The character of Basil Hallward in The Picture of Dorian Gray from LitCharts | The creators of SparkNotes Sybil Vane The painter who becomes enamored with Dorian Gray’s beauty and innocence, seeing him as the ideal to which his work has always aspired. He makes Dorian sit for hundreds of portraits. When one day he paints a portrait of true likeness to Dorian, his feelings overwhelm him. It is the best work he has ever done but he is afraid that there is too much of himself in it. After the painting, his artistry becomes average, he can never elevate his work to the perfection that Dorian inspired at his youthful peak. He tries to guide Dorian towards decency, so in love is he with the memory of that innocent boy, but the knowledge of how Basil has dictated his now tortured existence with his painting and his passion, enrages Dorian, who kills Basil. Basil becomes a sad example of a good artist disappearing in sacrifice for Art. Basil Hallward Quotes in The Picture of Dorian Gray The The Picture of Dorian Gray quotes below are all either spoken by Basil Hallward or refer to Basil Hallward.

For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one: ). Note: all page and citation info for the quotes below refers to the Penguin Classics edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray published in 2003. Chapter 1 Quotes Download it! Basil Hallward Character Timeline in The Picture of Dorian Gray The timeline below shows where the character Basil Hallward appears in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance. Chapter 1 The novel opens in the gorgeous flower-filled rooms of Basil Hallward’s house. Lord Henry Wotton and Basil are together in the studio, considering the portrait... (full context) Basil says he has put too much of himself into the painting to exhibit it. Lord... (full context) Realizing he has given away Dorian’s name, Basil confesses that he hadn’t wanted to reveal him to Henry, but had wanted to keep... (full context) Basil met Dorian Gray at a party. He says that an artist must go into society... (full context) Lady Brandon, a shrill, social butterfly, brings Basil around to meet some of the guests.

Spotting Dorian again, Basil asks to be introduced,... (full context) Henry mentions that laughter is a good basis for friendship, but Basil teases that Henry knows nothing about friendship. Henry disagrees, he chooses his friends carefully for... (full context) The subject turns back to Dorian Gray. Basil confesses that he has been spending more and more time with the boy and that... (full context) Henry desperately wants to meet Dorian now. Basil explains that Dorian will probably not have the same effect for Henry, that it is... (full context) When asked if Dorian Gray has any fondness for him in return, Basil says he sees a certain affection in Dorian, but he may just be enjoying the... (full context) ...he is very glad to have passed up a tedious lunch for an afternoon at Basil’s instead. He remembers then that he has heard about Dorian’s charms from his Aunt. Basil... (full context) Chapter 2 Henry and Basil go into the house and find Dorian Gray playing a song at Basil’s piano. Lord... (full context) Basil is getting nervous at Henry’s affect on the afternoon he had planned. He tells Henry...

(full context) ...is not interested in faithfulness and lasting, so they agree to have a capricious friendship. Basil is painting with a great passion. When he is finished, Henry congratulates him. It is... (full context) ...and beautiful forever. He says he will give his soul to trade places. He accuses Basil of only caring about him as much as a statue. The outburst is so unlike... (full context) Basil tries to comfort Dorian, but he is distraught. He blames Lord Henry, and they quarrel... (full context) As they have tea, Basil reprimands Henry for saying wild things to Dorian. But Dorian is not put off. When... (full context) Chapter 3 ...his curiosity. The possibilities of influence upon him seemed limitless. Lord Henry also thinks about Basil, and finds the whole story of secret influences and affections very exciting. He vows to... (full context) ...park. Dorian wishes to follow, even though he has made a prior engagement to visit Basil. Henry can’t promise him any more talking but says he may accompany him, and “look... (full context) Chapter 4 ...the theatre - every night is another unmissable heroine.

But Dorian does want Henry and Basil to come with him one evening, and help him to free Sybil from her contract... (full context) Dorian hasn’t been keeping in touch with Basil. The last contact he had was when Basil sent the portrait to him in a... (full context) Chapter 6 As they dine together, Henry informs Basil that Dorian is to be married. Basil doesn’t believe it, and Henry reminds him that... (full context) ...actually Sybil who first mentioned marriage. Henry comments that this is typical of a woman. Basil scolds him for his rudeness but Dorian’s spirits will not be dampened. He declares himself... (full context) Chapter 7 When they arrive at the theater, Henry and Basil see firsthand its crude set up and rough-looking crowd. Dorian promises Henry that Sybil will... (full context) ...terrifies Dorian. During the famous balcony scene, Juliet’s words are flat and lifeless. Henry and Basil decide to leave. Henry reassures him that she is very beautiful nonetheless. Love is better... (full context) ...house, where the lamps are still burning. Among the luxurious treasure of his home sits Basil’s portrait. Today, something about it causes him to double-take.

The expression on the portrait’s face... (full context) Chapter 9 Basil arrives at Dorian’s house, and expresses his sympathy for him, and for Sybil Vane and... (full context) At the mention of what is in store for Sybil’s “little white body”, Dorian orders Basil to stop. He says that the incident is over, he has mastered the emotion of... (full context) Basil is sickened at the idea of Sybil killing herself but Dorian explains the beauty of... (full context) Dorian requests that Basil do a portrait of Sybil. Basil agrees but really wants Dorian to sit for him... (full context) Dorian asks Basil to trade secrets with him. He asks why Basil refused to exhibit the picture at... (full context) Basil explains that when he met Dorian, he was struck by a strange fascination. Dorian became... (full context) As soon as Basil had removed the painting from his studio, the curse lifted, and he saw clearly the... (full context) Basil, set to go home, reaffirms the importance of Dorian and the painting to him, and...

(full context) Chapter 10 With Basil gone, Dorian begins to get suspicious of his servant Victor, imagining him sneaking a glance... (full context) ...showing him his rotten soul. He regrets for a moment not sharing the burden with Basil. He feels a sudden appreciation for the love that Basil showed him, a kind of... (full context) Chapter 12 ...Dorian is approaching his thirty-eighth birthday. Walking home from an evening at Henry’s, he sees Basil Hallward in the street. Dorian pretends he hasn’t seen Basil, but Basil soon catches up... (full context) Dorian reluctantly invites Basil in, if he promises not to talk about serious things. Despite Dorian’s request, Basil insists... (full context) Dorian scolds Basil. It is quite the reverse, he claims. It is their own scandalous ways that makes... (full context) Chapter 13 Dorian leads Basil to the top of the house. He is smiling with a strange pride at what... (full context) Dorian reminds Basil of the wish he had made on seeing the portrait for the first time. Basil... (full context) Dorian tells Basil it is too late for prayer, he doesn’t believe in the words.

Basil scolds him.... (full context) The sound of Basil’s blood is a horrible drip, drip, drip on the floor of the schoolroom. Dorian goes... (full context) ...up the room and goes down to the library. He says to himself that since Basil was supposed to go to Paris that evening for six months, nobody would suspect anything... (full context) It occurs to Dorian that he has plenty of time to dispose of Basil’s body. He fetches his servant Francis and asks to be woken early the next morning... (full context) Chapter 14 ...night’s bloody events come back to him. Dorian sickens and feels again the loathing for Basil that had caused him to strike. How strange it is, he considers, to have a... (full context) ...with his servant. He spends some time sketching, but soon the drawings start to resemble Basil Hallward. Determined to distract himself, Dorian goes to the bookshelf and picks an ornately bound... (full context) ...of the portrait, and its gory colors seem even worse to him than those of Basil’s body. Dorian goes in and covers the painting, and leaves Alan Campbell to his work....

(full context) Chapter 15 ...at the mention of the previous evening worries him. When he gets home, he burns Basil’s clothes and bag. (full context) Chapter 16 ...around them, each in a state of the forgetfulness that Adrian describes. The memory of Basil haunts Dorian. And so does the presence of his changed old friend. Dorian wants to... (full context) Chapter 19 The topic turns to Basil’s disappearance, which has now been noted by the police and talked about for some time,... (full context) ...for a pianist, he notes. Dorian asks about the rumors of murder that are following Basil’s case but Henry finds the whole topic quite dull. He says that the only time... (full context) Dorian asks Henry how he would react if he told him that he had murdered Basil. Henry says that Dorian could never do such a thing. Murderers are low down people.... (full context) Cite This Page Choose citation style: Parfitt, Georgina. "The Picture of Dorian Gray Characters: Basil Hallward." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 17 Sep 2013. Web. 19 Dec 2016.

Parfitt, Georgina. "The Picture of Dorian Gray Characters: Basil Hallward." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 17 Sep 2013. Web. 19 Dec 2016. Parfitt, Georgina. "The Picture of Dorian Gray Characters: Basil Hallward." LitCharts LLC, September 17, 2013. Retrieved December 19, 2016. Parfitt, Georgina. "The Picture of Dorian Gray Characters: Basil Hallward." LitCharts LLC, September 17, 2013. Retrieved December 19, 2016. Copy to Clipboard The picture of Dorian Gray 1890 by Oscar Wilde · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Classic Literature Fiction Literature Historical Fiction The novel begins on a beautiful summer day with Lord Henry Wotton, a strongly-opinionated man, observing the sensitive artist Basil Hallward painting the portrait of a handsome young man named Dorian Gray, who is Basil's ultimate muse. After hearing Lord Henry's world view, Dorian begins to think beauty is the only worthwhile aspect of life.

He wishes that the portrait Basil painted would grow old in his place. Under the influence of Lord Henry (who relishes the hedonic lifestyle and is a major exponent thereof), Dorian begins to explore his senses. He discovers amazing actress Sibyl Vane, who performs Shakespeare plays in a dingy theatre. Dorian approaches her and soon proposes marriage. Sibyl, who refers to him as "Prince Charming", swoons with happiness, but her protective brother James tells her that if "Prince Charming" harms her, he will certainly kill him. Dorian invites Basil and Lord Henry to see Sibyl perform in Romeo and Juliet. Sibyl, whose only knowledge of love was love of theatre, casts aside her acting abilities through the experience of true love with Dorian. Disheartened, Dorian rejects her, saying her beauty was in her acting, and he is no longer interested in her. When he returns home, he notices that his portrait has changed. Dorian realises his wish has come true – the portrait now bears a subtle sneer and will age with each sin he commits, while his own appearance remains unchanged.

The Picture of Dorian Gray The Picture of Dorian Gray Authored by Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray is a lush and vivid novel telling of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil's, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry's world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfillment of the senses. Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian (whimsically) expresses a desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than he. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, and when he subsequently pursues a life of debauchery, the portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.

Publication Date: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973) - Movie | Moviefone The Picture of Dorian Gray (1973) Where To Watch DVD Release Date: August 27th, 2002 Not Yet Rated|1 hr 51 min Plot Summary Not long after having his portrait painted by the artist Basil Hallward (Charles Aidman), handsome Dorian Gray (Shane Briant) meets Lord Harry Wotton (Nigel Davenport) and falls under his influence. A radical libertine, Wotton encourages the boy to indulge every hedonistic impulse, and soon Dorian becomes notorious for his debauchery. Looking at his own portrait one day, he fancifully wishes that it might age rather than he -- and, miraculously, gets his wish.

Dorian Gray Dorian Gray Identity/Class: Human altered by magic Occupation: Dilettante Affiliations: Lord Henry Wotton; formerly Basil Hallward Enemies: James Vane, Basil Hallward Known Relatives: None Aliases: None known Base of Operations: England First Appearance: The Picture of Dorian Gray (Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, 20th June 1890) by Oscar Wilde Powers/Abilities: So long as the picture is intact Dorian does not age nor can any injury affect him - instead all infirmities are passed on to it. History: Dorian Gray is an orphaned boy who is the heir to a great fortune. Basil Hallward paints his portrait, and Dorian declares that he would give his soul if he were always to be young and the painting instead would grow old. Dorian leaves his fiancée - the actress Sibyl Vane - because through a single bad performance he claims that she has killed his love. She kills herself with poison and Dorian is unaffected. So begins the tale of the boys descent into low society in London while still giving dinners and musicals for high society.

He is inspired by two things: the book Lord Henry Wotton sends him that seems to predict his own life in dissecting every virtue and every sin from the past; and secondly the picture of himself which grows steadily older and more vicious looking compared to his own mirror image which remains young. Fanatical about the portrait, he is driven to murder and deception. As others are drawn into this web of evil Dorian himself longs to return to innocence but his method is horrific and tragic. SparkNotes: The Picture of Dorian Gray: Analysis of Major Characters Analysis of Major Characters The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde Themes, Motifs & Symbols Dorian Gray At the opening of the novel, Dorian Gray exists as something of an ideal: he is the archetype of male youth and beauty. As such, he captures the imagination of Basil Hallward, a painter, and Lord Henry Wotton, a nobleman who imagines fashioning the impressionable Dorian into an unremitting pleasure-seeker. Dorian is exceptionally vain and becomes convinced, in the course of a brief conversation with Lord Henry, that his most salient characteristics—his youth and physical attractiveness—are ever waning.

The thought of waking one day without these attributes sends Dorian into a tailspin: he curses his fate and pledges his soul if only he could live without bearing the physical burdens of aging and sinning. He longs to be as youthful and lovely as the masterpiece that Basil has painted of him, and he wishes that the portrait could age in his stead. His vulnerability and insecurity in these moments make him excellent clay for Lord Henry’s willing hands. Dorian soon leaves Basil’s studio for Lord Henry’s parlor, where he adopts the tenets of “the new Hedonism” and resolves to live his life as a pleasure-seeker with no regard for conventional morality. His relationship with Sibyl Vane tests his commitment to this philosophy: his love of the young actress nearly leads him to dispense with Lord Henry’s teachings, but his love proves to be as shallow as he is. When he breaks Sibyl’s heart and drives her to suicide, Dorian notices the first change in his portrait—evidence that his portrait is showing the effects of age and experience while his body remains ever youthful.

Dorian experiences a moment of crisis, as he weighs his guilt about his treatment of Sibyl against the freedom from worry that Lord Henry’s philosophy has promised. When Dorian decides to view Sibyl’s death as the achievement of an artistic ideal rather than a needless tragedy for which he is responsible, he starts down the steep and slippery slope of his own demise. As Dorian’s sins grow worse over the years, his likeness in Basil’s portrait grows more hideous. Dorian seems to lack a conscience, but the desire to repent that he eventually feels illustrates that he is indeed human. Despite the beautiful things with which he surrounds himself, he is unable to distract himself from the dissipation of his soul. His murder of Basil marks the beginning of his end: although in the past he has been able to sweep infamies from his mind, he cannot shake the thought that he has killed his friend. Dorian’s guilt tortures him relentlessly until he is forced to do away with his portrait. In the end, Dorian seems punished by his ability to be influenced: if the new social order celebrates individualism, as Lord Henry claims, Dorian falters because he fails to establish and live by his own moral code.

Lord Henry Wotton Lord Henry is a man possessed of “wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories.” He is a charming talker, a famous wit, and a brilliant intellect. Given the seductive way in which he leads conversation, it is little wonder that Dorian falls under his spell so completely. Lord Henry’s theories are radical; they aim to shock and purposefully attempt to topple established, untested, or conventional notions of truth. In the end, however, they prove naïve, and Lord Henry himself fails to realize the implications of most of what he says. Lord Henry is a relatively static character—he does not undergo a significant change in the course of the narrative. He is as coolly composed, unshakable, and possessed of the same dry wit in the final pages of the novel as he is upon his introduction. Because he does not change while Dorian and Basil clearly do, his philosophy seems amusing and enticing in the first half of the book, but improbable and shallow in the second.

Lord Henry muses in Chapter Nineteen, for instance, that there are no immoral books; he claims that “[t]he books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.” But since the decadent book that Lord Henry lends Dorian facilitates Dorian’s downfall, it is difficult to accept what Lord Henry says as true. Although Lord Henry is a self-proclaimed hedonist who advocates the equal pursuit of both moral and immoral experience, he lives a rather staid life. He participates in polite London society and attends parties and the theater, but he does not indulge in sordid behavior. Unlike Dorian, he does not lead innocent youths to suicide or travel incognito to the city’s most despised and desperate quarters. Lord Henry thus has little notion of the practical effects of his philosophy. His claim that Dorian could never commit a murder because “[c]rime belongs exclusively to the lower orders” demonstrates the limitations of his understanding of the human soul. It is not surprising, then, that he fails to appreciate the profound meaning of Dorian’s downfall. Basil Hallward Basil Hallward is a talented, though somewhat conventionally minded, painter.

His love for Dorian Gray changes the way he sees art; indeed, it defines a new school of expression for him. Basil’s portrait of Dorian marks a new phase of his career. Before he created this masterwork, he spent his time painting Dorian in the veils of antiquity—dressed as an ancient soldier or as various romantic figures from mythology. Once he has painted Dorian as he truly is, however, he fears that he has put too much of himself into the work. He worries that his love, which he himself describes as “idolatry,” is too apparent, and that it betrays too much of himself. Though he later changes his mind to believe that art is always more abstract than one thinks and that the painting thus betrays nothing except form and color, his emotional investment in Dorian remains constant. He seeks to protect Dorian, voicing his objection to Lord Henry’s injurious influence over Dorian and defending Dorian even after their relationship has clearly dissolved. Basil’s commitment to Dorian, which ultimately proves fatal, reveals the genuineness of his love for his favorite subject and his concern for the safety and salvation of Dorian’s soul.

More Help Deceptive Picture - The New Yorker Deceptive Picture How Oscar Wilde painted over “Dorian Gray.” By Alex Ross Even before Wilde sent the manuscript of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” to the typist, he was hesitating over its homoerotic content.CreditIllustration by EDWARD SOREL Oscar Wilde was not a man who lived in fear, but early reviews of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” must have given him pause. The story, telling of a man who never ages while his portrait turns decrepit, appeared in the July, 1890, issue of Lippincott’s, a Philadelphia magazine with English distribution. The Daily Chronicle of London called the tale “unclean,” “poisonous,” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” The St. James Gazette deemed it “nasty” and “nauseous,” and suggested that the Treasury or the Vigilance Society might wish to prosecute the author.

Most ominous was a short notice in the Scots Observer stating that although “Dorian Gray” was a work of literary quality, it dealt in “matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing in camera” and would be of interest mainly to “outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys”—an allusion to the recent Cleveland Street scandal, which had exposed the workings of a male brothel in London. Within five years, Wilde found himself convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with certain male persons.” The furor was unsurprising: no work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire. The opening pages leave little doubt that Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorian’s portrait, is in love with his subject. Once Dorian discovers his godlike powers, he carries out various heinous acts, including murder; but to the Victorian sensibility his most unspeakable deed would have been his corruption of a series of young men. (Basil tells Dorian, “There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name.

You and he were inseparable.”) At the Wilde trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from “Dorian Gray,” calling it a “sodomitical book.” Wilde went to prison not because he loved young men but because he flaunted that love, and “Dorian Gray” became the chief exhibit of his shamelessness. Wilde died in 1900, in a run-down Paris hotel, at the age of forty-six. Almost overnight, a legend was born: Wilde the homosexual martyr, Wilde the moral rebel. A nascent gay-rights movement embraced him as a hero of defiance. When, in 1967, Craig Rodwell opened a gay-and-lesbian bookstore in New York, he named it the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, and after the Stonewall riots of 1969 Rodwell used the bookstore’s mailing list to help organize the first gay-pride parade. As recently as the late eighties, you could still find bookish young people coming to terms with their sexuality by way of reading Wilde. (You could at least find me.) Whether or not Wilde saw himself as part of a cause, he did not lack courage.

The multiple versions of “Dorian Gray”—the earliest surviving manuscript, which is at the Morgan Library; the typescript sent to Lippincott’s, which Harvard University Press has just made available in an “uncensored” edition; the published Lippincott’s text; and the expanded book publication of 1891—show Wilde deciding, sentence by sentence, just how far he would go. The Wilde Bookshop closed in 2009, a casualty not only of the decline of the bookselling business but also of the partial triumph of Rodwell’s mission. In many major cities, at least, gays and lesbians no longer seem to need a safe place in the form of a store. And they no longer seem to need the tragicomic Oscar; the young gays of today can revel in the wit and wisdom of Neil Patrick Harris. All of which leaves Wilde in an interesting limbo. What will he mean in a perhaps not too distant time when homosexuality has ceased to be a conversation stopper? “To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely—it is not wise to show one’s heart to the world,” Wilde once wrote.

We should not assume that his heart was revealed to us when he became a gay icon, or when he was canonized in wider bohemian circles as the patron saint of “Be yourself.” (The phrase appears in the 1891 essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”) Wilde’s aestheticism, his fanatical cult of beauty, was the deepest and most lasting of his passions, and it is now the most radical thing about him. Perhaps only the threat of persecution prevented Wilde from freely expressing his sexuality in his writing; yet he also may have been caught in the modern struggle to inhabit an identity without becoming defined by it. The ghastly ending of “Dorian Gray”—Dorian stabbing his portrait in a frenzy—shows a man losing a battle with his public image. The two most recent major biographies of Wilde are Thomas Wright’s “Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde,” which appeared in 2008, and Neil McKenna’s “The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography,” which came out in 2005. They present almost comically contradictory portraits. Wright’s Wilde is an intellectual dreamer who rarely steps outside the literary realm.

We are told that his parents—the eye-and-ear surgeon William Wilde and the poet Jane Francesca Wilde, who wrote under the name Speranza—accumulated mountains of books at their home, in Dublin, and that young Oscar habitually read in bed, his mind ravished by Irish folktales, ancient-Greek texts, Romantic poems, and gothic novels. Wright even suggests that Wilde discovered his sexuality in the pages of Plato. “Was it a case of literary nurture over biological nature?” Wright asks, as if Wilde might have found boys unattractive had the philosopher not put the idea in his head. In this telling, Wilde’s ultimate humiliation came not on the day of his arrest, on April 5, 1895, but a few weeks later, when his library was auctioned off. McKenna’s Wilde, by contrast, is a largely sexual being who reads in order to find a language for his desire and writes in order to speak that desire aloud.

He is hailed as “a martyr in an epic struggle for the freedom of men to love men.” McKenna rejects the idea, set forth in previous biographies, that Wilde had no gay life until his early thirties, when he met Robert Ross, a precociously self-aware Canadian teen-ager, in Oxford. In fact, certain of Wilde’s youthful poems drip with homoeroticism—“And he looked on me with desire / And I know that his name was Love”—and his early friendship with the painter Frank Miles, among others, had a sexual tinge. Yet McKenna reads too much into meagre evidence. He is a writer of the “almost certainly” school, and he withholds material that belies his thesis. (He does not mention that Miles was notoriously attracted to very young girls.) Later chapters rely on the dubious memoirs of Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, a forger and a fantasist, who claimed carnal knowledge not only of the principals in the Wilde case but also of Paul Verlaine and the Dowager Empress of China. McKenna, by fixating on Wilde’s sexual life, arrives at an oddly unflattering portrait.

Preying on young literary fans, paying off rent boys, picking up lads as young as fifteen—Wilde is stripped of his charm. To read Wright and McKenna in succession is like seeing a picture alter before one’s eyes: a bookish fellow becomes a sex addict. There is, however, no real contradiction; countless literary lives have veered from monkish labor to mindless pleasure. Wilde himself first felt this split when he was studying at Oxford, in the eighteen-seventies. In the poem “Hélas!,” published in 1881, he wistfully imagines a life of “austere control,” in which he “might have trod / The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance / Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.” But he tastes “the honey of romance” and loses his footing. Sixteen years later, Wilde traced the same downward arc in “De Profundis,” the annihilating book-length letter that he wrote in prison to Alfred Douglas, his former lover: “Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations.” He never found the middle ground between those extremes, although he glimpsed it.

“All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment,” he said, summing up “Dorian Gray.” Such epigrams were the foundation of Wilde’s fame, and remain so. He is often seen as the godfather of celebrity culture, in that from the outset he was noted chiefly for being Oscar Wilde. Even in his Oxford days, his witticisms were making their way beyond the university walls. (His first hit: “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”) On settling in London, in 1879, he assumed the gaudy neo-Renaissance poses that inspired dozens of Punch cartoons and two characters in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Patience.” He maintained exquisite attitudes during his American lecture tour of 1882, enduring jeers from college students and enjoying the unexpected admiration of Colorado miners. Back in England, he caused further chatter with a turn toward domesticity, marrying Constance Lloyd and producing two sons. Only when he published “The Happy Prince and Other Tales,” in 1888, did his literary output catch up to his fame. With that publication, the most intense phase of Wilde’s career began.

His wit acquired a sharper edge: celebrity became a vehicle for subversion. The fairy tales are well stocked with delightful paradoxes, yet they are encircled by strangeness and sadness. “The Star-Child” ends with the sentence “And he who came after him ruled evilly.” They are tales of impossible love: a fisherman’s for a mermaid, a statue’s for a swallow. Victorian parents who read the stories to their children may have stumbled over the friskier moments, as when the title character of “The Young King” presses his lips to a statue of Antinous, Hadrian’s male slave. Wilde reveals the human complexity and suffering behind the luxurious surfaces that he summoned so easily in rolling Irish prose. The Young King is dismayed to discover that his subjects have toiled severely—and even died—in order to manufacture his golden raiments, yet when he tries to assume a humbler guise the kingdom revolts against him.

Wilde was never an open radical in the manner of George Bernard Shaw, but the imperious essays he published between 1889 and 1891—“The Truth of Masks,” “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”—dug tunnels under the moral foundations of Victorian England. Artists are cast as outlaws (“There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture”), purveyors of dangerous ideas (the better to resist “that splendid system that elevates [men] to the dignity of machines”), tellers of gorgeous lies that supplant dull truths, and habitual antinomians, rejecting “the shallow shibboleths of any sect or school.” In “The Soul of Man,” Wilde imagines a revolution that will sweep aside all middle-class Philistinism. Technological advances, he predicts, will liberate even the working classes, granting them lives of aesthetic reverie.

The vague economic logic of the argument is a pretext for Wilde to vent his rage on an audience that treated him as an amusing sideshow: “In the kitchen, I’m more of an aggregator than a content creator.” Buy a cartoon The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist. A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this.

When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. This fulmination anticipates the rhetoric of modernism. Yeats and Joyce, in particular, felt a strong connection to their Irish forerunner. Yeats, who believed that Wilde would have made a great soldier or politician, praised him for launching “an extravagant Celtic crusade against Anglo-Saxon stupidity.” Joyce evidently drew on the trials of 1895 in creating the hallucinogenic persecution of Leopold Bloom in the “Circe” chapter of “Ulysses.” The gay strain in Wilde’s work is part of a larger war on convention. In the 1889 story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a pseudo-scholarly, metafictional investigation of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a boy, Wilde slyly suggests that the pillar of British literature was something other than an ordinary family man.

In the 1891 play “Salomé,” Wilde expands a Biblical anecdote into a sumptuous panorama of decadence. Anarchists of the fin de siècle, especially in Germany, considered Wilde one of their own: Gustav Landauer hailed Wilde as the English Nietzsche. Thomas Mann expanded on the analogy, observing that various lines of Wilde might have come from Nietzsche (“There is no reality in things apart from their experiences”) and that various lines of Nietzsche might have come from Wilde (“We are basically inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments are the most indispensable to us”). Nietzsche and Wilde were, in Mann’s view, “rebels in the name of beauty.” In early 1892, Wilde enjoyed a huge theatrical success with “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” and until he went to prison he confined himself to social comedy. The subversive agenda remained: Richard Le Gallienne plausibly proposed that Wilde “made dying Victorianism laugh at itself, and it may be said to have died of the laughter.” But the increasing virtuosity of Wilde’s dramatic technique masked a weakening of his creative impulse; the plays were written amid long periods of inactivity and relied intermittently on old lines.

“The Importance of Being Earnest,” brilliant as it is, threatens to become a greatest-hits compilation. Wilde later blamed the dissipations of Alfred Douglas for the slowing of his productivity after 1892; their affair began that year, after Wilde paid off a blackmailer on Douglas’s behalf. After reading the newer books on Wilde, I returned to Richard Ellmann’s 1988 biography, which, despite some errors and eccentricities, still commands the field. Ellmann performs the supreme service of taking Wilde seriously, as a writer first and a personality second. He catches Wilde’s lawless moralism, his outcast-preacher tone. “His creative works almost always end in unmasking,” Ellmann writes. “The hand that adjusts the green carnation suddenly shakes an admonitory finger.” Ellmann explains better than any other chronicler why, in 1895, Wilde chose to face his accusers instead of fleeing to the Continent. It was not an act of martyrdom, or of arrogance or self-delusion, but, rather, an exercise in intellectual consistency.

Ellmann writes, “He submitted to the society he had criticized, and so earned the right to criticize it further.” Dorian Gray emerged from the same dinner that insured the immortality of Sherlock Holmes. Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle dined together in London in August, 1889, as guests of Joseph Marshall Stoddart, the editor of Lippincott’s. Doyle, like so many others, came away dazzled by Wilde. “He towered above us all, and yet had the art of seeming to be interested in all that we could say,” Doyle recalled. Later that year, Doyle sent Lippincott’s his second Holmes tale, “The Sign of Four,” assigning a few Wildean traits to the great detective. (You can imagine Wilde saying, “I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”) Wilde, for his part, may have picked up some tricks from Holmes’s creator: parts of “Dorian Gray” are as gruesome as a police procedural. Last spring, I spent a few hours looking at the autograph manuscript of “Dorian Gray,” at the Morgan Library.

When Dorian attempts to destroy his portrait, the manuscript has him “ripping the thing right up”; Wilde then adds the phrase “from top to bottom.” Nicholas Frankel, the editor of the new Harvard edition of “Dorian Gray,” notes that the eviscerating gesture evokes Jack the Ripper, whose crimes had filled the papers two years earlier. The original magazine story, at fifty thousand words, has all the familiar elements of the book version, which is the one most people know. Lord Henry, a Mephistophelian aesthete who seems to be Wilde’s mouthpiece, visits the studio of his friend Basil Hallward and becomes fascinated by a picture displayed there. Basil confesses his attraction to its subject. When Dorian enters, Lord Henry intellectually seduces him with a philosophy of hedonism. (“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”) Dorian, saddened by the idea that he must grow old while his portrait stays the same, wishes the opposite were true. An elfin magic takes hold. Dorian falls for a gifted young actress named Sibyl Vane and then casts her aside when he determines that the joy of love has rendered her art banal.

She kills herself. The face in the picture acquires a cruel look. As Dorian wallows in debauchery, Basil pries into his secret life and wonders about the state of his soul. Dorian, who has hidden the picture in his attic, shows Basil the now hideous face, and kills him. Thoughts of repentance cross Dorian’s mind, but he decides that he must wipe out the only remaining record of his crimes: the portrait. When he stabs it, he falls dead, his face misshapen beyond recognition. In the same instant, the picture’s beauty is restored. In the Morgan manuscript, Wilde’s hand flows confidently, as if taking dictation, but the appearance of fluency may be deceptive: the autograph is probably a copy of an earlier draft that has disappeared. Although Wilde is celebrated as the greatest natural talker of modern times, he edited his prose meticulously. The opening paragraphs, describing Basil’s studio, are a masterpiece of precise evocation, and Wilde’s handwritten changes sharpen the imagery yet more.

In a passage that compares the “dim roar of London” to the “bourdon note of an organ,” Wilde inserts the word “distant” before “organ,” adding a twinge of far-off religious dread. At the same time, Wilde’s revisions to the opening dialogue between Basil and Lord Henry betray a rising anxiety, an urge to lower the emotional temperature. Exclamations over Dorian’s beauty give way to more reserved remarks about his “good looks” and “personality.” “Passion” becomes “feeling,” “pain” becomes “perplexity.” Wilde’s pen stops Basil from mentioning the time Dorian brushed against his cheek and from announcing that “the world becomes young to me when I hold his hand.” And when Basil explains why he is withholding the painting from London gallery-goers he is prevented from saying that “where there is really love, they would see something evil, and where there is spiritual passion they would suggest something vile.” Tellingly, Wilde removes intimations of a prior attachment between Basil and Lord Henry.

He deletes a description of Basil “taking hold of [Lord Henry’s] hand.” One passage is so heavily scratched out as to be almost illegible, but in it Lord Henry seems to berate Basil for having become Dorian’s “slave,” and then blurts out, “I hate Dorian Gray.” In the end, Wilde cancels any hint of jealousy and gives Lord Henry the mask of an amused aesthete: “Basil, this is quite wonderful! I must see Dorian Gray.” Even before Wilde sent his manuscript to the typist, then, he was hesitating over its homoerotic content, and especially over the pages devoted to Basil’s desire. The focus on Basil is not surprising, given that Wilde later declared, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” When the typescript arrived in the Philadelphia offices of Lippincott’s, it was Joseph Marshall Stoddart’s turn to have second thoughts. His changes are noted in the new Harvard edition. Stoddart was no prude, and moved in unconventional circles; when Wilde came to America, Stoddart introduced him to Walt Whitman.

But the editor knew his public’s limits. He, or an associate, cut another of Basil’s confessional remarks about the portrait—“There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion”—and several descriptions of Dorian’s nighttime wanderings, including a sentence that might depict the ancient ritual of cruising: “A man with curious eyes had suddenly peered into his face, and then dogged him with stealthy footsteps, passing and repassing him many times.” In good American style, Stoddart had no problem with the violence. “Dorian Gray” failed to scandalize America. England was, of course, another matter. Although Wilde was already planning to expand the story into a novel, he certainly reacted to the insinuations in the press. More references to physical contact between the male characters were dropped. Just as significant as the expurgations are the additions: six chapters, totalling some twenty-eight thousand words. They supply further episodes of society comedy, fresh adventures for Dorian in the opium dens, a fuller sketch of the unlucky Sibyl Vane, and a baroque subplot involving James Vane, Sibyl’s brother, who seeks to avenge her.

The new material gives “Dorian Gray” a novelistic heft, even a political edge. The chapter about the Vanes, for example, sets Dorian’s velvety life style in stark relief. Yet these excursions in high and low society feel a bit like staged distractions. There are too many tidy formulations—“It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for”—positioned to reassure the middle classes. The version that Wilde submitted to Lippincott’s is the better fiction. It has the swift and uncanny rhythm of a modern fairy tale—and “Dorian” is the greatest of Wilde’s fairy tales. Wilde made clear from the outset that he wished to show not only the thrills and pleasures of a ruthlessly aesthetic life but also its limits and dangers. The hideousness of Dorian’s demise is as integral to the work’s conception as any bloodcurdling twist in Poe, and looking at the final pages of the manuscript you can almost see Wilde’s lips curling cruelly as he wrote. Beneath the brutal final paragraph, he signs his name in slashing strokes, as if wielding a knife.

Ellmann sums it up thus: “Drift beautifully on the surface, and you will die unbeautifully in the depths.” Wilde steps outside his practiced persona to cast a cold eye on the sensation-seeking life style popularly ascribed to him. “No A.C., but who needs it when you’ve got this kind of cross-ventilation?” Buy a cartoon The most problematic aspect of Wilde’s revision is the novel’s Preface, with its famous cavalcade of epigrams: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim”; “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book”; “All art is quite useless.” These lines, together with new quips for Lord Henry (“Art has no influence upon action. . . . It is superbly sterile”), are related to letters that Wilde wrote to critics and readers after the Lippincott’s publication. They amount to a formalist defense, positing the story as an autonomous object in which diverse readers perceive diverse ideas. But art does reveal the artist, and it does influence action, however unpredictably.

In Wilde’s narrative, books are described as “poisonous” agents that enter the bloodstream: an unnamed French book that Lord Henry gives to Dorian discloses new vistas of vice. In the typescript, we learn that the book is “Le Secret de Raoul,” by Catulle Sarrazin—probably a fictional stand-in for Huysmans’s 1884 novel, “Against the Grain,” which describes a gay encounter more explicitly than Wilde ever dared to do. (Wilde read it on his honeymoon.) Above all, there is Basil’s painting, which destroys both its creator and subject. When Mallarmé read the story, he singled out for approval the line “It was the portrait that had done everything.” Art is not innocent, Wilde implies. Violence can be done in its name. Indeed, the twentieth century brought forth many Dorian Grays: fiendishly pure spirits so wrapped up in aesthetics that they become heedless of humanity. Wilde’s anatomy of the confusion between art and life remains pertinent with each new uproar over lurid films, songs, or video games. Even in the final book version, Wilde refuses to moralize, to tell the artist what to do or the reader what to think.

Each individual must devise his own ethical code. When Wilde wrote that all excess as well as all renunciation brings its punishment, he evidently had in mind the contrast between Basil, who can conceive of his love for Dorian only in abstract terms, and Dorian, who is so intent on embracing the physical that he loses his mind. Both men meet bad ends. Lord Henry, by contrast, emerges unscathed, his talk naughtier than his walk. Indeed, Basil accuses him of being secretly virtuous: “You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing.” Lord Henry espouses a peculiarly contemporary kind of moderation, indulging his brain but not his body, employing Dorian as a proxy hedonist. (Today, Lord Henry might spend a lot of time on the Internet.) There is something sad about him, for, unlike Basil and Dorian, he fails to commit himself. His life is vicarious. What begins as an alluring fable ends as a full-on modernist nightmare. Only one character experiences anything like spontaneous joy, and that is Sibyl Vane, when she decides to abandon the artistic life and devote herself to Dorian. “I am sick of shadows,” she tells him.

“You are more to me than all art can ever be.” Tragically, Sibyl does not realize that Dorian has exchanged his soul for that of the painting; like the others, she is trapped by the image’s spell. The eerie thing about Wilde’s life is that he, too, could not escape the infernal logic of the “Picture.” His own book exhibited “poisonous” properties. Alfred Douglas read it at Oxford and, by his own testimony, reread it thirteen times. He became determined to meet the author. He was Wilde’s fantasy come to life—Dorian stepping from the canvas. But he had an ugly soul; as Wilde recognized in “De Profundis,” hate excited him more than love. Wilde, Basil to the end, adored the young man all the same. On February 18, 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s hate-engorged father, inscribed a visiting card with the words “For Oscar Wilde, posing Somdomite,” and left it at Wilde’s club.

Urged on by Douglas, Wilde made the mistake of suing the Marquess for libel—a decision catastrophic not only for his career but also for his sense of dignity, since, as he later wrote, he was forced to present himself as a “champion of respectability in conduct, of puritanism in life, and of morality in art.” At the libel trial, Queensberry’s chief attorney, Edward Carson, needed to demonstrate that the words on the card were justified. So he set about establishing that Wilde had already advertised his proclivities in print. “Dorian Gray” became Carson’s main resource, and he elected to treat it as Wilde’s life story—an ironic move, because in its pages Basil complains that “men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.” The barrister pounced on a passage that had appeared in the Lippincott’s version and was later cut: “It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. . . . I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly.” The following interrogation ensued: CARSON : You must ask me a plain question.

CARSON : I hope I will make myself very plain before I am done. Wilde was obviously perturbed by the exchange. It was like talking to an eight-year-old who couldn’t tell the difference between an actor and his role. He defended himself ably, but Carson was softening him up for the blow. Private detectives hired by Queensberry had rounded up rent boys and starstruck youths who had served Wilde’s needs, and there were no clever answers to the next round of questions: “Did you become intimate with a young man named Conway? . . . He sold newspapers on the pier at Worthing? . . . Did you put your hands inside his trousers? . . . Did you give him sums from time to time amounting to fifteen pounds?” The roll call of Wilde’s associates hauntingly echoes the list of young men whom Dorian is said to have ruined. During the two dismal criminal trials that followed, Wilde had one magnificent moment, and it, too, involved “Dorian Gray.” While being questioned on the subject of Alfred Douglas’s poem about “the Love that dare not speak its name,” Wilde was suddenly moved to defend that love instead of denying it.

With emotion, he announced that such love was “as pure as it was perfect,” that it “pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo.” According to one transcript, he said, “It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection.” He was quoting almost directly from “Dorian Gray”: “The love that [Basil] bore him . . . had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself.” Wilde’s speech aroused hisses in the courtroom and also a brave burst of applause. At least one member of the jury voted against a guilty verdict, forcing a retrial. A political panic erupted: the men around Lord Rosebery, the Prime Minister, feared that if Wilde were not convicted they would be accused of sheltering a degenerate.

(Rosebery had a personal motive; it was rumored that he had been the lover of the older brother of Alfred Douglas, Francis, who had died in 1894, probably a suicide.) A second prosecution began, with the Solicitor General in charge, and it was successful. Justice Wills, the presiding judge, bombastically described the case as “the worst . . . I have ever tried.” Over time, though, the shaming of Wilde generated as much sympathy as disgust, particularly among those who were disenchanted by the strutting poses of the British Empire. “When the verdict was announced the harlots in the street outside danced upon the pavement,” Yeats wrote. And in the gay underworld Wilde’s defiance cracked open the door of hope. Havelock Ellis, in the 1906 edition of his book “Sexual Inversion,” noted that the Wilde trials “generally contributed to give definiteness and self-consciousness to the manifestations of homosexuality,” and quoted a correspondent saying that Wilde’s sufferings made him feel “ready to strike a blow, when the time comes, for what we deem to be right, honorable, and clean.” Wilde foresaw his posthumous triumph.

“I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms,” he wrote to the early gay-rights campaigner George Ives. Even so, the clean-cut categories of contemporary sexuality might have puzzled him. He was attracted to women as well as to men, if not nearly as strongly, and the collapse of his marriage may have had as much to do with temperamental differences as with sexual ones. (You could see him as one more self-entitled Victorian male exercising his right to extramarital recreation.) Furthermore, he might have resisted the tendency toward normalization in gay circles—the drive of an oppositional culture to abolish itself. When he spoke of winning the battle, he probably did not have in mind gaining the right to join the military and marry in church. “The world spins only forward,” Prior Walter says at the end of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” a “gay fantasia” that opened in 1991, a century after the publication of “Dorian Gray.” Prior goes on to say, “We will be citizens. The time has come.” Seeing the Signature Theatre production of Kushner’s masterpiece last spring, I thought of how much had changed in twenty years, never mind a hundred.

When I was in college, AIDS cast a pall of fear over gay life, and I struggled to summon the courage to tell my closest friends who I was. I couldn’t have imagined that gay marriage would become legal in half a dozen states, or that I would be married myself. The transformation is almost dreamlike. Yet I doubt that Wilde would recognize in our world the utopia that he dreamed aloud in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” A man who steeped himself in the literature of the ancient Greeks, who modelled his being on the writing of Balzac and Stendhal and Pater, who read Dante every day in prison, might have seen a new kind of hell in the global triumph of American-style pop culture. Medicine prolongs life and slows aging, but personal satisfaction is as elusive a commodity as it was for Dorian Gray. Prejudice wanes, ignorance grows, the world spins forward and backward. Few of us would wish for the return of Wilde’s London, with its opulent surfaces and savage heart. But Wilde might have been content to stay there, savoring his joys and sorrows. No one lives happily ever after.

♦ Alex Ross has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1993, and he became the magazine’s music critic in 1996. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Fiction Literature The novel begins on a beautiful summer day with Lord Henry Wotton, a strongly-opinionated man, observing the sensitive artist Basil Hallward painting the portrait of a handsome young man named Dorian Gray, who is Basil's ultimate muse. After hearing Lord Henry's world view, Dorian begins to think beauty is the only worthwhile aspect of life. He wishes that the portrait Basil painted would grow old in his place. Under the influence of Lord Henry (who relishes the hedonic lifestyle and is a major exponent thereof), Dorian begins to explore his senses. He discovers amazing actress Sibyl Vane, who performs Shakespeare plays in a dingy theatre. Dorian approaches her and soon proposes marriage. Sibyl, who refers to him as "Prince Charming", swoons with happiness, but her protective brother James tells her that if "Prince Charming" harms her, he will certainly kill him.

Dorian invites Basil and Lord Henry to see Sibyl perform in 'Romeo and Juliet'. Sibyl, whose only knowledge of love was love of theatre, casts aside her acting abilities through the experience of true love with Dorian. Disheartened, Dorian rejects her, saying her beauty was in her acting, and he is no longer interested in her. When he returns home, he notices that his portrait has changed. Dorian realises his wish has come true – the portrait now bears a subtle sneer and will age with each sin he commits, while his own appearance remains unchanged... (Excerpt from Wikipedia) Basil Hallward Timeline in The Picture of Dorian Gray Basil and Lord Henry talk about Basil's newest painting and the young man who inspired it. Basil begs Lord Henry not to speak to Dorian, but Lord Henry ignores him. As Lord Henry speaks to Dorian, Basil completes the picture. Dorian is charmed by how beautiful he is in the portrait. Weeks later, Basil joins Dorian and Lord Henry to see Sibyl at the theatre. He has doubts about Dorian's hasty engagement. Basil leaves after only half the play is over because Sibyl's acting is so bad.

After Sibyl's suicide, Basil visits Dorian to comfort him. Basil wants to see his picture, but Dorian stops him. Basil resigns himself to never seeing his portrait again. Dorian wrests a secret from Basil, without revealing his (Dorian's) secret in turn. On the eve of Dorian's thirty-eighth birthday, Basil visits Dorian right before he's scheduled to leave to Paris. Basil's lecture to Dorian on preserving his good name infuriates Dorian and, impulsively, Dorian shows Basil the changed portrait. Basil doesn't recognize the painting as his own. When he sees his signature at the bottom of the portrait he cannot understand how it changed. He is incredibly disturbed at the thought that it might reveal Dorian's soul. Basil begs Dorian to pray for his soul. Dorian murders Basil.

Question: Basil Haliward painted which notorious portrait?
Answer: The Picture of Dorian Gray