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Description: Oscar Wilde

Condition Note: 207 by 121mm., pencil and grey wash caricature portrait of Oscar Wilde captioned O.W., signed 'Max', framed and glazed

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Provenance: Miss J. Skidmore, 1952 exhibition label from the Leicester Square Galleries

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Published: Mason, cf. p.241; Hart-Davis, A Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm, cf 1779-1780, 1783; Ellmann 371

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Notes: This expressive full-length portrait of Oscar Wilde in profile wearing full evening dress, with a large button-hole and holding a tasselled cane, is similar to two listed in Hart-Davis' catalogue dating from around 1894 (nos. 1779-1780) in which Beerbohm has depicted Wilde in rather a debauched manner. These are in contrast to another portrait by Beerbohm (no. 1783) executed in 1911 for Stuart Mason which was accompanied by a letter stating: "It gives a much more essential view of Oscar. The other one [no. 1779, from Pick-Me-Up] showed only the worst side of his nature. At the time whe I did that other one, and even when it was published, I hardly realised what a cruel thing it was: I only realised that after Oscar's tragedy and downfall. I shouldn't at all like it to be perpetrated in your book. This caricature that I am sending to you shows Oscar in a light that won't pain posterity, and is, as I have said, much more really true." This later drawing reproduced in Mason depicts a far more refined and dignified Oscar Wilde with a less debauched face. Although Hart-Davis located some of the Beerbohm Wilde portraits from the 1952 Leicester Galleries exhibition, he did not locate this present one.

Max Beerbohm first met Oscar Wilde in 1888 when Beerbohm was at Charterhouse but the two only became friends in the early 1890s when his brother Herbert Beerbohm Tree produced a Wilde play. Beerbohm referred to Wilde as 'the Divinity' and Wilde said that Beerbohm had "the gift of perpetual old age". Beerbohm admired Wilde deeply but drew back from his homosexual nature and kept his distance. He was to caricature him repeatedly, often savagely, as a form of intimacy. Beerbohm was repelled by Wilde's relationship with Douglas, writing to Ross in 1893, "Poor Oscar! I saw him the other day, from a cab walking with Bosie and some other members of the Extreme Left. He looked like one whose soul has swooned in sin and revived vulgar. How fearful it is for a poet to go to bed and find himself infamous."