Wilde photographed with friends and others at Magdalen College, Cambridge (detail).
Dominic Winter Auctions is offering for sale a group photograph of Oscar Wilde among his fellow students at Magdalen College, Oxford. The photograph will be auctioned on 20 May 2026; the estimate is £3,000–£5,000 (view lot here | WBM).
The sale of a photograph of Wilde would not usually be worthy of comment – photographs of Wilde are sold at auction with some regularity. What is intriguing about this particular sale is that Dominic Winter is describing the photograph in their online catalogue as ‘seemingly unrecorded’. New photographs of Wilde are rare indeed.
The photograph offered for sale by Dominic Winter (click to enlarge).
Another print of the photograph in Merlin Holland’s The Wilde Album (1997), pp. 38–39 (click to enlarge).
The discovery of the photograph was hyped up in a 9 May article for The Daily Telegraph by Patrick Sawer (view article; paywall).
Chris Albury of Dominic Winter told Sawer that the photograph, which a collector found by chance in an album filled with Scandinavian prints and scenes of Dorset, was ‘not unlike hundreds of other student group photographs taken in the late Victorian era’, but for Wilde’s presence. Sawer predicted that the photograph would be ‘pored over by aficionados of the Irish writer’.
This aficionado pored over the photograph for about five seconds before reaching for a copy of Merlin Holland’s The Wilde Album (1997) and flipping to pages 38 and 39. There, printed across two pages, is the same photograph. It is not new at all.
I made sure to check and check again, because John Cooper has noted (see his blog) that many photographs of Wilde have almost – but not quite – identical counterparts: during this period photographs were often taken in pairs. But examining the posture of the dozens of sitters in the Magdalen photographs shows without doubt that the version reproduced by Holland (which is held at the Library of Congress) and the version being offered by Dominic Winter derive from the same negative.
The error is baffling given that the experts at Dominic Winter have clearly conducted some research: they state that they have identified among the men near to Wilde his college friends Reginald ‘Kitten’ Harding, William ‘Bouncer’ Ward, and E. Cholmley Jones, and ‘tentatively’ identified others as A. F. Peyton and Rowland Childers. They do not, however, state to whom in the photograph these identities belong.
From left, Reginald Harding, William Ward, and Wilde. Taken on 12 Mar. 1876. This photograph appears in The Wilde Album, p. 35.
Back left to right, A. F. Peyton, C. H. Tindall, and Wilde; front left to right, C. H. Lindon, and T. T. Peyton. Taken on 13 Mar. 1876. This photograph appears in The Wilde Album, p. 37.
Rowland Childers and Wilde. Taken on 12 Nov. 1875. This photograph appears in The Wilde Album, p. 35, with an incorrect caption.
Holland’s legend to the Magdalen group photograph states that Ward is second to Wilde’s left. This is correct. By comparing known photographs of Wilde with his college friends, it is also clear that Harding is seated in front of Wilde. A. F. Peyton may be the man seated at far left in a white jacket and white bowler. T. T. Peyton (his brother?) can be seen standing in the centre of the photograph in a white suit and with no hat. To his left, in a white jacket and white bowler, appears to be C. H. Tindal. Childers is nowhere to be seen (note that Holland incorrectly identifies Childers as Arnold Fitzgerald on p. 35 of The Wilde Album, an error that he corrected in 2023 in a comment on Cooper’s blog). This makes sense given that Childers was a member not of Magdalen but Balliol.
The man on the left appears to be T. T. Peyton; at right, C. H. Tindall.
This may be A. F. Peyton.
No photograph of anyone by the name of E. Cholmley Jones appears in The Wilde Album. There is one on p. 21 of Vyvyan Holland’s Oscar Wilde and His World (1960), although the figure’s face is partly concealed by the brim of his bowler hat and I do not believe that anyone in the larger group photograph can be identified on the basis of it.
Albury also told Sawer that the photograph shows Wilde and his friends combining
to set themselves apart from the larger group of otherwise anonymous students and teachers [….] Oscar is clearly the star of this clique, exuding the kind of magnetism that we would expect from such a budding celebrity. There are only a handful of photographs of Wilde during his time at Magdalen, so every new photograph is a precious boon to the Wildean community worldwide.
There are a few of things to say in response to this. Firstly, it is quite clear from the photograph that Wilde and those seated near to him are in no way setting themselves apart from the other sitters. Their postures and clothing are thoroughly inconspicuous (compare Wilde's posture with the more confident posture of the man standing fourth from the right with his fist against his hip). Neither is Wilde the ‘star’ of his ‘clique’ or the leader of what Sawer terms a group of ‘acolytes’. In this photograph, and in others of Wilde and his college friends, the sitters arrange themselves in a completely non-hierarchical fashion. I also must disagree with Albury’s claim that there are ‘only a handful’ of photographs of Wilde at Magdalen. If by this Albury means that there are few surviving prints, he may be correct. But if he means that there are few distinct images of Wilde at Magdalen, he is not. In reality, there are more images of Wilde dating to this time of his life than to any other, with the exception of the large number of photographs taken by Napoleon Sarony during Wilde’s tour of North America in 1882.
All the puffing up of the print is, in my opinion, not only unjustified but unnecessary. The print appears to be well-preserved and more than warrants its estimate. Photographs of Wilde sell for high prices regardless of whether they are ‘unrecorded’.