Oscar Wilde in Ottawa

In May 1882, the infamous playwright Oscar Wilde made a two-day stopover in Ottawa during a lecture tour of North America, with his performance making the front page of the Ottawa Citizen. During his stay, he visited a sitting of Parliament, and met Frances Richards, a young Ottawa portrait painter. The following year Richards visited Wilde in Paris and eventually moved to London in 1887. In late December that same year, she painted his portrait which, according to Christopher Millard, a contemporary London art critic, was the inspiration for Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Richards, who later became Mrs W. E. Rowley, Esq., had ties to another Canadian expatriate living in London, Mrs Augusta Ross, daughter of Robert Baldwin, the premier of the Province of Canada (1848-51). And, according to many of Wilde’s biographers, it was Ross’s third son, Robbie, who, through a meeting with Wilde, helped the famous writer recognize his homosexuality (he had previously shown little interest in the male sex and was even known as quite the ladies’ man). “Faithful Robbie” became not only Wilde’s first recorded male lover, but was with Wilde when he died, in Paris in 1900, disgraced and abandoned by
the public.