taken by Napoleon Sarony.
Scholars were never quite sure whether the caption to this sketch which says “From a Photograph by Sarony” meant that the illustration was from Sarony (in the sense of an artist’s impression of similar poses) or was a direct copy of an actual photograph of this particular pose.
Continue reading “False Bottom”
A rarely seen image of Oscar Wilde has recently been added to the series of photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony on January 5th, 1882.
Its rarity is evidenced by the fact that it does not appear to have been been published in any publicly available print medium to date, nor anywhere else previously online.
However, a proof print of it has lain dormant in the extensive Wilde holdings of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin—in the James McNeill Whistler collection to be precise—and their copy might be the only extant print.
Let us see how this photograph re-emerged and how it affects the total count of known Sarony images of Oscar Wilde
Continue reading “Sarony 3A”