Tag: New York

Article

Basil Hallward

Oscar Wilde Blog3 Comments

In Chapter XIII of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray the painter, Basil Hallward, is brutally murdered by the still innocent-looking Dorian Gray whose “gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art”1 eighteen years earlier.

But Basil, creator as he was of Dorian’s parallel life, was a resourceful fellow, and he was not about to let the mere fact of a frenzied knife attack, fatal though it was, prevent him from conducting his own secondary existence.

And so it was that Basil Hallward reappeared in 1904. His mission? To write the preface to a new edition of the very book in which he had died.

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Announcement · Article

Lecture Tour 1882

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Oscar Wilde’s Lecture Tour 1882
A New Landing Page

On his lecture tour of North America Oscar Wilde conducted 141 lectures over 11 months of 1882.

Now with a new landing page by digital creator Jon Darby, these lecture tour pages document a detailed, comprehensive, and accurate record of Wilde’s tour.

Each lecture has its own page dedicated to illustrating the lecture with details of the date, location, subject, lecture venue, and Wilde’s lodging, along with related ephemera—the standard being that all information is verified by primary sources.

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Announcement · News

Sarah Snook Wins Tony Award

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Sarah Snook Wins The Tony Award
The Picture of Dorian Gray’ on Broadway

As widely expected, and as prefaced in my review of the play, Sarah Snook tonight received the Tony Award for ‘Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play’—for her remarkable performance in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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News · Review

Playing to the Camera

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‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ on Broadway
A Literary Review

The Tony Awards for excellence in Broadway Theatre were announced last week, and it was pleasing to see an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray among the nominees.

The production is currently enjoying a limited engagement at Music Box theatre on W 45th St. in New York, after transferring from a successful run in London’s West End where it won two Olivier Awards. The Tonys are Broadway’s equivalent awards and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ received six nominations—including Best Performance by an Actress (Sarah Snook), and Best Direction (Kip Williams).

It is a truly remarkable staging of the work, and as a segue into what makes it remarkable, it is worth alluding to a little known Oscar Wilde-related parallel in the history of the Tony Awards.

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Article

In The Gold Room

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Gustav Klimt’s ‘Woman in Gold’ — centerpiece of The Neue Galerie, New York.

THE GOLD ROOMS OF WILDE AND KLIMT
—And the Vienna Inheritance of an Oscar Wilde Poem—

‘In the Gold Room’ is a poem that has attracted limited attention since it first appeared in Oscar Wilde’s self-published debut volume of Poems (1881).

Since then the poem has dimmed in the memory of even the seasoned scholar—and a visit to a museum of Germanic art hardly seemed likely to bring it back into the light.

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Article

Penn Pictures

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Erin Pauwels, Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York.
(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024)
BOOK REVIEW
by John Cooper

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.

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Announcement

Film—Wilde in New York

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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.

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Article

Men of Letters

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The Destiny of Two of Wilde’s Friends

Names like A.A. Milne and Z.Z. Top are not just at the opposite ends of the 20th century’s cultural and chronological spectrum, they are polar examples of another kind. I mean, of course, in the alphabetical use of two initials as a form of nomenclature, which, as a device, often makes for a memorable moniker. 

Oscar Wilde, in his time, knew a few characters thus named, including two of the most celebrated: W. B. Yeats and H. G. Wells.

However, on this day I should like to focus on two similarly styled, but lesser known, artists in the Wilde story, for they share a bond more profound than the form of their familiar names:

I refer to F. D. Millet and W.T. Stead.

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Article · News

An Impromptu Lecture

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botta.jpg
WILDE LETTER REVEALS IMPROMPTU ARRANGEMENTS

A previously unpublished autograph letter signed (ALS) by Oscar Wilde appeared a little while ago at auction in North Carolina. Aided by the letter’s evident authenticity and the fact that the consignor is a direct family descendant, it sold at auction for $5,500.

The item is a note sent by Wilde to Anne Lynch Botta, the 19th century doyenne of New York literary society, in which he expresses regret at not being able to attend a reception, owing to his impending departure for Canada.

We can use internal evidence from the letter to learn more about Wilde’s itinerary.

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Article

Deepo

Oscar Wilde Blog1 Comment

I am not going to alleged that an allegiance to alliteration is actually alluring, but I allude to it in this little Oscar Wilde story, as it is about a Liberal politician, the Lord of Language, and the ladies Labouchère and Langtry.

Or perhaps it would be even more obscure, and thus more intriguing, to say it is about Henrietta Hodson, Hester & The Two Henrys, and The Home Depot.

Either way, we must first place the tale in context.

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