Quirky images related to Oscar Wilde, or not.
© John Cooper, 2024.
That’s Odd
Category: Article
The Rops Vignette
Not Everyone’s Kettle of Fish
Oscar Wilde’s symbolist play Salome is notable for its licentious artwork by Aubrey Beardsley. But Beardsley’s infamous illustrations appeared only when the English edition of the play was released in 1894.
When the original French Salomé had been published a year earlier, it contained no illustrations pertinent to the text. The only graphical representation in the French edition was the Rops Vignette, which had nothing to do with Wilde’s play, but it rivals Beardsley in its decadence.
So what is the Rops Vignette?
Continue reading “The Rops Vignette”Numa Patlagean
Clay bust of Oscar Wilde, 1914. Numa Patlagean (1888—1961).
Oscar Wilde’s modeling career has been under discussion recently.
I refer, of course, to the art of sculpture, a subject that held a fascination for Oscar: he referenced it in his essays on art, and in his reviews of art galleries; he bought sculptures, commission sculptures, and even had his hair styled after a bust of Nero in the Louvre.
Oscar used say that he could only think in stories and correspondingly asserted that a sculptor thinks only in the raw material of his art. He told André Gide, “the sculptor doesn’t try to translate his thought into marble; he thinks in marble, directly”. 1 This thought echoes the symbolism of Oscar’s table talk about a man who thought only in bronze melting down the statue of eternal sadness that adorned his wife’s grave, and making of it a bronze homage to the joy which dwells only in the moment.
Continue reading “Numa Patlagean”Some Common Prisoner
Oscar Wilde Visits Two U.S. Prisons
—Updated from its original posting in 2015—
State penitentiaries are not generally considered tourist destinations.
Yet in a curious twist in Oscar Wilde’s conventional social activity during his lecture tour of North America in 1882, he took the opportunity to visit TWO American state prisons within the space of three days: one during a train stop on his way to lecture in Atchison, KS; and a second (along with its insane asylum) before his next evening lecture in Lincoln, NE.
Did Wilde have a special interest in places of incarceration? Or, aware of his appeal to notoriety, was fate prefiguring for him a life on the inside?
Continue reading “Some Common Prisoner”Oscar’s Oyster Supper
Tea or Coffee, Mr Wilde?
(Give Me The Wine List)
Eating oysters in Connecticut is a big thing; and when in Hartford, CT, there was only one place to go: Honiss’ Oyster House.
In 1981 the New York Times ran an article about the famous old place, now long since gone:
Continue reading “Oscar’s Oyster Supper”Rosebud
Gyles Brandreth’s
Podcast Episode with Rupert Everett
A podcast worth noting for Wildeans is Rosebud—a series of interviews conducted by the estimable Gyles Brandreth. Notable not because Gyles is now a podcaster—surely a part preordained for a journalist, novelist, non-fiction writer, publisher, television presenter, after-dinner speaker, theatre producer, university chancellor, former politician, and perennial novelty knitwear model.
No—it is more pertinently notable because Gyles is also the Honorary President of the Oscar Wilde Society. And it’s more recently notable because on March 21, 2024 his guest on the podcast was Rupert Everett, an actor who also has strong connections to Oscar Wilde.
Continue reading “Rosebud”Turn of the Crank
Oscar Wilde on Machines
The irresistible force of the industrial revolution meets the
immovable objection of the aesthetic movement.
The reasons for Oscar Wilde’s much-heralded lecture tour of America seemed clear enough: to promote Gilbert & Sullivan’s latest operetta, Patience, while conducting a series of lectures on subjects of his own choosing.
At least that was the undertaking devised by the theatrical impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte.
Any suggestion that Oscar might, meanwhile, attempt to inculcate the American masses with what he perceived as much-needed ideas about art and aesthetics, would be entirely ulterior.
But Oscar made it his self-imposed mission to do just that.
Continue reading “Turn of the Crank”The Spectator
Max Beerbohm
Having begun a personal resurgence of interest in Max Beerbohm (exhibition, article) it would be remiss not to also allude to the special role he had with regard to Oscar Wilde.
Max Beerbohm first met Oscar in 1888 while a student at Charterhouse School, but it was not a moment likely to engender an immediate affinity. For Max it was just a brief introduction. And, as for Oscar, he was a decade removed from the callow superficiality of college days and currently set to decamp to the decayed remove of serious Bunburying.
Continue reading “The Spectator”MiniMax
Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm (1872—1956)
If you have the opportunity to study Max Beerbohm’s satirical sketches in the current exhibition Max Beerbohm: The Price of Celebrity (NY Public Library), it will not escape your notice how the writer and cartoonist ‘Max’, as he was familiarly known, was himself a consummate subject for caricature.
As we shall see, the idea of a Beerbohm burlesque was not lost on contemporary artists, nor, indeed, on Max either, for he caricatured himself more than any other subject.
Continue reading “MiniMax”First Impression
—A Large Signet Ring On His Little Finger—
When Oscar Wilde arrived in America, at the beginning of 1882, the press came out to meet him on his ship the SS Arizona. A principal aim was to satisfy the public’s anticipation about what this aesthetic curiosity actually looked like.
A reporter from the New York Sun described Oscar’s appearance:
He stood at least six feet two inches tall, with broad shoulders and erect carriage. He wore a long ulster, lined with two kinds of fur, patent leather boots, and had a small round fur cap set squarely on his head. He stood at ease with one hand thrust into his ulster pocket and the other, with a large signet ring on its little finger…1
In retrospect, we might suspect of Oscar that if something as subtle as his signet ring managed to form part of the journalist’s first impression, it was not the last impression the ring was going to make.
Continue reading “First Impression”
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