(Marlene Dumas, quoted in National Portrait Gallery press release, 2017, accessed August 2017.) I have painted Wilde before the entry into the prison that destroyed his life and tried to show him less as a proud author and more as a vulnerable man in relation to the young lover who led him to his tragic end. He was imprisoned at Reading for two years for loving the beautiful, untrustworthy ‘golden boy’ Bosie. As a writer of great wit, his combination of intelligence and humour is unique. I have been a fan of Oscar Wilde ever since I can remember. As well as being a record of the doomed relationship between the two men, and of the oppression of homosexuality within Britain, the two paintings are a personal response by Dumas to Wilde, a figure she has long admired: Dumas is interested in the way painting can replicate the intimacy and emotion of human relationships. While incarcerated Wilde wrote De Profundis (1897, published 1905), his love letter to Bosie and, upon his release in 1897, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). After evidence was uncovered of Wilde’s relationships with sex workers, he was arrested, convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years of hard labour in Reading Gaol. With encouragement from Bosie, Wilde sued for libel. In 1895 Bosie’s father, the Marquis of Queensberry, left a card at Wilde’s club that accused him of being a sodomite. From around 1891 to 1895 Wilde and Bosie were in a relationship at a time when male homosexuality was illegal. Unlike many of Dumas’s paintings, the titles of these two works directly refer to a specific sitter, drawing attention to the biography of the two figures. By treating each figure in a similar fashion, Dumas sets up an informal relationship between the subjects that suggests an intimacy at odds with the original photographic source material. When hung to the left of Oscar Wilde, Bosie appears to be glancing at his lover. Like the painting of Wilde, Dumas based the portrait on a nineteenth-century photograph of Douglas. Although the canvases differ dramatically in size, the heads of each subject are scaled similarly, with Bosie’s face occupying almost the entire frame of the smaller painting. The accompanying painting depicts the writer and commentator Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945), also known as ‘Bosie’. As with many of her paintings, Dumas removes any reference to the setting so that the focus is solely on the figure and her paint technique. The picture features a limited palette, with bursts of yellow colour on Wilde’s gloves and green on his cravat. Based on a full length black-and-white photograph taken by Napoleon Sarony in 1882, Dumas has enlarged the figure, so that Wilde appears larger than life-size, and cropped the composition just below his waist. Oscar Wilde is the larger of the two paintings and depicts the writer with his hands clasped and his gaze looking out of the canvas to his left. Oscar Wilde is one of a pair of paintings by Marlene Dumas, both dated 2016, that separately depict the writer, dramatist, poet and cultural figure Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) (Tate T14922).
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