“Basil’s studio” is an extract taken from the chapter I of “The picture of Dorian Gray”.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel written by Oscar Wilde in 1891. It is an example of Gothic fiction.

The story is told by an unobtrusive third-person narrator. The perspective adopted is internal, since Dorian’s apparition is in the second chapter, and this allows a process of identification between the reader and the character, and this allows a process of identification between the reader and the character. The settings are vividly described with words appealing to the senses. The novel is set in London at the end of XIX century. The protagonist is Dorian Gray, a young man. Dorian’s beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to paint his portraits.

The novel begins in the elegantly appointed London home of Basil Hallward, a respected but reclusive painter. Basil discusses his latest portrait with his friend Lord Henry Wotton. Lord Henry admires the picture, the subject of which is a beautiful young man. Lord Henry insists that the painter should exhibit it at a gallery. Basil says that he never will because he has "put too much of myself into it." Lord Henry laughs at him, From this situation it becomes clear that Lord Henry is more cynical while Basil is a simpler man with more purely romantic values. The characters are separated and categorized by appearance and talent, each representing only his own category and unable to move between them. This creates a kind of inhuman tone to these descriptions. As if trying to simplify and beautify the messiness of people’s personalities and inner contradictions, Basil turns his friends into two-dimensional portraits. While Lord Henry exercises influence over other characters primarily through his skilful use of language, it is Dorian’s beauty that seduces the characters with whom he associates. In this opening chapter, Dorian emerges as an incredibly impressionable young man (this information can be taken only from some elements present in the portrait).

In this extract there are different element, like the evocative use of the language of the senses, the absence of any didactic aim, the disenchantment with contemporary society, the excessive attention to the self, which are typical of the Aesthetic works.

Aestheticism, which found its footing in Europe in the early nineteenth century, proposed that art need not serve moral, political, or otherwise didactic ends. The aesthetic movement rejected that art must necessarily be an instructive force in order to be valuable. Instead, the aestheticists believed, art should be valuable in and of itself—art for art’s sake.

Aestheticism flourished partly as a reaction against the materialism of the burgeoning middle class, assumed to be composed of philistines (individuals ignorant of art) who responded to art in a generally unrefined manner. In this climate, the artist could assert him- or herself as a remarkable and rarefied being, one leading the search for beauty in an age marked by shameful class inequality, social hypocrisy, and bourgeois complacency.