Editorial Journal of John Cooper on Oscar Wilde
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.
Continue reading “Not Oscar”
“TO A CHILD IN HEAVEN”
A Translation by Lady Wilde
In June 1877, the short-lived Dublin magazine The Illustrated Monitor notably published a poem that Oscar Wilde had written in Rome titled: “Urbs Sacra Æterna” (Sacred and Eternal City).
However, that was not the only Italian connection. Elsewhere in the same issue there appeared a now forgotten and uncollected verse in translation provided by Oscar’s mother. It carried the auspicious title “To a Child in Heaven”.1
Here it is as it appeared when reprinted in Donahoe’s Magazine:
Continue reading “I See Thee With Angels”
The current exhibition of Oscar Wilde at Magdalen College prompts me to extend an idea begun last year in an article titled Double Take—in which I featured two similar photographs by Hills & Saunders of Oscar Wilde and his fellow students at Magdalen.
That article highlighted only one of the series; now we take a look at the other known examples.
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”
You may recall the rediscovered photograph of Oscar Wilde (similar to the one above) that I featured in this post — where it was effectively published for the first time in almost 130 years.
The photograph had originally appeared in the March 10, 1893 issue of the Westminster Budget, in an article titled “Mr. Wilde’s Forbidden Play” about Oscar’s French work Salomé.
At the time of that earlier post I expressed the hope is that an original print might come to light, and one has not done so yet. However, what has emerged is another copy of the newspaper, this time with a better quality image—now shown above.
So who do we have thank for this improved print?
Continue reading “Rediscovered II”
In my last article I alluded to how that erstwhile sinner, Oscar Wilde, had achieved the exalted air of sainthood. Unfortunately, for collectors of Wildean memories, with that classification comes the saintly cliché that a good man is hard to find.
And nowhere is that maxim manifested more in Oscar Wilde’s case than in the promised land of lost pictures. On the artifact scale of hardness-to-find, the rarest commodities are gold dust, hen’s teeth, and, hardest of all, previously unseen photographs of Oscar Wilde.
Continue reading “Rediscovered”
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”