First edition, first issue, one of only 250 copies thus; in total 750 copies of this edition were printed in 1881. However, after the first 250 copies were issued, mock title pages were printed stating second and third editions, and the remaining 500 copies were equally split between them. This is a particularly attractive copy, with the bookplate to the front pastedown of the eccentric sportsman and artist William Eden (1849-1915), father of future Prime Minister Anthony Eden, and who, like Wilde, had a dispute with the artist James McNeill Whistler. Eden excelled at a range of sports from boxing and horse riding to shooting, "the epitome of the sporting squire" (ODNB), a member of several clubs and well known in London society. So too was he a keen amateur artist and aesthete, building a fine collection of paintings, and was a member of the aristocratic group The Souls. The contrast between the sportsman and the aesthete has been noted: "There was little that was harmonious in his nature, and the aesthetic side warred with and exacerbated, rather than complemented, his athleticism, making him a bored sportsman and a militant aesthete. As he grew older, the world's failure to correspond to his ideals drove him to furious rages and the debased taste of humanity confirmed his atheism - for how could a God have made such a botch of things?" (ibid). His dispute with Whistler was occasioned when Eden commissioned a portrait of his wife, which Whistler executed, but then kept the cheque without handing over the painting, leading to a legal case which resulted in Whistler's book The Baronet and the Butterfly (1899). Wilde too had a lengthy rivalry with Whistler, out of the courts, but with very public sparring. Mason 304. Octavo (183 x 122 mm). Early 20th-century pink straight-grain morocco for Hatchards of Piccadilly, spine lettered in gilt, pink cloth sides, marbled endpapers, top edge gilt, pink silk page marker. Bound without half-title. A few inked crosses to contents list. Spine lightly sunned, very light rubbing at extremities, contents clean; an excellent copy.
