A Picture is a Purely Decorative Thing - Essays and Excerpts on The Arts

Oscar Wilde

Description

“A Picture is a Purely Decorative Thing” is a brand new collection of essays and excerpts on the subject of The Arts written by Oscar Wilde. Contents include: “The Artist”, “The English Renaissance of Art”, “An Exposure of Naturalism”, “Sculpture at The Arts and Crafts”, “House Decoration”, “The Poetry of Archæology”, “The Art of Archæology”, “Art and the Handicraftsman”, “Mr. Morris on Tapestry”, “Lecture to Art Students”, “The Relation of Dress to Art”, “London Models”, “Pen, Pencil and Poison”, “Printing and Printers”, etc. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish poet and playwright who became one of the most popular in London during the 1880s and 1890s. Well-known for his sharp wit and extravagant attire, Wilde was a proponent of aestheticism and wrote in a variety of forms including poetry, fiction, and drama. He was famously imprisoned for homosexual acts from 1895 to 1897 and died at the age of 46, just three years after his release. A fantastic collection of interesting and thought-provoking essays not to be missed by those with an interest in the work and mind of this seminal literary figure. Other notable works by this author include: “Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890), “Salome” (1891), and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (1895). Read & Co. Great Essays is proudly publishing this brand-new collection of classic essays complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of Oscar Wilde.

Sujets

• Bookbinding
• What Is Art?

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 08 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528769952
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A picture is a purely decorative thing
ESSAYS AND EXCERPTS on the Arts
By
OSCAR WILDE





Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Great Essays
This edition is published by Read & Co. Great Essays, an imprint of Read & Co.
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Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk


"Art never expresses anything but itself."
— O scar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1891


Contents
Oscar Wilde
THE ARTIST
THE ENGLISH RENAIS SANCE OF ART
AN EXPOSURE O F NATURALISM
SCULPTURE AT THE ART S AND CRAFTS
HOUS E DECORATION
THE POETRY O F ARCHÆOLOGY
THE ART O F ARCHÆOLOGY
ART AND THE HA NDICRAFTSMAN
MR. MORRIS ON TAPESTRY
LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS
THE RELATION OF DRESS TO ART
L ONDON MODELS
PEN, PENCI L AND POISON
PRINTING AND PRINTERS
THE BEAUTIES OF BOOKBINDING
THE CLOSE OF THE ART S AND CRAFTS
ENGLI SH POETESSES




Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. His parents were successful Dublin intellectuals, and Wilde became fluent in French and German early in life. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and subsequently won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was heavily influenced by John Ruskin and Walter Pate. Wilde proved himself to be an outstanding classicist. After university, he moved to London and became involved with the fashionable cultural and social circles of the day. At the age of just 25 he was well-known as a wit and a dandy, and as a spokesman for aestheticism — an artistic movement that emphasized aesthetic values ahead of socio-political themes — he undertook a lecture tour to the United States in 1882, before eventually returning to London to try his hand at journalism. It was also around this time that he produced most of his well-known sh ort fiction.
In 1891, Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel. Reviewers criticised the novel's decadence and homosexual allusions, although it was popular nonetheless. From 1892, Wilde focussed on playwriting. In that year, he gained commercial and critical success with Lady Windermere's Fan, and followed it with the comedy A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895). Then came Wilde's most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest – a farcical comedy which cemented his artistic reputation and is now seen as his masterpiece.
In 1895, the Marquess of Queensbury, who objected to his son spending so much time with Wilde because of Wilde's flamboyant behaviour and reputation, publicly insulted him. In response, Wilde brought an unsuccessful slander suit against him. The result of this inability to prove slander was his own trial on charges of sodomy, and the revealing to the transfixed Victorian public of salacious details of Wilde's private life followed. Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years of hard labour.
Wilde was released from prison in 1897, having suffered from a number of ailments and injuries. He left England the next day for the continent, to spend his last three years in penniless exile. He settled in Paris, and didn't write anymore, declaring “I can write, but have lost the joy of writing.” Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on in November of 1900, converting to Catholicism on h is deathbed.


THE ARTIST
ONE evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image of The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment . And he went forth into the world to look for bronze. For he could think onl y in bronze.
But all the bronze of the whole world had disappeared, nor anywhere in the whole world was there any bronze to be found, save only the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that endure th for Ever .
Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands, fashioned, and had set it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved in life. On the tomb of the dead thing he had most loved had he set this image of his own fashioning, that it might serve as a sign of the love of man that dieth not, and a symbol of the sorrow of man that endureth for ever. And in the whole world there was no other bronze save the bronze of this image.
And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great furnace, and gave it to the fire.
And out of the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that endureth for Ever he fashioned an image of The Pleasure that abideth f or a Moment .
An E xcerpt from Poems in Prose , 1894


THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART
The English Renaissance of Art was delivered as a lecture for the first time in the Chickering Hall, New York, on January 9, 1882. A portion of it was reported in the New York Tribune on the following day and in other American papers subsequently. Since then this portion has been reprinted, more or less accurately, from time to time, in unauthorised editions.
There are in existence no less than four copies of the lecture, the earliest of which is entirely in the author’s handwriting. The others are type-written and contain many corrections and additions made by the author in manuscript. These have all been collated and the text here given contains, as nearly as possible, the lecture in the original form as delivered by the author during his tour in the Un ited States.
Among the many debts which we owe to the supreme æsthetic faculty of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any abstract definition of beauty—any such universal formula for it as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century—still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is possible.
I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent expressio n of beauty.
It has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought, and again as a mere revival of mediæval feeling. Rather I would say that to these forms of the human spirit it has added whatever of artistic value the intricacy and complexity and experience of modern life can give: taking from the one its clearness of vision and its sustained calm, from the other its variety of expression and the mystery of its vision. For what, as Goethe said, is the study of the ancients but a return to the real world (for that is what they did); and what, said Mazzini, is mediævalism but in dividuality?
It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit, that springs the art of the nineteenth century in England, as from the marriage of Faust and Helen of Troy sprang the beautiful bo y Euphorion.
Such expressions as ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ are, it is true, often apt to become the mere catchwords of schools. We must always remember that art has only one sentence to utter: there is for her only one high law, the law of form or harmony—yet between the classical and romantic spirit we may say that there lies this difference at least, that the one deals with the type and the other with the exception. In the work produced under the modern romantic spirit it is no longer the permanent, the essential truths of life that are treated of; it is the momentary situation of the one, the momentary aspect of the other that art seeks to render. In sculpture, which is the type of one spirit, the subject predominates over the situation; in painting, which is the type of the other, the situation predominates over the subject.
There are two spirits, then: the Hellenic spirit and the spirit of romance may be taken as forming the essential elements of our conscious intellectual tradition, of our permanent standard of taste. As regards their origin, in art as in politics there is but one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of expression. Yet, I think that in estimating the sensuous and intellectual spirit which presides over our English Renaissance, any attempt to isolate it in any way from in the progress and movement and social life of the age that has produced it would be to rob it of its true vitality, possibly to mistake its true meaning. And in disengaging from the pursuits and passions of this crowded modern world those passions and pursuits which have to do with art and the love of art, we must take into account many great events of history which seem to be the most opposed to any such artis tic feeling.
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