![]() 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. As with many of her paintings, she has eschewed any reference to the setting so that the focus is solely on the figure and her paint technique. In the painting of Wilde, also based on a nineteenth-century photograph, Dumas has used a limited palette, with bursts of yellow colour on Wilde’s gloves and green on his cravat. Bosie is wearing a yellow jacket and dark tie, and appears to both look at the viewer and over to his left so that, when hung to the left of the Oscar Wilde painting, he appears to be glancing at his lover. in 1893 of Douglas with Wilde, but has translated the monochrome tones of the photograph into a composition of pink and grey hues, with blue under-drawing appearing in sections across the canvas. Dumas has based her painting on a photograph taken by Gillman and Co. Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) is significantly smaller in size than Oscar Wilde (Tate T15179), but the heads of each subject are scaled similarly, with Bosie’s face occupying almost the entire frame of the painting. ![]() Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) is one of a pair of paintings by Marlene Dumas, both dated 2016, that separately depict the nineteenth-century writer and commentator Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945), also known as ‘Bosie’, and his lover, the writer, dramatist, poet and cultural figure Oscar Wilde (1854–1900).
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