Sarony 3A

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

The photograph came to the notice of the Oscar Wilde Society further to an article I had written about all aspects of the Sarony Photographs for the Society’s academic journal The Wildean, [No. 55 July 2019].

In the article one of the key questions I addressed was the number of images in the first set of Sarony photographs taken in 1882 (i.e. not counting the 3 others taken in 1883). I had noted how the total had long stood at twenty-seven—which was also the number illustrated in that excellent little volume The Wilde Album produced by Oscar Wilde’s grandson Merlin’s Holland.

But in my article I took the approach that there are, in fact, “not twenty-seven photographs of Wilde from 1882: there are twenty-eight”—pointing out that there are two different photographs bearing the number 9.

Wilde’s poses in the two number 9s are so extremely similar that they could easily be mistaken for each other when not viewed together, but when juxtaposed there is one glaring difference: in one photograph Wilde is holding his book of Poems (1881) and in the other he is not (9A and 9B below).

And any suspicion that one is a doctored version of the other can be dispelled by a close examination of minor details.

So at this vital point in the game the score of twenty-seven photographs taken by Sarony in 1882 had risen to twenty-eight.

But Merlin Holland knew better. In response to my article, Merlin wrote to reveal that he had viewed a long-lost photograph at the Ransom Center a few years ago and identified it as a Sarony variant—which it certainly is. This is not only corroborated by the details in the picture, but also because a magazine etching of Wilde adopting the identical pose depicted in this photograph had appeared around the time it was taken in 1882.¹

However, the actual photograph had remained a mystery—and perhaps this was because it was not included in the original run of cabinet cards offered to the public by Sarony. This suspicion is suggested because the Ransom proof print does not have a commercial Sarony mount; and it is unnumbered when clearly it was taken concurrently with the known photo number 3 and there is no gap in the series’ enumeration.

Consequently the photograph will be known as 3A.

View the full photograph
oscarwildeinamerica.org

To be fair, Merlin had long foreseen such a faulty numbers game about the photographs because he had qualified the original count with the caveat that there were “at least” twenty-seven. With the extra number 9, now Sarony 3A brings the total of known photographs taken in 1882 again to an odd number: 29.

Twenty-nine however really is an odd number for a print-run of photographs. Surely thirty would make more sense? If only there were some indication of that. By chance the Newport Mercury provided such an indication on January 28, 1882 (the same month the photographs were taken) with this intriguing, but as yet unsubstantiated, news item:

© John Cooper, 2020.

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Footnote:

1. More on the magazine etching in the foot fault article False Bottom. ↩︎