Oscar Wilde

1 portrait

© National Portrait Gallery, London

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Oscar Wilde

by Napoleon Sarony
albumen panel card, 1882
12 in. x 7 1/4 in. (305 mm x 184 mm)
Purchased, 1976
Primary Collection
NPG P25

Sitterback to top

  • Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Wit and dramatist. Sitter associated with 16 portraits.

Artistback to top

  • Napoleon Sarony (1821-1896), Photographer. Artist or producer associated with 57 portraits.

Linked publicationsback to top

  • 100 Photographs, 2018, p. 34 Read entry

    Dublin-born dramatist, writer and wit Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was renowned as an aesthete from an early age. His unconventional behaviour, witty and paradoxical remarks and dandified pose brought him notoriety. In 1882 Wilde embarked on a lecture tour of North America. Shortly after his arrival in New York, he posed for a series of extravagant portraits by Napoleon Sarony (1821-96), including this one. Later, Wilde’s period of greatest creativity, including the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and a succession of stage comedies culminating in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was cut short by two years’ imprisonment with hard labour as a result of his then-illegal love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas.

  • 100 Photographs, 2018, p. 35 Read entry

    Dublin-born dramatist, writer and wit Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was renowned as an aesthete from an early age. His unconventional behaviour, witty and paradoxical remarks and dandified pose brought him notoriety. In 1882 Wilde embarked on a lecture tour of North America. Shortly after his arrival in New York, he posed for a series of extravagant portraits by Napoleon Sarony (1821-96), including this one. Later, Wilde’s period of greatest creativity, including the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and a succession of stage comedies culminating in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was cut short by two years’ imprisonment with hard labour as a result of his then-illegal love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas.

  • 100 Writers, p. 72
  • Saywell, David; Simon, Jacob, Complete Illustrated Catalogue, 2004, p. 661
  • Toksvig, Sandi; Dyer, Richard, Gay Icons, 2009 (accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery from 2 July - 18 October 2009), p. 12

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Subject/Themeback to top

Events of 1882back to top

Current affairs

The Ashes Test cricket series is born. The series gets its name from a satirical obituary published in the English newspaper The Sporting Times, stating that English cricket had died and its cremated body was being taken back to Australia, after England, with batsmen W. G. Grace and Charles Studd, lost the first home match to Australia at the Oval.
The Married Women's Property Act is passed, securing equal property rights between married couples.

Art and science

Eadweard Muybridge, British photographer, exhibits his images of animal and human motion, captured with his 'zoopraxiscope', a motion-picture machine recreating movement by displaying individual photographs in rapid succession, at the Royal Academy and Royal Institution. His studies and inventions contributed to the development of motion pictures, with E.J. Marey and the Lumiere brothers acknowledging his impact.

International

The Zioinist movement begins, with the first wave of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, at this time part of the Ottoman empire. The Jewish people were in Diaspora, spread across the world, and Palestine, the place of Jewish origin but now also occupied by Muslims and Christians, seemed a logical place for a settlement.

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