As an author, poet and playwright, Oscar Wilde is known for his association with literature. But, Wilde had much to say about the visual and decorative arts, as well.

Explore how Wilde’s works were influenced by art and artists during “Oscar Wilde and the Visual Arts,” a lecture led by Nicholas Frankel, at 4:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 30, in the Class of 1941 Lecture Room in the University of Delaware’s Morris Library. This event is free and open to the public.

Wilde’s relationships with leading figures in the art world — notably, illustrators Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Ricketts; painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler; decorative artist Edward Burne-Jones; and literary critics John Ruskin, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds — were integral to his ideas.

In addition to those formative relationships, Wilde, himself, was the subject for important visual artworks by artists including Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, William Powell Frith, Robert Goodloe Harper Pennington, John Singer Sargent, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and, allegedly, Walter Sickert.

Wilde’s direct engagements with art and artists are important chiefly for their effects upon his practice as an imaginative writer. During the lecture, Frankel will trace the effects of fine art on Wilde’s poetry, fiction and criticism, and demonstrate the significance decorative and book arts had on his published works.

Frankel also will touch upon Wilde’s early quarrels with Whistler over the respective merits of painting and literature while showing how Wilde came to see language as something increasingly iconic and inherently visual. Those attending will see how his books of the early 1890s, including The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Sphinx and the famous English edition of Salome — illustrated by Beardsley — showcase the full flowering of Wilde’s interest in the visual arts.

A professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, Frankel’s research and teaching focus is in 19th century British literature. A Wilde scholar, Frankel is the author of several books on the British author including the recently published biography Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (2017). His previous books include The Annotated Importance of Being Earnest (2015), The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition (2011) and Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (2000).

The lecture is sponsored by the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection; the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press and the departments of Art History, English and Women and Gender Studies.