Paris goes Wilde over Oscar exhibition

Paris loves Oscar Wilde this autumn. Posters of the Irish aesthete, dandy and writer greet one in the metro. His aphorisms are framed in metro cars and published in a new illustrated edition.

A media blitz has started with a six-page spread in Paris Match magazine.

It's all connected to Oscar Wilde; Insolence Incarnate, a splendid review of Wilde's life and oeuvre, at the Petit Palais, the fine arts museum of the city of Paris. Some 100,000 people are expected to visit by January 15th.

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Portrait of Oscar Wilde by Napoleon Sarony in 1882. Photograph: Library of Congress, Washington DC

Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland says when he saw the final version of the show he helped produce, “It gave me a huge jolt of emotion, thinking; ‘God, all this is for him’.”

“France gave me asylum,” Wilde often said.

He was hounded out of England in 1897 after serving a two-year prison sentence for “gross indecency” with his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie. Wilde spent the last three years of his life in France before dying penniless and alone in Paris.

Wilde’s tomb at Père Lachaise cemetery became such a place of pilgrimage that the Irish Government had to pay for a glass screen to protect Jacob Epstein’s angel sculpture from lipstick kisses.

Visitors still stick little notes, covered with kisses, on the glass.

Most of the messages are by young people, Holland says: “Oscar Wilde was rebellious, at a time when the ‘r-word’ – rebellion, revolt, revolution – shook the foundations of the British empire. He was an individual at a time when conformity was the norm. He was a preacher of sensuality when it wasn’t talked about. And he kept his integrity. Those characteristics are irresistible to today’s youth.”

On a recent, Indian summer evening, 675 people who were involved in organising the exhibition raised a glass of Wilde’s favourite liquid to him in the Petit Palais.

Subtle Irishness

Ireland’s ambassador, Geraldine Byrne-Nason, said she was “deeply honoured to celebrate what I regard as Oscar’s true homecoming in Paris”.

Holland says his grandfather already paid his debt to France in 1995, when a hit production of An Ideal Husband saved the Théâtre Antoine from closure.

Now, he says: “Paris and Oscar are hand in hand, wooing the French public.”

Entering the exhibition is like walking into the fin-de-siècle décor of Oscar Wilde's life.

Blue and white lily wall-paper is reminiscent of the china Wilde bought when he proclaimed himself leader of the Aesthetic Movement on leaving Oxford.

We meet Wilde's mother, Jane Francesca "Speranza" Elgee, who wrote On the Bondage of Women in 1893, to demand that women be granted high public office.

“Wilde’s Irishness was more subtle than his mother’s,” Holland says.

“In his very first letter to Speranza, which we have in the exhibition, he asks ‘Have you written to Aunt Warren on the green notepaper?’ His mother’s sister had married a British officer. The green paper was a provocation . . . Even as a child, he loved his mother’s subversiveness. Later, he wrote to William Gladstone, to thank him for promoting Home Rule.”

As a way of social climbing, Wilde wrote sonnets to Lily Langtry, the mistress of the prince of Wales, Ellen Terry, the great English actress, and Sarah Bernhardt.

When the French actress arrived in London with the Comédie-Francaise, Wilde brought her an armful of lilies.

John Singer Sargent's magnificent portrait Ellen Terry as Lady MacBeth hangs in the exhibition, alongside a Wilde poem alleging she purchased her costume in Byzantium.

The show also includes pre-Raphaelite masterpieces that Wilde wrote about in his early career as an art critic.

Wilde realised early the importance of being famous.

In 1882, he sailed to New York, where the photographer Napoleon Sarony shot sepia pictures that were used to publicise a year-long lecture tour across the United States.

Some 13 of Sarony’s original photographs have been brought together, for the first time.

Better understanding

A character in The Portrait of Dorian Gray quips that "when good Americans die they go to Paris".

Wilde used the money earned in America to return to his literary friendships in Paris, and then to marry Constance Lloyd, who was half-Irish.

Their sons Cyril and Vyvyan – Merlin Holland’s father – were born within two and a half years.

Vyvyan would later describe in his autobiography how, after the trial, a Swiss hotelier turned Constance and her sons out because they carried the name of the “monster”.

She changed the name to Holland.

An oil portrait and photographs show Constance’s beauty. Correspondence makes clear that she and Wilde continued to love each other, despite his affair with Bosie.

When Oscar left prison, he sent Constance what she called “one of the most beautiful letters he ever wrote me, full of penitence”.

Shortly before her death, Holland says, his grandmother wrote to a friend, saying, “For the sake of the boys, I feel I must keep apart from him. But if I saw him now I think I should forgive everything. When I love somebody once, I love them always.’”

The calling card that the Marquess of Queensberry left for Wilde, calling him a “sodomite,” is displayed in a glass case.

Wilde sued for defamation, but the Marquess filed counter-charges and Wilde’s career came crashing down, as a fortune-teller had warned it would.

Two years of hard labour broke his health and spirit.

Four months after leaving prison, Wilde was briefly reunited with Bosie in Naples.

“The mere fact that he wrecked my life makes me love him,” Wilde wrote to his closest friend, Robbie Ross.

Sixteen years ago, exhibitions at the British Library and Barbican in London to mark the centenary of Wilde’s death in 2000, found no sponsors.

This exhibition was the brainchild of the Turkish business magnate and collector Omer Koc, who also financed it.

In 2000, Wilde “was still slightly sulphurous,” Holland says. “I think it has changed and continues to change. People love the fact that he has made us laugh for 100 years . . . If he brings people to a better understanding of different sexuality, he will have fulfilled a great role in the 21st century.”

Oscar Wilde: Insolence Incarnate is at the Petit Palais in Paris until January 15th. petitpalais.fr