The Picture of Dorian Gray

A portrait keeps the marks of a life its subject refuses to carry: the sins, the years, the cruelty. Wilde's only novel was cut by his publisher, attacked as immoral, and read aloud in court at his trial, where the prosecution treated the fiction as a confession. Beneath the epigrams it is a severe book about what a beautiful surface costs. Fifty-nine plates, from Goya to Whistler, trace the painted face and the cost of beauty across a century of portraiture, the perfect visual counterpart to Wilde's fable of the soul made visible.