Copyright © 2020 by Wendy Waszut-Barrett
Much has been written about Oscar Wilde’s first visit to America in 1882. That spring, Wilde lectured at the Tabor Grand Opera House in Denver and later at the Tabor Opera House in Leadville. The event was advertised in the “Leadville Daily Herald” as “Oscar Wilde. The Great Apostle of Aesthetics in lecture on Art Decoration” (7 April 1882). On April 13, 1882, the house was packed when Wilde took the stage (Leadville Daily Herald, 6 April 1882). Before Wilde departed Leadville, a group of miners brought him to the bottom of Tabor’s Matchless Mine for a “banquet.” Wilde later commented, “The first course was whisky, the second course was whiskey and the third course was whiskey!” This story has been repeatedly told over time, with Wilde’s fancy attire and his alcoholic intake remaining the primary focus of each tale.
Wilde represents just one of the many speakers booked at performance venues during the nineteenth century; they all required painted settings. Just like musical performances and vaudeville acts, the stage was set with an appropriate scene for each event. For Wilde, it was an elaborate interior setting, decorated with fine pieces of china, vases and artworks.
Wilde’s appearance at both Denver and Leadville mentioned the used of an interior setting, complete with a balcony and distant landscape. This was a standard stock setting for each venue. In Denver, the stock setting at the Tabor Grand would have been painted by Henry C. Tryon. In Leadville, the interior setting for Wilde would have been painted by James E. Lamphere.
In the spring of 1882, Henry C. Tryon was working still working as a scenic artist at the Tabor Grand Opera House. By summer, he would venture farther west and work for the Salt Lake Theatre in Utah. During this time, Tryon published a series of articles about art and aesthetics in newspapers across the country. There are similarities between Tryon’s writings and Wilde’s lecture at the Tabor Grand. It makes me wonder if Tryon listened to Wilde’s lecture from the wings, or if he was in the audience at the Tabor Grand. I doubt that he would have missed it, especially considering the subject matter.
I located a very detailed article about Wilde’s lecture from when he was at the Tabor Grand. It was published on April 22, 1882, in the “Fort Collins Courier.” It includes a lovely description of Tryon’s stage setting for Wilde’s lecture. Here is the article in its entirety:
“The great aesthete has come and gone. Oscar Wilde has appeared at the Tabor Opera House. The apostle of English aestheticism has every reason to feel proud of his reception. The audience was a large and highly cultured one; in spite of the bad weather, there was scarcely a vacant seat in the house, outside the boxes. The gallery was crowded and no fault could be found with the behavior of the boys. Some twenty minutes before the lecturer appeared the curtain rose one of the finest stage settings that has ever been seen in the opera house.
There was an elegant background in beautiful dado designs and in subdued tints of white, pink and pale violet. Through the crimson curtains at the center of the stage, was a balcony and a glimpse of a pretty landscape. The furniture was in Eastlake and the floor was covered with Turkish carpets. The center of the stage was a large and beautiful calla lily standing in an elegant porcelain vase and resting on a small table. Under the table was a beautiful crown of many-colored flowers. On either side of the stage were elegant cabinets – of ebony holding vases, ports and various article of bric-a-brac, with quite a variety of pictures. A Japanese fire screen and several pictures on easels were set at other points about the stage. Hung above the stage was a beautiful blue and gold chandelier. The lecturer was late in appearing and the audience was getting impatient, when a small boy, one of the ushers, appeared and poured out a glass of water from a cut-glass decanter for Oscar’s benefit. It was nearly nine o’clock when Oscar finely appeared, coming with a slow step through the red curtains at the back of the stage. He came in so quickly that he was ready to commence his lecture before the audience were aware of his approach. But when once they realized that he was on the stage there was quite a flutter of applause all over the house.
Mr. Wilde is in appearance not so effeminate as some people would have the pubic believe. He is tall, with broad shoulders, and moves with the strong steady step of a coal-heaver. Whatever his ideas of beauty, he has not a beautiful gait and he is too strongly built for the esthetic costume to impress one favorably when he wears it. His general appearance is much like a cartoon displayed in the leading Sixteenth street clothing house. He wore a suit of very elegant dark velvet, which includes a cut-away coat, cut in circular form, knee breeches, low shoes and black stockings. At his neck was a Byron collar with a flossy white neck-handkerchief, while from his snow-shite shirt-front glittered a single cluster of diamonds. His hair was very straight and very long, falling in a dark brown mass over his shoulders and parted directly at the equator. His nose was decidedly long and aquiline, and the general contours of his face was sharp, especially his chin. The most beautiful and striking part of his face are the eyes which are a very deep blue and really beautiful. The forehead is given quite an intelligent appearance from his wearing his hair in such ling masses and parting in the middle. The mount is the most disagreeable feature on his face, being large enough to swallow the whole brood of Philistines. His hands were encased in white kids, the right hand being partially uncovered.
He speaks in a good, full round voice and uses no gestures. Portions of his lecture were really eloquent, especially the descriptions of cities and scenes in sunny Italy. That he is really an enthusiastic believer in what he says and that there was much truth in what he uttered no one will deny. There was no good reason, however, why a callow youth of not more than twenty-six summer should stand in a building which is a marvel of beautiful decoration elegant wood-carving, and which is not surpassed, if it is equaled, by any place of amusement in England, and say that we Americans display no taste for the beautiful in our public buildings. Perhaps, however, the great esthete does not comprehend the value of “taffy.”
He commenced without any form of introduction and without even addressed his audience as ladies and gentlemen. The substance of Mr. Wilde’s lecture was as follows:
In every nation and in every year there is produced a certain amount of artistic taste and artistic talent, Many people live as if there was no art or beauty in life. But this art and beauty in life is no accident. It is this beauty of decoration which we call art. Is it a thing born in luxury? Not so. It is a thing for all. Art is to the workman the value he places on his work. What we are suffering from in this age is work badly done. How shall we reform this? By giving the people noble and beautiful designs to work from. As soon as you give your people noble and beautiful designes to work you will have found better work. The real power to create work lies with the artisans, the people that work for you and make things for you. The great trouble in America is you give work over to mere machines. Until you change this you will find little true art.
The basis of our work in England is that we have brought together the handicraftsman and the artist. Think not that these can be isolated! They must work together. The school of sculpture in Athens and the school of painting in Venice kept the work in these countries at the head of the world.
All arts area fine arts. There is no art that is not open to the honor of decoration and the rules of beauty. You must seek out your decorative workman, your handicraftsman, and you must give him the right to his surroundings. The stateliness of architecture and the beauty of men and women on the streets must inspire the workman and artist. All the teachings in the world will be of no avail unless you surround him with those things which please ad delight him. Think of those things that inspired the artist at that Gothic school of Pisa. The artist saw brilliantly lighted palaces, arches and pillars of marble and porphyry. He saw noble knights with their glorious mantles flowing over their mail riding along in the sunlight. He saw groves of oranges and pomegranates, and through these groves he saw the most beautiful women that the world has ever known. Pure as lilies, faithful, noble and intellectual. Over all, ever present, ever near, that untroubled and sacred heaven which in those days of unquestioned faith was literally peopled with spirits. That was a school where the workman passing to his labor saw such wonderful things about him that he had them wrought in his mind as eternal principles never to be forgotten and there is much I think in beauty and nobility of dress. Without a beautiful national life all the arts must dies. People must dress, not in dull, sombre, unbeautiful costumes.
When I speak of Italy, I do not ask you to bring back the thirteenth century. The art we require is an art founded on all the inventions and improvements of the nineteenth century. We do not undervalue machinery. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness. When you find anything ugly, it was made by a bad workman.
Do not mistake the mere material machinery of civilization for civilization itself, Civilization will depend on the noble uses we are willing to mut its materials to. These things are merely noble if we use them nobly.
You must search out your workman. Give him the right surroundings and don’t put your designer in a colorless and barren atmosphere and ask him to produce beautiful things. You must have before him the best decorative work of Europe and America, Work with the artist with the same reverence, the same appreciation, the same love. There is not one of use that could not live with perfect contentment in a neat, plain room, with sunlight and books, No art is much better than bad art. Instead of feeling that art is indeed a science, we are apt to fly off to glaring colors, horrible to look upon. And you should have a museum; not of stuffed monkeys and giraffes, but you should bring together all the wonders of art in weaving, in painting, in pottery, in architecture and the metals.
In London, one of our strongholds of strength, is the South Kensington museum. You go there Sundays and you see the workmen going round examining every ornament, every specimen of beauty that men of past ages have wrought.
Color without tone is like music without harmony, mere discord. Perfect art should be like perfect music, every tone answering to another, as every chord answers to another in music. The most beautiful windows in England are always filled with the most gorgeous eastern embroideries. A Japanese artist will always impress you with having put on just the right colors and designs, when painting even a small fan or bit of lacquer.
One of the most absurd things that I ever saw was the young ladies painting moonlights on a bureau and sunlights on dinner plates. Some consideration of the use which the article is to be put should enter into the mind of the artist. It is well enough to have moonlights and sunlights, be we are not particularly pleased to dine off them. The imaginative artists will tale a plain piece of paper or strip of canvas and convert it into something else, whereas the decorator does not wish to cover up the article or change its purpose, but merely add to its beauty. These things and many others are what your schools of art should teach your young women. I do not think there was ever a real national school of art. Don’t mid what the schools of art in Europe are doing, but have an art of your own. Young civilizations should have the best art because youth should be more joyous and joy should have the purest ideas of beauty. Art requires a strong personal power in the individuals and has not usually flourished among the weak and feeble. All the great schools of the art have been under republics. The art of Athens and Venice was natural and healthy. If you want to know what the folly of a monarch will inflict on a national in the shape of art, look at France with the monstrous dragons and other horrible conceptions of design in the age of Louis XIV. We have lost the art from our life by the horrible character of our architecture.
If an ancient sculptor should ask me where he could find models for his art, I would show him men at the docks unloading a beautiful ship.
Wherever in your fields you find men driving cattle or women drawing water, there you will find models of beauty. Gods and goddesses. Kings and queens, were carved and painted by Greeks and Romans. But I think that in America you do not care as much for gods and goddesses, and still less for kings and queens. What you have daily before, what you love most dearly and believe in most fondly, that is where your art lies. No country can compare with America for its resources and beauty. If you build in marble, you must remember that it is a precious stone. A man has no right to build in marble unless he will use it nobly. One should either carve it in long lines of joyous decoration, or decorate it in colors and tints of real beauty, or else we should inlay it in a way that the people of Pisa did their palaces; otherwise we had better build in red brick, which is not without some beauty. Then there is no reason why you should not build in wood. I think, however, you paint your houses in the most horrible colors here in America. In no single house from New York to San Francisco did I see a single piece of wood that was worth the name. In Switzerland the little barefoot boy will produce carving that will make his father’s house wonderfully beautiful. I know nothing more ugly than modern jewelery. I don’t see why anybody wears it. I think people do not sufficiently remember that the time may come when the simple work of the handicraftsman will be all to tell our history. Gold has always been a rare thing in Europe, but for you gold is given in exhaustless measure. Gold is not given us, I think simply for speculation. Don’t leave your workman in gold in the background. Go to him and tell him what you like best in decoration and watch him as he draws it out in those magic threads of sunlight that are called gold-wire. In this way you will encourage your workmen. I would wish to see you have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful of think to be beautiful. Whatever art we are to have in the future must be democratic art. I do not mean by this that it must be rough. Art must no longer be the luxury of the rich or the amusement of the idle. It must enter into everyday life of the hard-working masses of the people. This is the reason that we in England put so much stress on decorative art.
You may ask whether are will do anything more than make our life beautiful for us? But art will do more than this. We in England wish our children to grow up to love the beautiful and good, and hate what is evil and ugly. Plato expressed this thought ages ago. The beauty of form and color even in the meanest vessels of the houses we live in will teach the boy to look into that divine harmony of materials life which lies all around us. One of the great faults of modern education is that it attempts to make all culture literary. It has been so much s that we, perhaps, have been lead sometimes to hate books and reading. Instead of teaching a boy that long list of battles of French and English kings that we have learned to call history, if we were to teach him more to use his hands in some of these beautiful and useful arts, we would thus teach him ore morality, for the lies of bad workman cannot be covered; the retribution is immediate, and what people call fine art is founded on perfect truth, perfect honesty and perfect simplicity. We will teach him again to love nature more. When we can teach the boy that no blade of grass and no flower is without beauty then we shall have achieved much All art is praise of God. The carving of a great Gothic cathedral always seemed to me to be a hymn inn God’s honor.
It seemed fitting to Him in earlier ages that He filled the house of His sanctuary with angels and gold and with pillars of purple and crimson. Industry without art is barbarism.
I cannot give a better definition of our principle of art culture than an extract of Keats; letter to a friend in which he says: ‘I have not the slightest reverence for the British public, nor for anything else than the Supreme Being, the lives of great men and the principle of beauty.’
Let it be for you to create an art by the hands of the people that will please the world. There is nothing in the world around you that art cannot ennoble. There is not an animal, not a bird, not a plant, that cannot be of use to the faithful artist. As there is nothing in life there nothing in mere lifelessness that will not be of use to you. There is not a bit of broken rope, not a basket of wicker work that will not give you ideas of design.
When you have among you young artists don’t leave them in obscurity and dishonor.
The world has practiced so much injustice that it has learned to undervalue applause. Give words of encouragement to the artist.
The voices that live in your mountains have not alone messages of freedom; they speak another language, which the artist must catch and foster in forms of beauty that will never die.
At the conclusion of his lecture, Mr. Wilde left the stage as rapidly as he had stepped upon it, but bowed just at the further end of the platform, at the applause which was accorded him. The audience was very quiet throughout his lecture.”
To be continued…
