Tag: oscar wilde

Article

Basil Hallward

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“The Artist’s Preface”

By Basil Hallward?

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 to write the preface to a new edition of the very book in which he had long since died.

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Article

Bonhams

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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the story of how an image purporting to show a young Wilde in an assembly of pupils at Portora Royal School, had to be withdrawn from an auction at Bonhams in 1998.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On account of this last fact, I was asked whether the late decision had left Bonhams time to amend the offering of the withdrawn items, or had the catalogue already been printed?

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Article

Not Oscar

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Contemporary newspaper report of the photograph.
(Author’s Collection)

Not a Photograph of a Young Oscar

Withdrawn From a Bonhams Auction, 1998.

In his recent retrospective After Oscar, Merlin Holland recalls how he was often called upon to verify ostensible photographs of Oscar Wilde.

One such photograph purported to show a young Oscar in an assembly of pupils at Portora Royal School.

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Article

Robert Ross

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Two grainy but rarely seen images of Robert Ross [see Footnote].

Robert Ross Revisits Hôtel d’Alsace

“The Best Franc’s Worth I Ever Had”.

As noted in my recent article Last Rites, Oscar Wilde died in the Hôtel d’Alsace on the Rue des Beaux Arts in Paris, on November 30, 1900. One of the few people present on that occasion was Robert Ross.

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Article

Dream World

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Oscar Wilde : The Artist as Dreamer

Feasting With The Greeks

The pathways of the poets are often traversed by dreamers destined to wake up one day to the dangers of the real world.

One such idealist in Victorian London was Oscar Wilde who, in the homophobic 1890s, was often to be found obliviously “feasting with panthers”1 in fashionable restaurants such as Kettner’s.

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Article

The Friend of Oscar Wilde

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A Letter From Lord Alfred Douglas

“it is not in my system to moralize, [or] to abandon a friend”

Le Havre is a French port city on the English Channel at the estuary of the river Seine in Normandy—which is where one might expect it to be located given that Le Havre means “the harbor”.

What might also be self-evident is that when Alfred Douglas visited this pleasant coastal resort, in August 1895, it was not long before he became combative with the local press.

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Article

Last Rites

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The Conditional Baptism of Oscar Wilde

The day before he died.

Oscar Wilde died at ten minutes to 2 PM on November 30th, 1900. We know this from a detailed letter, citing the precise time of death, written by Robert Ross who was with Wilde when he died.1 But less certain is what happened immediately before and after that moment.

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Article

Autumnal

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Ernest Dowson at Queen’s College, Oxford.

Dowson’s Dreamful Autumn

Summer’s loss seems little…on days like these.

In October 1892, Ernest Dowson wrote to his friend Victor Plarr1 to say:

“My muse awoke from her torpor of many months yesterday, here is her feeble utterance, but she may run to another verse by and by.”

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Announcement

Dress Lecture

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Free Online Lecture

Oscar Wilde on Dress
by John Cooper

DATE: Saturday, December 6 at 2pm EST
(Eastern Standard Time in the US is five hours behind GMT)

Click here to Register: Zoom Webinar.

Welcome to the sixth season of online lectures presented by the Victorian Society in America inspired by their internationally-acclaimed Summer Schools.

This season’s speakers will address a wide variety of subjects including Los Angeles in the Victorian era, the evolution of resort architecture, Oscar Wilde’s philosophy on dress and fashion, a behind-the-scenes look at the preservation of Gilded Age Newport, the Saturday Evening Girls’ club and the Paul Revere Pottery, and the work of British preservationist and architectural historian Gavin Stamp.

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Article · News

End of the Innocence

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Whitehouse vs. The BBC
Perversely Topical

No, not that White House. But still topical because, coincidentally, Merlin Holland’s new book, Oscar Wilde, The Legacy of a Scandal, tells of a spat between another Whitehouse and the BBC—and a group of perverse individuals.

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