Dominic Winter Auctioneers: Antiques Trade Gazette - 6 May 2026
Unrecorded photograph of Oscar Wilde discovered at Gloucestershire auction
A seemingly unrecorded photograph of the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde taken during his time at Magdalen College, Oxford has been found by Gloucestershire auction house Dominic Winter.
A detail of the photograph taken in the cloisters of Magdalen College, Oxford, c.1876, showing Oscar Wilde in a bowler hat facing the camera. The photo is estimated £3000-5000 at Dominic Winter.
The college photo, acquired by chance by a vendor interested in other photos in an album, comes for sale in South Cerney, Gloucestershire this month with a guide of £3000-5000.
The private vendor recently bought the photo as part of a leather-bound album of late Victorian photographs. His primary interest had been the group of small format prints of Scandinavia that appeared in the back of the album. Dominic Winter specialist Chris Albury told ATG: “It was apparently only later when flicking through he happened to by chance spot the face of Oscar Wilde staring back at him in a group photo.”
Subsequent research confirmed the presence of known members of Wilde’s Oxford ‘clique’ including his closest university friends and fellow Classicists, William Welsford Ward known as Bouncer and Reginald ‘Kitten’ Harding. E Cholmley Jones is also identified with two others tentatively identified as AF Peyton and Rowland Childers. According to the fashion of the time, most wear bowler hats.
The appearance of what appears to be a black, or mixed race, student in the photograph is also notable. The only identified black student at Oxford at this time was Christian Frederick Cole (1852-85), who studied first as a non-collegiate student and then at University College from 1873-76, becoming the first black graduate of the University of Oxford.
The photograph offered at Dominic Winter showing students and teachers, including Oscar Wilde and friends, taken in the cloisters of Magdalen College, Oxford, c.1876. A detail of the print shows Wilde in a bowler hat facing the camera. To his right (in profile) is E Cholmley Jones and to his left, William Welsford Ward. Reginald Harding is seated at Wilde’s feet. The figure to Ward’s left is tentatively thought to be Rowland Childers while Jones places his hand on the shoulder of a young man in a mortar board thought to be AF Peyton. The figure of a black student seen standing top left in profile wearing a bowler hat, may be that of Christian Frederick Cole, the first black graduate of the University of Oxford.
The photo, an albumen print measuring 8 x 11in (20 x 28cm), was taken in the Cloisters of Magdalen College, Oxford, c.1876.
Wilde had arrived at Magdalen as a promising Classics undergraduate from Trinity Collage, Dublin in 1874. When he graduated four years later, his quips and witticisms were already being reported in the press. It was at Oxford that he coined his famous remark on Aestheticism: “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china”.
Wilde was photographed throughout his life, creating the image that would further his literary and artistic reputation. Many were made as carte de visites and printed in multiples.
A handful of photographs of Wilde in his college days are known, most of them single or small group portraits taken in one of the local studios. However, this informal image of Wilde among around 50 other students and fellows is apparently unrecorded. Chris Albury has contacted Magdalen College to confirm the discovery.
The photo is being offered for sale in the album in which it was found. It contains other views of Oxford, some images of Devon, plus the eight smaller photographs of Scandinavian fishing villages that had first attracted the vendor’s attention.
The May 20 sale at Dominic Winter in South Cerney, Gloucestershire is titled Photographs, Posters, Postcards, Autographs, Historical Documents, Association Items & Ephemera.
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