Oscar Wilde and beyond

Beyond Oscar Wilde: Portraits of Late Victorian Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection" will run through Nov. 10 in the University Gallery in Old College.

The exhibit will feature more than 65 works from this major private collection of Victorian literature and art, including drawings, lithographs, watercolors, oils, photographs, books and illustrated letters that span the period 1870-1901.

Representations of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) were crucial to launching and sustaining his career in the world of the arts and also to determining his unhappy fate. Thus, historians often focus on the meaning and importance of Wilde's image, when discussing the late-19th-century British cultural milieu.

One of the highlights of this exhibition will be a previously unknown caricature of Wilde by Max Beerbohm. But, the items on view will go beyond Wilde, to consider a fuller range of images of male and female writers and artists, in both portraits and self-portraits, including a George Du Maurier portrait of George Eliot, the poet Algernon Swinburne's personal photograph album and self-portraits by Beerbohm, William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert and Rudyard Kipling.

A special reception, cosponsored by the University of Delaware Library, will be held at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 5, in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room in the Morris Library, and will include a public lecture on "Idealization, Romanticizing and Caricature in Late Victorian Portraiture" by Debra N. Mancoff, an art historian and scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She has lectured and written extensively on Victorian art and culture.

A reception in the University Gallery will be held after the lecture, with shuttle transportation provided from Morris Library to Old College.

A walking tour of the exhibition will be presented by Margaret D. Stetz, visiting associate professor of women's studies at the University of Delaware, at noon, Wednesday, Oct. 30. Stetz is a noted scholar in Victorian and women's studies and has lectured at numerous institutions in the U.S. and abroad.

The collector, Mark Samuels Lasner, also will be on hand Oct. 30 to discuss the works on view. A recognized expert on Victorian art and literature, he is the author of A Selective Checklist of the Published Work of Aubrey Beardsley (1995) and The Yellow Book: A Checklist and Index (1998), among other publications. He has organized, alone and with Stetz, exhibitions at Harvard University, the Grolier Club, Georgetown University and the University of Virginia.

Samuels Lasner, who serves on the boards of a number of bibliophile organizations, is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Delaware Library.