The full portrait. Photograph: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
Oscar Wilde portrait to have first UK exhibition
Painting by US artist Robert Goodloe Harper Pennington was presented to writer and wife, Constance, as wedding gift
Mark Brown Arts correspondent
A full-length portrait of a young, dapper and confident Oscar Wilde, painted as a wedding present for his doomed marriage to Constance, is to be exhibited in the UK for the first time.
Tate Britain announced that the painting, which has been in Los Angeles since the 1920s, is to be a star of its 2017 show, Queer British Art 1861-1967.
The 1.85 metre (6ft) oil painting depicted Wilde as a slender 27-year-old on the cusp of success, the exhibition curator Clare Barlow said.
“His stance is confident, holding a pair of gloves in one hand while the other clasps a silver-topped cane. It presents a different, more sombre image to the one we are more familiar with,” she said.
The portrait was painted by the US artist Robert Goodloe Harper Pennington and presented to Wilde and his wife, Constance, as a wedding present in 1884.
Unsurprisingly, Wilde loved it. It was the couple’s most prized possession and hung above the fireplace in their Chelsea home during the good years.
Wilde was at the height of his fame and powers when, in April 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, or Bosie, accused Wilde of “posing as a sodomite”.
Wilde took the catastrophic decision to sue, setting in train a sequence of events which led to a spirit-sapping jail term, hard labour and an early death.
During the trial, evidence was presented of Wilde’s relationships with other men, causing the trial to collapse. On 25 May 1895 he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour in solitary confinement on the charge of gross indecency.
While awaiting trial, Wilde was declared bankrupt, meaning all his belongings, including the portrait, were sold at auction to pay his debts. Most of the belongings remain untraced but the portrait was bought by Wilde’s friends Ernest and Ada Leverson.
The couple kept it in storage in their Kensington house, with Wilde remarking that Ernest “could not have [it] in his drawing room as it was obviously, on account of its subject, demoralising to young men, and possibly to young women, of advanced views”.
The painting was later in the home of Wilde’s former lover and lifelong friend Robert Ross. After his death it was sold to the US collector William Andrews Clark and has remained in the US ever since. It is being loaned to Tate Britain by the William Andrews Memorial Library, part of the University of California, Los Angeles.
It was behind this door that Wilde wrote De Profundis, his extended letter to Bosie which is considered one of the greatest letters in the English language, including lines such as: “Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.”
The time in his cell also inspired The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he wrote while in exile in France.
Wilde’s spirit was broken by the brutal regime in Reading. He was released from jail sick, bankrupt, separated from his wife and unable to see his children. By 1900, at the age of 46, Wilde was dead.
The painting was later in the home of Wilde’s former lover and lifelong friend Robert Ross. After his death it was sold to the US collector William Andrews Clark and has remained in the US ever since. It is being loaned to Tate Britain by the William Andrews Memorial Library, part of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The portrait will be displayed in London next to the door from Wilde’s prison cell, c.3.3, in Reading jail.
It was behind this door that Wilde wrote De Profundis, his extended letter to Bosie which is considered one of the greatest letters in the English language, including lines such as: “Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.”
The time in his cell also inspired The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he wrote while in exile in France.
Wilde’s spirit was broken by the brutal regime in Reading. He was released from jail sick, bankrupt, separated from his wife and unable to see his children. By 1900, at the age of 46, Wilde was dead.
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