Item 19: Oscar Wilde (undated)

Even before meeting Oscar Wilde through the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree—Max’s half-brother—young Beerbohm was under the spell of Wilde’s exquisitely witty prose in Intentions (1891). He remained so throughout his undergraduate years at Merton College, Oxford. Decades later (probably around 1920), Beerbohm returned to Wilde as a subject, picturing him in the early 1880s, near the start of his career as a global celebrity. In those days, Wilde was an advocate for Aestheticism and for Beauty (capital “B”). That was how Beerbohm chose to draw him: as feminine and almost pretty, softened in memory by the haze of both cigarette smoke clouds and the passage of time.