The Exquisite Life of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was the central literary figure of the fin de siecle, and, in his own words, 'a man who stood in symbolic relation to his times'. Celebrated first as a poet and writer of brilliant essays and charming fables, he was also a perceptive critic and an incisive moral and political thinker. Today, however, his fame rests mainly on his novel of artistic decadence, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the ever-popular The Importance of Being Earnest. From his first notoriety in the 1880s when he carried the message of the aesthetic movement to America, and through to the height of his fame as a wit raconteur in the dizzy social whirl of London in the early 1890s, he had the world at his feet. But then it all went tragically wrong: following his love-affair with 'Bosie', the young and aristocratic Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde was persecuted by Douglas's, father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was put on trial for homosexual offenses, and sentenced to two years imprisonment in Reading Gaol. He spent the last, tragic years of his life in France, supported by a handful of loyal friends, but shunned by those who had courted him in the days of his glory.

Stephen Calloway is a curator of paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.