The Picture of Dorian Gray

“As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skillfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.”

This quote depicts Basil Hallward as he finishes his portrait of Dorian Gray. His desire to “imprison” here captures one of the central themes of the text: The human desire to make the fleeting nature of youth and beauty more permanent. Wilde’s choice to use the word imprison is also significant. Through this characterization of Basil’s desire, Wilde asserts that the impulse to preserve beauty results in the imprisonment of beauty. Indeed, the quote invites one to question whether art itself seeks to imprison beauty through its artifice and separation from the chronology of real life. 

“Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.”

Although Lord Henry always speaks in a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek manner, he also often very boldly proclaims his own shallowness, as if it is profound insight and a virtue. This quote exemplifies his character’s manner. He explicitly proclaims his opinion that true beauty and true intellect are incompatible. 

“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.”

Basil speaks obliquely about his homosexual attraction to Dorian Gray. Veiled by his words is the belief that if others were to see his painting of Dorian Gray, they would impose an “autobiographic” lens on it and recognize his sexual desire for Dorian, which is the true reason that Basil does not wish to exhibit the painting.