Irish auction house Fonsie Mealy is offering for sale a writing desk that is purported to have belonged to Oscar Wilde. It will be sold on 19 June 2025 as lot 906 in the Chatsworth Summer Fine Art Sale. The estimate is €6,000 to €8,000.View lot | Wayback Machine
A desk purported to have belonged to Oscar Wilde. Image: Fonsie Mealy
Inscription in drawer. Image: Fonsie Mealy
Another inscription on a drawer. Image: Fonsie Mealy
Mortimer Menpes, self portrait. Image: Wikimedia
Thomas Carlyle by Alphonse Legros, 1877. Image: National Galleries Scotland
The slope-top Davenport desk is made from rosewood and has a Morocco leather writing surface, heavily worn. Inside one of the drawers is written in an uncertain hand: ‘From M. Menpes | 1938 | Oskar [sic] Wilde’s | writing desk’. On the bottom of another drawer is written in what appears to be the same hand: ‘This desk | A gift from my dear friend ~ MORTIMER MENPES | godfather of Vyvyan Beresford Holland 1938 | it being his father’s desk | OSCAR WILDE | C.A.L. | Library’.
Fonsie Mealy states that the desk passed by direct descent to the vendor. The artist Mortimer Menpes, a disciple of Whistler, died on 1 April 1938 and presumably bequeathed the desk to ‘C.A.L.’, from whom it has passed to its present owner.
According to Fonsie Mealy, the desk ‘was removed from the house shortly before the court-ordered auction of Wilde’s possessions, held “by order of the High Sheriff” following his trial and imprisonment in 1895’. They observe that the catalogue of the 1895 sale
offers a stark and telling glimpse into the aftermath of Wilde’s fall, revealing that the house had been largely purged of its furnishings prior to cataloguing. Many rooms are listed with little or no furniture, a silent testament to the efforts of Wilde’s loyal friends—such as Mortimer Menpes—to quietly remove treasured items before they could be sold under the order of the High Sheriff.
But how plausible is this theory?
In a January 2024 article for The Wildean, I discussed the 1895 auction at the Wildes’ Tite Street home.Marland, R. (2024) John Donoghue’s ‘Requiescat’ plaque, The Wildean, 64, 3–67 Like Fonsie Mealy, I noticed that much of the furniture that we know the Wildes owned is not listed in the auction catalogue. An explanation for this appeared in a contemporary newspaper: before the sale ‘the major part of the furniture and effects had been removed under the right of Mrs Oscar Wilde’.‘Two Pictures’, The Evening News (London, UK), 25 April 1895, 3
By comparing descriptions of the furniture in the catalogue with those written by visitors to the home prior to the auction, I was able to conclude that Constance Wilde must have taken all the beds except her husband’s and all – or almost all – of the furniture from her own bedroom, the dining room, and the front drawing room. She also took some artworks (drawings by Burne-Jones, etchings by Whistler) that remained in her possession until her death in 1898.
Importantly, the removal of furniture was not indiscriminate. Constance took furniture that either belonged to her or her children (e.g., their beds) or could be construed as shared furniture (e.g., tables and chairs from the front drawing room and dining room), but left items that belonged to her husband alone, including a ‘folding iron bedstead’ (lot 229) that the contemporary newspaper article previously mentioned locates in the back room on the first floor (Wilde had converted this room from his smoking room to his bedroom to make space for the children), and, in Wilde’s ground floor study, a ‘Chippendale mahogany corner chair’ (lot 174) and an ‘ANTIQUE MAHOGANY WRITING TABLE, with 2 flaps, rising slope, and draw-out desk, fitted–formerly the property of Thomas Carlyle, the Historian’ (lot 171).
This desk had not really belonged to Thomas Carlyle, a man whom Wilde admired and described as ‘our English Tacitus’. Wilde had probably told people that the table was Carlyle’s because he privileged beautiful lies over the prosaic truth. Carlyle scholar Marylu Hill explains in a 2013 article for Carlyle Studies Annual that Carlyle bequeathed his only writing desk to a friend, who gave it to the London Library. It is now in the Thomas Carlyle museum, the historian’s former home.Hill, M. (2013). A tale of a table: Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and the Legacy of Thomas Carlyle, Carlyle Studies Annual, 29, 137–54
Although the desk sold in 1895 had not belonged to Carlyle, it had self-evidently belonged to Oscar Wilde. Could this be the same desk that is now being offered by Fonsie Mealy? It could not, and I acknowledge that the Fonsie Mealy catalogue makes no claim that the two desks are one and the same. The 1895 desk was of mahogany, not rosewood. It also had two flaps, and the Menpes desk has only one.
The Fonsie Mealy catalogue states that the presence of the so-called Carlyle desk, ‘alongside newer items in the [1895] sale, suggests that the collection was a blend of both antique and more contemporary pieces—highlighting how an 1830s Davenport desk would have fit comfortably within the overall assemblage’. It is certainly true that the Wildes owned furniture from different periods. What the Fonsie Mealy catalogue lacks is any explanation as to why Wilde might have owned two desks.
I have conducted a thorough study of the interior decoration and furnishings of Wilde’s home, partly for my article in The Wildean and partly for a 2024 talk I gave in the rooms that had once been Wilde’s dining room and study. I have seen no evidence that Wilde owned more than one desk. I am of the opinion that the desk sold in 1895 was the only desk that Wilde owned at the time of his arrest and that it was sold where it was found, in his study. The present location of that desk is unknown.
If we assume, however, that the Menpes desk did belong to Wilde, how plausible is it that Menpes could have retrieved it from the home before the 1895 auction, as suggested by Fonsie Mealy?
As we have seen, Constance removed furniture and artworks. But there is no evidence that any of Wilde’s friends removed anything from the home. Wilde’s friend Robert Ross claimed on more than one occasion that, having been asked by Wilde (who was then on remand) to go to Tite Street to retrieve unpublished manuscripts, he gained access to Wilde’s locked study ‘just before the bailiffs arrived’. He does not state whether he removed anything. I note in my paper for The Wildean that Ross had the opportunity to take with him small and valuable items, such as a manuscript sonnet by John Keats that Wilde displayed in his study (sold in the 1895 sale along with a Menpes etching as lot 122). That he did not take any small valuable items, let alone large pieces of furniture, suggests to me that when he entered the home he either did not know that a sale was imminent or, knowing that a sale was imminent, was concerned that taking anything would be illegal. Recall the newspaper article that mentions Constance’s right to take furniture, a right that friends would not have shared.
Some of Wilde’s friends – Ada and Ernest Leverson, William Rothenstein – did purchase items at the sale, chiefly artworks, that they intended to return to Wilde at a later date. We can presume that they did not retrieve these items from the home before the sale because they did not have the opportunity or because they accepted that they did not have the right. Taking items if possible or permissible would, of course, have been preferable to having to pay for them, so the fact that they did end up paying for items suggests to me that they were unable or unwilling to take them.
To sum up, there is no evidence that Menpes purchased anything at the sale, that anyone other than Constance or Robert Ross entered the home prior to the sale, or that anyone other than Constance removed furniture prior to the sale.
But, if we assume that the Menpes desk did belong to Wilde and that Menpes did enter the home prior to the sale and removed it, why did he remove this desk and not the desk that everyone believed had belonged to Carlyle? I can think of no plausible answer to this question.
I accept that the Menpes desk did belong to Menpes and that the inscription on its drawers accurately reflects the inscriber’s understanding of its provenance. Therefore I can only conclude that Menpes was not telling the truth about the desk.
Relevant here is a suggestion, referred to in Vyvyan Holland’s memoir Son of Oscar Wilde (1954), that Menpes was not responsible for making the artworks he claimed were his own:
My godfather was Mortimer Menpes, an artist of some repute in the eighties; I still possess some of his etchings which he bestowed upon me in lieu of a christening mug; the etchings are not very good, and there was always some element of doubt as to whether Mortimer Menpes did them himself. He was a man of private means, something of a dandy, and a friend of Whistler and all the Pre-Raphaelites. Many years later, when I was twenty-one, Sir William Richmond, R.A., told me that at one time Mortimer Menpes’s name had been put forward for membership of the Royal Academy. Doubts were cast upon his being able to produce, unaided, any work of art at all, and at the beginning of this century a small committee of Academicians, including Richmond himself, was deputed to visit his studio and to ask him to paint or draw or etch something in their presence. Menpes stood upon his dignity, refused to comply and ushered the committee off the premises. He was not elected to the Royal Academy, and the significant fact is that after this incident he retired from the artistic world and never produced another work of art, though he continued to write about art until he died in 1938.Holland, V. (1954) Son of Oscar Wilde, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 37–8
I am not in a position to comment on Holland’s story, but there does seem to be at least a possibility that Menpes, who was known to be a raconteur as well as a dandy, was the sort of man who might concoct a story about the provenance of a desk he owned. If he did, he would only have been following the example set by Wilde with his ‘Carlyle’ desk.
A bed purported to have been owned by Lady Wilde. Image: Fonsie Mealy
Finally, it is worth noting that Fonsie Mealy is selling alongside the desk a bed that they state once belonged to Oscar Wilde’s mother, Jane, Lady Wilde, and that she purchased in France in 1878. The estimate is €3,000 to €4,000.View lot | Wayback Machine The catalogue mentions that the ‘richly carved walnut and ebonised bateau bed’ was, like the desk, ‘removed from Oscar Wilde’s house, 16 Tite Street, by Mortimer Menpes prior to the auction of April 24th, 1895’. The description continues:
Although the house was relatively large, with five bedrooms listed, only one of these rooms in the catalogue actually contains a bed, a French brass bed. The absence of any other beds, wardrobes, or personal furnishings in the remaining bedrooms suggests deliberate removal, likely carried out discreetly by those close to Wilde in an attempt to protect items of sentimental or monetary value from public dispersal. This silent purging underscores the quiet loyalty of his circle, who sought to shield what remained of Wilde’s domestic and artistic life in the face of public disgrace.
The bedstead mentioned in the 1895 catalogue is not ‘a French brass bed’ but ‘a folding iron bedstead’. In any case, as I have argued, the best explanation for the lack of other beds in the house is that Constance removed them. No Wilde scholar, to my knowledge, has ever demonstrated, or even speculated, that Wilde’s friends removed furniture from the home.
The Fonsie Mealy catalogue does not explain why Wilde would have owned his mother’s bed. Lady Wilde died in 1896 and so at the time of Wilde’s arrest she would still have required it. The idea that she would have given her son her bed and purchased another, at a time of her life (after the death of her husband) when she was struggling for money, is implausible. So too, in my opinion, is the idea that Menpes would have taken it. Again, if he did take it, we would need to account for his leaving other items of greater value that would have been easier to remove: if the bed purported to be Lady Wilde’s was in the home, it must have been kept on at least the second floor above ground level, and therefore much more difficult to extract than, say, items from Wilde’s study, the entrance to which was only a few steps from the front door.
My belief is that the bed weakens rather than strenghthens the case that the desk was Wilde’s, and that Menpes fabricated the provenance of both items.
Update: 19 Jun. 2025. The desk sold for €29,000 and the bed for €15,000.