Tag: Whistler

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Six Marks

Oscar Wilde Blog9 Comments

PURPLE AND ROSE: THE LANGE LEIZEN OF THE SIX MARKS.
J. M. Whistler, 1864.

I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently to see James McNeill Whistler’s 1864 work “Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks”

The painting depicts Whistler’s model (and of course, partner) Joanna Hiffernan in a classic Whistler composition, here given an oriental setting in the sitting-room of his studio. The details in the picture display some of Whistler’s personal collection and reveal his burgeoning interest in East Asian art.

Being no expert on the artistic merits of the painting itself, I thought I would concentrate instead on the terminology of its title, littérateur that I might be.

And as Wildean that I am, I was drawn immediately to the reference to “Six Marks” because the expression The Six-Mark Tea-Pot is the caption to a well-known cartoon satirizing the aesthetic movement, and I was anxious to decipher its coupling with the “Lange Leizen” of the low-country.

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Sarony 3A

Oscar Wilde Blog4 Comments
Sarony 3A courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, used with permission.
New Sarony Photograph Identified

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

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Cello Encore

Oscar Wilde Blog12 Comments
More Of The Cello Mystery Solved

—Corroborating Research—

In a recent article I established the literary source for the cello coat worn by Oscar Wilde at the Grosvenor Gallery. However, I left it open to interpretation whether Wilde actually did have such a coat tailored or, perhaps, he just happened to have one like it. After all, ask you may recall, there was only one report of the “cello” shape.

However, we can now be definitive.

Further research allows us to make the coat story complete—although, as we shall see, the archaic variant word compleat might make for a better fit.

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