Oscar Wilde 125: Reimagining the House Beautiful
On 30 November, the 125th anniversary of Oscar Wilde’s death, my exhibition Oscar Wilde 125: Rory Hutton Reimagines the House Beautiful opened at Shapero Modern on New Bond Street.
My connection to Wilde feels strangely personal. Born a stone’s throw from his childhood home, he has occupied my imagination for as long as I can remember. Creating this exhibition felt like a natural way to honour him, exploring his philosophies and his belief in art, beauty, decoration, colour and joy.
The exhibition opens with a line from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience:
“Though the Philistines may jostle,
You will rank as an apostle
In the high aesthetic band,
If you walk down Piccadilly
With a poppy or a lily
In your medieval hand.”
The character of Bunthorne, while not strictly based on Wilde, later became closely associated with him, something Wilde was more than happy to encourage.
From there, the exhibition travels through Wilde’s student rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford, famously filled with blue and white china. Wilde proclaimed, “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” So outraged were some of his contemporaries by such decadence that a sermon was preached against it in the college chapel.
Wilde’s lecture The House Beautiful has guided the prints and objects in the exhibition. He reminds us that “a designer must imagine in colour, must think in colour, must see in colour”, something I try to do instinctively in my own work. Wilde argues for surroundings that are expressive, personal and intelligently assembled rather than slavishly fashionable. He writes about flowers, colour, books, china and furniture, and about the moral importance of living with beautiful things. It is not about wealth or display, but about discernment and delight.
And of course, he offers practical advice too:
“Those of you who have old china use it. There is nothing so absurd as having good china stuck up in a cabinet merely for show. If you can’t use good china without breaking it, then you don’t deserve to have it.”
Blue and white china sits at the heart of the exhibition. Wilde adored it. Hence, I worked with an historic Stoke-on-Trent factory to produce a pair of limited-edition blue and white bone china plates, made using traditional English ceramic processes.
Another collaboration I was particularly keen to realise was a fan. Wilde loved fans as theatrical props and as decorative punctuation. Think of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Working with Rockcoco Fans, whose mission is to revive traditional fan-making in Britain, I designed a fan leaf based around chrysanthemums, one of Wilde’s favourite flowers.
Wilde is about allowing beauty to be part of daily life rather than something reserved for best. He understood that decoration is never superficial. It shapes how we feel, how we behave and how we see the world.
But beneath the famous wit lies something more serious. Wilde believed that art had a moral purpose, in its ability to create what he called a “common intellectual atmosphere” between people. He imagined a world where beauty might not prevent conflict entirely, but might at least make us more human with one another. In times like ours, that feels worth holding onto.
One of the great pleasures of the past few weeks has been seeing how warmly the exhibition has been received. It has been covered by The Gloss, Country Life and The English Home, among others, and English perfume house Penhaligon’s collaborated with me to host a very special evening inspired by Wilde’s favourite scent, Hammam Bouquet.
I am hugely grateful to Shapero Modern for believing in my concept and curating it so beautifully in their gallery. This exhibition marks my second solo show with Shapero Modern, following Gardening in Linocut, and it has been a real pleasure to work with them again. A small selection of works from the exhibition, including limited-edition prints and the blue and white china, can be viewed on the Shapero Modern website, and the gallery can be contacted directly for purchase enquiries.
The exhibition ends with Wilde’s final, wry observation:
“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”
If you find yourself in London between now and the end of January, I would love you to see the exhibition. It is, I hope, an invitation to slow down, to look closely, and perhaps to reconsider the quiet radicalism of making one’s house, and one’s life, as beautiful as possible.