From his room in West London he could hear the approach of footsteps on the street below. The birds were stirring, but Oscar Wilde was yet to sleep. In this part of the city, one was used to waking to the cry of foxes as they staked their claim to the new garden squares, but Wilde had more pressing reasons for insomnia in May 1895.
Before him appeared two gentlemen, one markedly shorter than the other. Both tottered slightly through intoxication, evidently wedded to their wakefulness. The taller man was an artist called Charles Conder, the shorter, propped on a cane, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great artist of La Belle Époque and 160th anniversary of the birth of the Irish writer. While the spirits of both men have lived on in their work, Lautrec’s efforts to keep Wilde’s flame alight in the face of adversity tend to be relegated to footnotes. Indeed, their most unlikely friendship has as good as vanished from memory.
Lautrec visited Wilde in London shortly before he was due in court to face charges for ‘gross indecency’, which amounted to accusations of homosexual activity. A trial heard a few months previously had resulted in a hung jury. To bide the time before the retrial, Wilde had taken up residency where he could, at the house of friends at 2 Courtfield Gardens.
The property was large, and to Lautrec, visiting from Paris, it would have epitomized the British fashion for updating classical architecture. The terrace, which still stands, yawns five stories into the sky. The house in which Wilde was staying had been built just two decades earlier, in line with the construction of Earl’s Court Station a few minutes’ walk away.
Once, with the aid of his stick, the disabled Lautrec had made it up to its top floor, he found Wilde dressed in a white chemise, blue cravat, and blue-grey jacket. His hair was as immaculate as when they had last met, jaw-length, centrally parted. Forgetting the tension of the hour, or determined to make it more bearable, Lautrec asked to draw him. Wilde refused. Writing some decades later, a friend of Lautrec explained that Wilde had been too restless to sit for him. Upon returning to his hotel to sleep off the night, the artist decided to sketch him from memory, close to life-size.
More majestic than any of his finery was the way Lautrec painted Wilde’s lips – red and wonderfully puckered, as though he wanted to kiss himself. ‘Lips are reddest before the night’, wrote Wilde as a Classics student at Magdalen College, Oxford, but Lautrec set his rosy mouth against the early morning sky, such as he might have observed on his stroll back to his hotel room. Late May 1895 was warm and dry, and Lautrec’s sky was full of its promise. The sun was rising not over new Courtfield Gardens, however, but over the more recognisable buildings on the Thames’ north bank. St Stephen’s Tower was ticking forebodingly over Wilde’s right shoulder, like an angry parent.
Wilde was only forty-one, but Lautrec showed how quickly he had aged. His face, always fleshy, was weighed down by jowl and bag. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the dandy convinces his acquaintances that he is far younger than his years. Wilde was not about to fool anyone when he erroneously gave his age as thirty-nine in a court appearance earlier that year.
During his own trials, he would find himself confessing the whereabouts of a male brothel ‘near the Houses of Parliament’. If the decaying portrait in the novel mirrored the manners of the ageless aesthete, then Lautrec’s portrait of the dandyish Wilde cut dolefully close to real life that year.
The two men had probably met in Paris in the early 1890s, where Wilde’s visits included walks in the Bois de Boulogne and leisurely lunches at Café de la Paix, the fashionable establishment that glows with life in paintings by Antoine Blanchard. The mysterious heroine of Wilde’s The Sphinx without a Secret also sat here. Lautrec, by now recognised as a leading painter of France’s booming café culture, was no doubt enjoying the same scenes.
Despite being the Irishman abroad, Wilde knew as well as Lautrec the capital’s artistic hotspots. In his 1891 novel, Basil Hallward hopes to exhibit his painting of Dorian Gray in Georges Petit’s collection on rue de Sèze. When Lautrec visited the same gallery two years later, he saw the japonisme prints that would inspire his vibrant lithographs of French nightlife.
As their art revealed, they were sufficiently involved in one another’s social circles by the spring of Wilde’s downfall. The day Wilde was arrested in London, 6 April 1895, Lautrec received a letter concerning a commission for two screens for a funfair for La Goulue, the vamp of Montmartre who appeared in several of Lautrec’s poster designs.
News of Wilde’s arrest might not have reached him when he chose to paint him into one of these scenes, his Moorish Dance, which he completed the same month. As La Goulue of his painting raised her diaphanous skirts to the accompaniment of a jangly piano, Oscar Wilde, smart in a top-hat, shared the spectator ground with Lautrec and mutual friends, including the art critic and activist Félix Fénéon, and show dancer Jane Avril, who was dressed in luscious velvet. Both Fénéon and La Goulue (real name Louise Weber) confessed that they had not posed for this picture, but Wilde would not ordinarily have looked out of place in such a setting.
The writer never met La Goulue, but Jane Avril later recalled enjoying Parisian nightlife with him. Although Lautrec’s inclusion of Wilde in the excited audience might at first have been construed as untimely considering his legal position in England, for Lautrec it was perhaps the beginning of something new.
As one of Britain’s finest poets, playwrights, and novelists, and as a man of social standing, Wilde would have been justified in expecting someone to speak out against his accusers, even if the man at their helm was the eccentric Marquess of Queensberry, father of his long-term lover Lord Alfred (‘Bosie’) Douglas.
Wilde had made the tragic mistake of attempting to indict the Marquess for ‘criminal libel’ when he left him a note accusing him of ‘posing as a sodomite’. The attempt had failed, leaving Queensberry thirsty for vengeance.
Fénéon, the critic whom Lautrec painted next to Wilde in his Moorish Dance, published a defence of the writer. The article, written for the May 1895 issue of Fénéon’s journal La Revue Blanche, was entitled ‘L’Assault malicieux’. Its author, Paul Adam, argued that homosexuality was a less destructive force than adultery. Although Wilde pledged his innocence in court, in his first trial he used his classical education to assert the beauty and purity of an intellectual relationship between an older and younger man. Lautrec did not object to the use of a sketch he had made of Wilde as an illustration for Adam’s article.
What he did mind was the drawing falling into the wrong hands. In a letter from June that year, he reprimands Lucien Muhlfeld of La Revue Blanche, ‘you thoughtlessly turned my Oscar Wilde plate over to a half-cocked schoolboy magazine’, after apologizing for the mix-up to his acquaintance Édouard Dujardin, editor of the lesser rag. Lautrec, if not Wilde’s closest friend, respected him enough to lend him his carefully orchestrated public support.
Wilde was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, but Lautrec continued to support him. His artistic studies of the writer cluster around the dates of his sentencing and imprisonment. Lautrec was, it seems, doing all he could to maintain Wilde’s presence, even when he was locked away in bleak Reading Gaol, where ‘every day/Crawled like a weed-clogged wave.’
As Wilde toiled in squalor, Lautrec saw to it that he would be the one to illustrate the programme for Salomé, a play Wilde had written in French whilst in Paris in 1891. The performance had been planned for 1892, but was delayed four years after it was refused a licence. One of the most contentious aspects of it was Wilde’s direction that Salomé should perform the ‘dance of the seven veils’ in her bid to procure the head of John the Baptist.
The dance was notoriously erotic. It figured prominently in Joris-Karl Huysmans’sAgainst Nature, a book Wilde described as ‘poisonous’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Huysmans, like Lautrec, was a regular observer at the Folies-Bergère, and described in lurid detail what Wilde resigned to a laconic stage note:
[Salomé] begins the lubricious dance which is to awaken the slumbering senses of the ageing Herod; her breasts rise and fall, their nipples hardening under the friction of her whirling necklaces; the diamonds adhering to her moist skin glitter …Echoing the literature of Huysmans and Wilde, Toulouse-Lautrec made a lithograph of celebrated dancer Loie Fuller dancing with veils at the Folies-Bergère – a mere waif beneath vast billowing sails with lives of their own.
For the play’s programme, he chose instead to create a simple black and white lithograph depicting, with cravat and puckered lips, Oscar Wilde. He was once more standing against the backdrop of St Stephen’s Tower, with the Houses of Parliament looming more prominently than before. Lautrec could hardly have issued a more flagrant message. Westminster had put Wilde away, but across the Channel, where people seldom looked any more kindly on homosexuality, a big-hearted Frenchman was ensuring that the playwright was neither out of sight nor out of mind as the curtain was raised on Salomé in 1896.
If these efforts played their part in maintaining Wilde’s spirit while he was in jail, Lautrec did not abandon him when he was finally released in 1897. The Irishman returned to Paris incognito, where he resided in hotels using a nom de plume.
He was spotted in an overcoat and hat drinking with Lautrec at the Irish and American Bar. In 1898, he was again enjoying Lautrec’s company at Café de la Galette, where an artist, Ricardo Opisso, drew him in the presence of showgirl Yvette Guilbert.
In another picture, Opisso drew Lautrec and Wilde sitting side by side on a banquette. They were as odd a pair as could be imagined, the one dark and bearded with a cane the length of his stunted legs, the other fair, almost cumbersome in his largeness. But as Opisso had realized, for all their physical differences they were at once united as outsiders. Well born, but marred by deformity and – in the eyes of the law and common testimony – unnatural perversion, Lautrec and Wilde had found in each other the fascination that fuelled their art.
Wilde remained anxious that Lautrec should read his latest work. Following a breakdown and worsening alcoholism, Lautrec was confined to a sanatorium for the first part of 1899, but in July travelled to Le Havre, on the north-west coast of France. Perhaps by coincidence, Wilde was also enjoying a sojourn there that month.
Returning to Paris soon after, he wrote to his publisher to request that he send Lautrec a small paper copy of An Ideal Husband, which was to be published in book form that summer. The extravagance set against moral decay that characterised The Picture of Dorian Gray chimed better with Toulouse-Lautrec’s world than did the buttoned-up society of Wilde’s latest publication, but its setting may have evoked an earlier memory. If Lautrec could not picture Grosvenor Square, where Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern host their extravagant dinner party in the play, then he could at least transport himself back to smart Courtfield Gardens, where he had called on Wilde on the eve of his sentence.
Lautrec may not have seen much of Wilde after receiving the copy of his book. In late autumn the following year, aged just forty-six, Wilde passed away in Paris from cerebral meningitis, thought to have been a complication of syphilis or an ear injury he sustained in prison. Lautrec, himself suffering from syphilis and a sickly liver, survived him by less than a year. He had left few words to explain the nature of his friendship with Oscar Wilde, quite content that even 150 years after his birth, his art would speak for itself.