Further flotsam from the wilds (so to speak) of the web. The above portrait is a collage constructed by this Flickr user with pages from The Picture of Dorian Gray as the raw material. A remarkable work.
Wilde’s face in the collage portrait comes from one of the famous photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony on the writer’s visit to America in 1882. Another of Sarony’s photographs was used as the basis for this cigar advert which sought to exploit Wilde’s fashionable notoriety. Possibly the first and last time that cigars have ever been offered for sale as “aesthetic”.
Less charitably, the Library of Congress American Memory collection has another piece of Wilde-related sheet music for something called Wilde, Oscar Wilde (also 1882) by Japonica Reginald McGinnis. The foppish caricature is worthy of Punch.
Also from the Library of Congress is this photo of the newly-finished Wilde monument by Jacob Epstein. (And there’s a large preparatory sketch here.) The stonework looks distinctly sharp and pristine compared to the weathered and graffiti-covered monument one finds today in Père Lachaise Cemetery.
• At the Guardian this week: Dorian Gray’s true picture of Oscar Wilde
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Oscar Wilde archive