It’s taken a while but here at last are some of the pages from my series of illustrations based on The Picture of Dorian Gray, as featured in volume 2 of The Graphic Canon (“The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals”) edited by Russ Kick. I agreed with Russ not to run everything so [...]
Illustration by W. Graham Robertson (19o8). (No, this doesn’t concern Pink Floyd.) The chapter – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – is normally dropped because it jars, seems so strange compared to all the others and, to some, is vaguely homoerotic. [Kenneth] Grahame thought it essential. Thus Mark Brown discussing the curious seventh [...]
The Dance of Salomé (1885) by Robert Fowler. There’s always more to find… Unfortunately, Robert Fowler’s academic tableaux is a prime example of bad Victorian art: carefully modelled but overlit, dull and lifeless. And worst of all for the subject at hand: deeply unerotic. We’re supposed to believe that this woman wrapped in a bedsheet [...]
Tommies Bathing by John Singer Sargent (1918). More discoveries from recent image trawls. There’s been plenty of speculation about the sexuality of John Singer Sargent—see here, for example—and this watercolour depiction of relaxing British soldiers would seem to be another of his works which confirms an enchantment with the male form. Lust aside, it’s a [...]
I wrote recently about John Selwyn Gilbert’s television play, Aubrey, an hour-long drama concerning the artist Aubrey Beardsley. That play was only screened once in 1982 and, like most one-off studio works of the period, is unavailable on DVD. John Osborne’s 1976 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray is a welcome exception to this [...]
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