Oscar Wilde

Napoleon Sarony

Oscar Wilde

Photograph, albumen cabinet card,

[1882].

Oscar Wilde and Beardsley had a complicated, contentious relationship. Perhaps they had too much in common: genius and a firm belief in their own powers; ready wit and verbal panache; a taste for dressing up; the wish to create beautiful rooms and collect rare objects; love of Paris and most things French; hatred of Philistinism and the British middle classes, etc. Wilde, however, was active and reckless in pursuing young men for sex, while Beardsley seemed never to settle upon a sexual orientation, let alone sleep with anyone. Because they collaborated on the Bodley Head’s edition of Salome (1894)—a project that found them sometimes at loggerheads— they were fused in the public imagination as decadents. When Wilde’s life careened into catastrophe in 1895 with his prosecution for “gross indecency,” Beardsley unjustly paid the price, temporarily becoming persona non grata in publishing circles and losing work.

From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press