Dominic Winter Book Auctions
Lot 597
Wilde (Oscar). Salomé, Drame en un Acte, 1st ed., Paris & London, 1893, title with device by Félicien Rops, contemp. silver print photograph of Moreau’s watercolour of Salomé dancing, tipped in as frontis., author’s signed presentation inscription to second blank verso and sl. offset to half title, ‘à Gustave Moreau, Hommage respectueux, Oscar Wilde’, with Wilde’s trademark paraph to the last letter of his name, some light browning to first two blanks and half title, orig. purple wrappers printed in silver, somewhat faded and with marginal browning, the whole (including spine) bound by Pagnant in contemp. boards with a stencilled floral decoration design in red, green, blue and yellow, embossed ex libris stamp of Oscar Molinari to additional blank front free endpaper, the endpapers being two identical gilt pictorial designs of Saints, leather title label to spine and gilt dated imprint at foot, worn along joints, 8vo. An outstanding and previously unknown association copy, gifted to the current owner by his mother’s landlady in Paris some forty years ago. Mason 348: ‘Salome was being rehearsed in June 1892 for production at the Palace Theatre, London, by Madame Sarah Bernhardt (with M. Albert Darmont as Herod) when the Lord Chamberlain withheld his licence on the ground that the play introduced biblical characters.’ The play which Wilde began writing in 1891 eventually found its first performance at the Theatre de l’Oeuvre in Paris on 11 February 1896. The English translation of the text first appeared in 1894. The influence of the celebrated French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) on Oscar Wilde’s vision for his play Salome is often cited as self-evident yet there is scant documentary evidence. It is not known that they ever met, and indeed Moreau is not mentioned once in the Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (2000). Oscar Wilde complained to Charles Ricketts after seeing Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for the English edition: ‘My Herod is like the Herod of Gustave Moreau, wrapped in his jewels and his sorrows. My Salome is a mystic, the sister of Salammbo, a Saint Therese who worships the moon.’ This inscribed copy puts beyond doubt Wilde’s admiration for and his debt to the great French painter.. In May 1884 Wilde visited Paris as a newly wed with his wife Constance just weeks after the publication of Joris-Karl Huysman’s influential decadent novel A Rebours. While there Wilde visited the Louvre to see Moreau’s celebrated The Apparition. This watercolour of Salome dancing before Herod had been exhibited alongside another oil painting of the same subject at the Paris Salon of 1876. The exhibition drew newspaper reports and the crowds with over 500,000 people flocking to see the two pictures. Moreau set in train Symbolist ideas and the artistic craze for the femme fatale Salome which Wilde was so keen to turn into French words and stage design. Moreau himself returned to the theme often, producing some nineteen paintings, six watercolours and more than 150 drawings of the same subject. Interestingly, the frontispiece to this lot (inserted by Wilde?) is a photograph from a watercolour of Salome Dancing from c. 1886 now hanging in the Musee d’Orsay. It shows Salome more richly robed and with a more Pre-Raphaelite look than the two famous pictures of 1876. After 1880 Moreau never exhibited at the Salons (or anywhere) again and refused to allow his pictures to be reproduced. Where this photographic frontispiece then came from is not the only question left begging. Are the endpapers and binding decoration from Moreau’s designs and did Wilde or Moreau or another insert the photograph? Moreau was himself influenced by Gustave Flaubert’s novel Salammbo (1862) but Moreau’s influence on the arts was to be more profound, most notably through Huysman’s novel A Rebours where the aesthete Des Esseintes sees Salome not as the dancing girl of the New Testament, but ‘she had become in some way, the symbolic deity of indestructible lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties … the monstrous Beast...’ Des Esseintes hangs Moreau’s two famous Salome paintings side by side at his home so that he could: ‘consider the beginnings of this great artist, this mythical pagan, this seer who could conjure up in the everyday world of Paris such visions and magical apotheoses of other ages.’. Richard Ellmann in his noted biography of Oscar Wilde (1988) wrote: ‘The principal engenderer of the story was an account in the fifth chapter of Huysmans’s A Rebours of two paintings by Gustave Moreau, and in the fourteenth chapter of the same book a quotation from Mallarme’s ‘Herodiade’. In one painting the aged Herod is being stirred by Salome’s lascivious but indifferent dance; in the other Salome is being presented with the Baptist’s head giving forth rays on a charger. Huysmans attributes to Salome the mythopoeic force that Pater attributes to the Mona Lisa, and mentions that writers have never succeeded in rendering her adequately’ (p. 321). ‘Wilde’s knowledge of the iconography of Salome was immense. He complained that Rubens’s Salome appeared to him to be ‘an apoplectic Maritornes’. On the other hand, Leonardo’s Salome was excessively incorporeal. Others, by Durer, Ghirlandaio, van Thulden, were unsatisfactory because incomplete. The celebrated Salome of Regnault he considered to be a mere ‘gypsy’. Only Moreau satisfied him, and he liked to quote Huysmans’s description of the Moreau paintings’ (p. 323). (1)
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