The Scandalous History of Oscar Wilde’s Memorial Tomb

Jacob Epstein was very upset. For months, the sculptor had toiled on a memorial tomb for Oscar Wilde, the celebrated—and often vilified—author of works like The Picture of Dorian Gray. When he had finished and placed the headstone, which took the form of a 9-foot-by-11-foot winged figure in flight, it was promptly covered up by a cemetery official.

The reasoning was simple. In 1912, the statue’s testicles were too scandalous to put on display, especially in a place where respect was to be paid to the dead.

When Epstein learned of the censorship, he raced to Paris, where Wilde had been laid to rest. He tugged at the tarp until it came off and railed against the injustice. His act of protest did nothing: It would be years before Wilde’s memorial would get a public unveiling, but that would be far from the end of it. For the next century, his grave would be a source of consistent controversy.

So would the testicles.

Entombed

Oscar Wilde was hardly any stranger to controversy. Born in Ireland in 1854, the novelist, poet, and playwright regularly challenged the moral barriers of his era. His play Salomé was condemned in Victorian Britain for depicting Biblical characters, a verboten practice at the time; he was accused of homosexuality and was even dragged into a criminal trial on suspicion of amoral sexual acts. For this, he received two years imprisonment. He died just three years after his release, perishing at age 46 in a Paris hotel room in 1900. Penniless, he was buried in a modest grave paid for by friends.

Some years later, Wilde’s friend Robert Ross managed to raise enough money through the sale of Wilde’s work to purchase a burial plot in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, the renowned graveyard home to a number of notable people. Then, an anonymous donor—later identified as Wilde admirer Helen Carew—facilitated something more elaborate for Wilde. Ross commissioned Jacob Epstein to design and carve a tomb. Epstein, a protégé of Rodin, had an interest in Middle Eastern and Egyptian iconography and conceived of a winged figure with a human face that bore some resemblance to Wilde, though Epstein would say the likeness was unintentional. (The sculptor may have also taken inspiration from De Profundis, a letter Wilde wrote while in prison.)

Epstein ordered 20 tons of Derbyshire limestone to his London studio, which was dragged there by horses. For 10 months, Epstein carved, chiseled, and sculpted the stone until it took the shape of a mythological figure.

“He has cut from the face of the stone a flying figure with vertical wings moving with swiftness through the air parallel to the earth,” James Bone wrote in The Guardian upon seeing the statue in 1912. “The upper half of the block is a great wing which begins and ends squarely. The figure, which is in deep relief, holds its head proudly, the chest almost on the same plane, the body almost parallel with the ground, and the sense of speed given by the confident head and the wing is increased by the great straight arm pressed into the side, the fingers extended. The legs are not in a straight line with the body, as in the usual convention, but fall away at an angle to the knee and then straight back with the foot taut, adding to the feeling of supernatural motion by the superb confidence they express.”

Omitted from that fanciful description was Epstein’s flourish: limestone testicles. The addition caused some controversy when Epstein previewed the statue to onlookers in London in 1911, with some speculating no cemetery in England would ever allow it to be displayed.

This proved to be true for Paris as well. When the sculpture was transported to the cemetery in 1912, the cemetery director promptly covered it up with a tarpaulin to hide it from public eyes until a solution could be found. Epstein came to Paris and pulled the tarp off, but the cloth was soon replaced, and the monument was put under guard.

“What sacrilege ... to try to efface a moment to the memory of a great poet,” Epstein said. “I shall remain here ’till I gain my purpose. That a monument must and will stand, as the glory of Oscar Wilde’s genius shines, despite all attempts to belittle it and blot it out.”

It didn’t work. The sparring between Epstein and the cemetery went on for two years, with Epstein refusing to modify the work and Wilde’s friend Ross looking for someone to make it palatable for the public. In his 1940 memoir, Let There Be Sculpture, Epstein recalled that authors including George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells endorsed a letter to the French government to refund customs fees Epstein had incurred to get the work into Paris.

At one point, an author named Alfred Douglas requested a photo of the work from Epstein to include in a book about Wilde. The artist, sensing the author might be trying to further demonize the sculpture, threatened to physically hurt him if he wound up writing about it. (“I shall spoil the remains of your beauty double quick,” Epstein wrote.) For this, the artist was dragged into court and agreed to pay a fine.

In 1914, the cemetery settled on a modification, reportedly against Epstein’s wishes [PDF]. The statue’s genitals were covered up by the addition of a bronze plaque, and the cemetery finally unveiled the sculpture for the general public.

How long the statue remained modest is unknown, though Epstein wrote that “a band of artists and poets subsequently made a raid upon the monument” to remove the plaque; one later gifted it to Epstein as a sign of solidarity against censorship. The work then remained under a tarp until the beginning of World War I, at which point stone testicles appeared to be of little concern to anyone.

Then, in 1961, a new controversy erupted. The testicles had been stolen.

Anatomically Incorrect

The exact circumstances of the statue’s castration were not recorded in their entirety. As near as anyone could gather, two visitors to Wilde’s grave may have grown offended beyond reason. Their solution to this perceived indecency was to knock the stone testicles loose and then flee. It’s also possible the parties were inebriated and mischievous rather than morally indignant.

In any case, the vandalism was duly reported. It was also communicated to Oscar Wilde’s son and to the estate of Robert Ross, who was buried in the same space and who owned the Wilde plot.

The initial theory was that the vandals had taken the testicles. As time went on, the story grew to include that they had been retrieved and were being used as paperweights in the offices of the caretaker or night watchman.

In either case, the Wilde statue stood without the genitals but nonetheless remained a contentious presence. By the 1990s, visitors were covering the statue with lipstick kiss marks, which required cleaning and proved damaging to the limestone. Pleading with guests to the cemetery didn’t work; neither did threatening them with fines. In 2011, a glass barricade was erected around the statue to prevent any contact.

Wilde may be at rest, but his resting place is not. In 2018, incoming cemetery curator Benoît Gallot made a point of searching for the testicles that were alleged to have been used as paperweights. His investigation turned up no sign of them. Gallot has said he is still routinely asked if he has Oscar Wilde’s testicles on his desk: “Each time I reply, ‘no, I don’t have those precious stone testicles on my desk.’” They’ve never been recovered.

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