Oscar Wilde (Fingal O’Flahertie Wills) (1854 - 1900)
Born in Dublin, Ireland. He studied at Trinity College (Dublin) and at Oxford. He wrote Poems (1881), the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and several comic plays, such as Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In 1888 he created the classic children's fairy stories The Happy Prince and Other Tales. He died an exile in Paris.
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.
