Oscar Wilde Famous and Infamous This Week at LiveAuctionTalk.com
Rosemary McKittrick is a storyteller. Her weekly art, antiques and collectibles column brings the past to life.

SANTE FE, NM, May 16, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- "Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, notorious," he said. No one understood the power of promise better than Wilde.

He had achieved his goal of being famous and notorious.

Playwright. Novelist. Poet. Essayist. Editor. Raconteur. Fashion icon. Hedonist. Change agent. Oscar Wilde was a study in contrasts.

His fame was seemingly unstoppable in late Victorian England. What he couldn't stop was England's Victorian prudery regarding his sexual preference.

"Some said my life was a lie but I always knew it to be the truth; for like the truth it was rarely pure and never simple;" he said.

Wilde's lifestyle and humor made him the perfect spokesman for Aestheticism, the late-19th century English movement advocating art for art's sake.

He gained fame in the theatre world between 1892 and 1895 with a series of popular plays. Wilde died of meningitis in 1900. He rests in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

His stories, essays, letters, collections of epigrams, and other writings are still popular today.

On Feb. 11, Swann Galleries, New York, featured a signed photo of Oscar Wilde in its Signed Historical Photographs from the Jerome Shochet Collection sale. The cabinet card, half-length portrait in a typical pose with flower in his lapel sold for $12,000.

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