The Scandal of the Tomb of Oscar Wilde

Photo by Frederick Henry Evans (1853-1943)

This photo of the sculpture for the tomb was taken by Frederick Henry Evans in Jacob Epstein’s Chelsea studio in 1912.

OSCAR Wilde died in Paris on November 30, 1900.  After his deathbed conversion to Catholicism, a funeral mass took place at Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Oscar was then buried at Bagneux cemetery, five kilometres south of Paris.  Nine years later, his body was moved to Père Lachaise, the final resting place of fellow artists such as Colette, Edit Piaf, Balzac, Chopin, Bizet, Proust, Dumas and Moliere.  But the Oscar Wilde tomb, designed and finished in 1912 by a young American sculptor, Jacob Epstein, caused an immediate scandal due the genitalia on the winged figure.  The authorities had the tomb “placed under arrest”, covered in canvas and guarded by the police while the Parisian public and the city’s officials debated what to do about it.  Even in death Oscar continued to be a divisive character.

 

In February 1898, Oscar Wilde arrived in Paris and installed himself in the Hotel de Nice on the Rue Des Beaux Arts on the Left Bank. His arrival coincided with the publication of the last thing he ever wrote, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The epic poem was an instant success and sold extremely well. Despite this, Oscar was always short of money and spent the next year visiting friends around Europe in places such as Cannes, Genoa, and Switzerland. In the late summer of 1899, he moved back to Paris and into the Hotel D’Alsace, again on the Rue Des Beaux Arts and registered under the name Sebastian Melmouth. This hotel was run by the genial Jean Dupoirier who offered extended credit. The cost for the room was 90 francs a month, which included breakfast and lunch.

In an interview in 1933, the hotel owner told a journalist: “I used to bring him breakfast at 11am, coffee, bread and butter. He couldn’t stand the chocolate. So he would get up and write his letters, or read a little. At half past one or two, I brought him his lunch, which was remarkably modest: a lamb chop and two eggs, usually boiled. He ate the same things every day, but always insisted that I bring them myself. At 5 o’clock in the evening, he crossed the Seine and went to the Café de la Régence where he had an aperitif. In winter, he was always careful to wrap himself up to his ears in a huge overcoat. Dressed this way, he looked huge.

(Foyer of L’Hotel today, formerly Hotel D’Alsace)

“He seemed perfectly resigned to his existence and accepted events with good humour. But he drank a lot. Here at the hotel, he was already getting through four bottles of brandy a week. It was not ordinary brandy. It was Courvoisier, very good and very old, that he sent me to buy for him in the Avenue de l’Opéra. At that time, this alcohol cost 28 francs a bottle, but I doubt that you can now find similar for less than 200 francs. In any case, I couldn’t afford to buy it for myself. Then almost every night he would go to the cafes and stay there until two or three in the morning. His habits were, moreover, extremely regular.”

Due to an abscess in his ear, which may have had its origins from a fall while in prison, together with his enormous alcohol intake, Oscar’s health began to deteriorate in the autumn of 1900. On October 10, he had an operation on his ear in his hotel room. Medics believe it could have been a paracentesis of the eardrum or the removal of a polypus. It would be ironic if he had been submitted to the then fashionable “Wilde’s incision” for mastoid infection; a procedure introduced by and named after his father Sir William Wilde.

On October 29, Oscar was well enough to get up and go out for a cab drive in the Bois de Boulogne with his great friend Robbie Ross. They stopped all along the way at cafes so Oscar could drink absinthe. Ross then went to visit his family who were staying in the south of France. On November 28, Ross returned to Paris in response to an urgent telegram and found that Oscar was near the end. Oscar Wilde died at 1.50pm on November 30, 1900. He was just 46 years old. The cause of death was recorded as cerebral meningitis. But for decades it was believed that he had, in fact, died of syphilis. However, recent examination of the evidence by a group of US physicians has come to the conclusion that “a middle ear infection and its subsequent spread to his brain may appear to be the best medical explanation for Oscar Wilde’s death”. A curious coincidence is that his 14-year-old son, Vyvyan Holland, who grew up to become an author and translator, required ear surgery for mastoid infection only eight weeks after his father’s death.

Mr Dupoirier said: “In the end, he had fallen very ill and had to undergo an operation. But we already felt that it was the end. So he begged me to keep him company; he didn’t want anyone else near him. But he was so heavy that I couldn’t get him out of bed on his own. I therefore used the services of a nurse who came to take care of him. In the end, he converted to Catholicism and the parish priest of St-Germain-des-Prés came to visit him. I used to spend the night sitting in an armchair next to him because he didn’t want me to leave him. He was very patient, despite the suffering he endured. Every now and then I gave him a morphine shot. For the last few days he lost his sight, and we read him verses aloud. He died on November 30. My daughter, who is very interested in literature, tells me that they now give lessons on him at the Sorbonne. I never thought he would achieve such notoriety when he was with me.”

(Oscar’s final hotel bill made out to Mr Melmouth)

Eight years after the death, on December 1, 1908, a dinner was held in the Ritz hotel in London to honour Robbie Ross. Robbie had been the executor of Wilde’s estate and he had just completed the winding up of Oscar’s affairs after paying off the many creditors. He had managed to track down and purchase the rights to all of Wilde’s texts, which had been sold off along with his possessions when Wilde was declared bankrupt. Among the 200 guests at the celebration dinner was the art critic and politician Sir Martin Conway, the writers Somerset Maugham and HG Wells and the painter William Rothenstein.

Ross now planned to move Oscar’s body to Pere Lachaise. A few days before the Ritz dinner, Ross was given £2,000 (£250,000 in 2021) by Mrs James Carew, the mother of Sir Coleridge Kennard, to create a suitable monument for the playwright. Carew had given the money on “the condition that the work should be carried out by the brilliant young sculptor Mr Jacob Epstein”.

(Epstein in his studio in Chelsea, photo by Frederick Henry Evans)

Jacob Epstein was a 28-year-old New Yorker, who had just caused a stir in London with his very first commission, the exterior of the British Medical Association on the Strand. His sculptures, which featured naked figures, had caused outrage from the clergy and prompted endless debate in the Fleet Street newspapers.

The commission to create a tomb to Oscar Wilde came as a shock to Epstein. In fact, when he first heard the news, he thought someone was playing a joke on him. Epstein had not been asked if he was free or even willing to carry out the work. Nevertheless, he accepted.

He realised the enormity of the task and took a long time to begin the work. Epstein said: “It was an exceedingly difficult task from the point of view of pleasing people (not that I try to please anyone but myself), for Wilde’s enthusiastic admirers would have liked a Greek youth standing by a broken column, or some scene from his works such as the Young King, which was suggested many times, while to his detractors he was wholly repellent, deserving of no monument. Once again, the stage was set for a discussion that was centred altogether outside the sphere of sculpture. In addition to these things, cemetery sculpture rarely departs from certain very fixed forms, and in Latin countries in particular there is, far more than England, a “cult of the dead”, so that anything original was certain to give offence of some kind.”

The monument began as a 20-tonne block of Hopton Wood limestone bought by Epstein when he saw it at a quarry in Derbyshire, England. The huge block was transported to London by train. It was placed on a cart and then dragged by 12 horses to Epstein’s studio in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea; ironically less than a mile from Tite Street, where Oscar had lived just 15 years before with his wife Constance and their two children. Epstein received the commission in December 1908 and it was finally completed (except for a few on-site finishing touches) and unveiled to the press in his studio on June 1, 1912. He decided on a naked winged angel, based on the 9th-century Assyrian bulls that Epstein had sketched at the British Museum. It reflects the artist’s interest in Middle Eastern and Egyptian art, and refers, perhaps, to Wilde’s poem The Sphinx. The accompanying plinth was created by Charles Holden and the inscription was carved by Joseph Cribb. The work was received favourably by the British critics. Epstein said that the piece took nine months of continuous work. Therefore, he did not start work on the sculpture until September 1911.

Stephen Gardiner, the British architect and Epstein biographer, said: “It is a work that broke with every convention and defied every established rule of taste and style. Visitors to the studio, one imagines there were many, must have been amazed or bewildered by the wild, extraordinary creature they saw emerging.”

(Photo by Frederick Henry Evans in Epstein’s studio)

When it was completed, the tomb was transported to France. Epstein ran into trouble right away, having rejected its status as a work of art, French customs placed an import duty of £120 (£15,000 in 2021) on the monument for the value of the stone. Friends tried to help; George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and Sir John Lavery were among those who signed a petition asking the French to have the tomb exempted from the tax. The French authorities would not be moved and the tax was paid after some delay.

Epstein, already annoyed by the red tape and the costs, made his way to Père Lachaise one morning to see the sculpture just after it was delivered. He had a little work to do still but he was looking forward to saying goodbye to the project. But there was worse to come. The reaction of the cemetery authorities and the Prefect of the Seine on the seeing the tomb was the same. They were horrified at the genitalia on the sculpture. Epstein wanted to put some finishing touches on the head, but found that the tomb was covered with tarpaulin and was being guarded by a gendarme.

The officer told Epstein that the tomb had been banned and he was not to touch it. The artist in his not-so-great French pleaded with the gendarme, but it was to no avail. The officer said that he was sorry, but he had his orders and “the tomb was under arrest”. Epstein returned to the cemetery that evening to work on the tomb after the policeman had left and he found that the testicles on the statue had been covered by plaster “to protect public decency”. Epstein was shocked. Here, in supposed liberal France, of all places, his art was being suppressed. The monument was under police surveillance and Epstein found he could not continue his work.

(Photo of tomb in 1912, photographer possibly Henri Roger-Viollet who was famous for his Alfred Dreyfus portrait)

The debate raged for months in the French newspapers. Eventually, a compromise was reached with the cemetery authorities. Under Robert Ross’ instruction, and to the utter horror of the artist, a bronze plaque similar to the shape of a butterfly was placed upon the testicles of the monument. Then in early August 1914 the occultist and poet Aleister Crowley broke into the cemetery at night with his friends and unveiled the tomb and held a ceremony. A few weeks later Crowley approached Epstein in a café in Paris, and around his neck was the bronze butterfly. He informed Epstein that his work was now on display as he intended.

The row might have continued on for years but by the autumn of 1914, the French authorities had bigger problems than a pair of sandstone testicles on a sculpture. The First World War was now raging and the German army was on the march.

Robbie Ross died in 1918 aged 49 and in 1950, on the 50th anniversary of Oscar’s death, an urn containing Robbie’s ashes was placed inside the Wilde tomb; the two friends together for eternity.

Oscar Wilde’s tomb is now the most visited in Père Lachaise. It sits near the graves of singer Edith Piaf, Irish designer and architect Eileen Gray and Oscar’s great friend, the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Jim Morrison of The Doors is also buried there. In 1961, someone broke off the sculpture’s testicles and the rumour around Paris was that an employee at the cemetery was using them as a paperweight.

In the 1990s, visitors started to kiss Oscar’s tomb and the sculpture soon became covered in lipstick, the oils of which began damaging the stone. The Office of Public Works in Ireland came to the rescue and the tomb is now considered an Irish monument abroad. The lipstick was removed, and a glass barrier erected to protect the structure. My first visit to the tomb was as a student in 1989 (see picture below) and I returned in November 2021 to take some photos and to write this piece. I am doing so from the very hotel room in which Oscar lived the last year of his life. A feature on my visit to L’Hotel will appear on this blog soon.

MARTIN BURNS, writing from Room 16, L’Hotel (formerly the Hotel D’Alsace), 13 Rue des Beaux Arts, Paris, November 2021.

Taken by Oscar Wilde House in November 2021. 

Taken in November 2021 by OWH. 

Taken in November 2021 by OWH. 

The author of this article visiting the tomb in 1989.