Ariadne in Naxos; or, Very Like a Wail

William Padgett

Wood engraving

Source: Punch (4 February 1882): 45

“Design by Our Own Greenery-Yallery-Grosvenor-Gallery Young Man, in humble imitation of the picture by Professor W. B. Richmond, symbolising “the grief of aestheticism at the departure of her Oscar.”

Punch may be alluding to Richmond’s Birth of Venus exhibited at the 1881 Grosvenor Gallery exhibition. This artist also used a similar pose of dramatically raised arms in his later Orpheus Returns from the Shades (1895). The cartoon comments upon Oscar Wilde’s departure for a lecture tour around the United States upon which Max Beerbohm based one of his caricatures.

According to Simon Houfe, Padgett contributed a single illustration to Punch in 1882, and this must be it.