Love Triangles, Death, and Art in Dahl’s "Skin" and Wilde’s "Dorian Gray"

What is the true cost of art for those involved in its making?

Roald Dahl is famous for many things both bad and good, but his perfectly plotted and written short stories for adults warrant much more attention than they receive. “Skin,” a brilliant 1952 story published in The New Yorker, stands out because it is the only one of his short stories to include a real person – the Expressionist painter Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) – as a character, and because of its curious relationship to Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.¹

Chaïm Soutine, Eva (1928), detail. Soutine signed this painting in red, but I have had to cut off the image without including the signature because of how it displays on the homepage of The Duck-Billed Reader. Soutine painted many portraits, and the two literary works discussed in this post are all about portraiture!

Note: what follows contains spoilers about both “Skin” and Dorian Gray.

“Skin” opens in 1946, with a destitute old tattoo artist, Drioli, passing a gallery showing of Soutine’s work. The sight of a picture in the gallery window calls to mind an evening that he and his wife Josie spent with Soutine many years ago, before the First World War, when Soutine was unknown and all three were terribly poor. As Drioli remembers it, “he had got rich one day, that was it, and he had bought lots of wine.” As Josie, Drioli, and Soutine become soddenly drunk, Drioli has an idea: Josie should pose for Soutine; and Soutine, after being taught how to use Drioli’s tools, should tattoo the portrait onto Drioli’s back. After Drioli convinces both artist and model to go along with this idea, Soutine inks a kinetic masterpiece on Drioli’s back and signs it in red.

Many years later, the sight of Soutine’s paintings in the gallery is a revelation to Drioli: he did not know that Soutine had become famous. On impulse, Drioli enters the gallery and, when asked to leave the warm, comfortable space by the owner, shouts: “I, too, have a picture by this painter! … I’ll show you! … [flinging off his jacket and shirt] You see? There it is!” A hush falls on the onlookers, broken when the gallery owner offers to buy the painting. Then another man, who claims to own a hotel at Cannes, proposes to maintain Drioli in luxurious comfort in exchange for “spend[ing] your time on my beach in bathing trunks, walking among my guests, sunning yourself, swimming, drinking cocktails.” The half-starved Drioli is persuaded by this, as well as by the man’s offer of an immediate dinner: “Roast duck and Chambertin, … And perhaps a soufflé aux marrons, light and frothy.”

The upshot: “It wasn’t more than a few weeks later that a picture by Soutine, of a woman’s head, painted in an unusual manner, nicely framed and heavily varnished, turned up for sale in Buenos Aires.”

Readers of this story are often focused on Drioli’s fate. But more interesting, in my view, are the story’s references to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both Dahl’s story and Wilde’s novel focus on the artistic alchemy of an erotic triangle. Both also raise questions about the meaning and value of art.

Two Love Triangles

Josie, the model whose image is inked into Drioli’s back, is Drioli’s wife. There is little about their relationship in Dahl’s story; instead, Dahl focuses on the relationship each has with Soutine, the painter.

Soutine’s attraction for Josie is evident. When Drioli announces that it’s time for a celebration, Soutine responds, “What is it that we celebrate? … Is it that you have decided to divorce your wife so she can marry me?” Later, Soutine brusquely tells Drioli, “Do not interrupt me when I am talking with your wife.” Drioli knows, when he suggests that Soutine paint Josie, that “he only had to mention his wife and the boy’s thick brown lips would loosen and begin to quiver.”

Despite Soutine’s aggressive remarks about Drioli’s wife, Drioli is unruffled; he seems willing to allow considerable liberties to the young painter. Drioli thinks of Soutine in endearments (“my little painter”; “my little Kalmuk”); and as “this ugly little boy whom he had liked - almost loved - for no reason at all that he could think of, except that he could paint.” Drioli says that Soutine’s paintings are “marvelous. I love them all.” When Drioli has the idea for the tattooed portrait of Josie, he says, touching Soutine’s knee, “I would like to have a picture [] that I can have with me always … for ever … wherever I go … whatever happens … but always with me … a picture by you.”² Drioli participates in the creation of the tattooed portrait by submitting his body as the canvas – a submission that entails an entire night, almost naked, under Soutine’s touch. By the morning, Drioli has been transformed into a living work of art that reifies the triangular relationship among Soutine as painter; Josie as model and muse; and Drioli, who loves both of the others, as viewer and canvas.

Chaïm Soutine, Self-Portrait (c. 1918), detail.

Dahl’s short story bears a striking resemblance to Wilde’s novel, which establishes a triangle between Basil Hallward, the painter of the titular picture; Dorian Gray, the young man who is his subject; and Lord Henry Wotton, the viewer (who is referred to both as “Lord Henry” and as “Harry”). The erotic undertone of these relationships is so evident that the novel – even after being toned down in multiple redrafts – was used as evidence in a libel case imprudently brought by Wilde to prove that Wilde was not a “sodomite,” as the Marquess of Queensberry had labeled him.³

The novel opens with Basil telling Lord Henry that Dorian “absorb[s] my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.… I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t see him every day. He is absolutely necessary to me.” Basil’s passion for Dorian becomes evident when Dorian accuses Basil of caring for him only because of his physical beauty. Basil “turn[s] pale and ca[tches] his hand. ‘Dorian! Dorian!’ he cried, ‘don’t talk like that. I have never had such a friend as you, and I shall never have such another.’” Dorian later reflects on the painter’s “absurd fits of jealousy, his wild devotion” and realizes that “the love that [Basil] bore him—for it was really love—had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual…. It was such love as Michelangelo had known ….”⁴

Dorian, in turn, is fascinated by Lord Henry, who awakens new feelings in Dorian with this striking statement:

“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. … You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame—”

Dorian is thunderstruck. “Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. He understood them now. Life suddenly became fiery-coloured to him. It seemed to him that he had been walking in fire. Why had he not known it?” As Lord Henry discourses on “the new Hedonism,” he reflects that “talking to [Dorian] was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow.”

This conversation occurs during Dorian’s last sitting for the portrait. Basil remarks, “I don’t know what Harry has been saying to you, but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression.” Basil completes the portrait and signs it “in long vermilion letters.”

After listening to Lord Henry rhapsodize about the pleasure of youth, Dorian is seized by the fear that, unlike his portrait, he will inevitably lose his beauty.

As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a knife and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. His eyes deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears.… “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! … I would give my soul for that!”⁵

And that is exactly what happens.

In his preface to the novel, Wilde wrote: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” Here, the portrait of Dorian mirrors Dorian’s absorption of Lord Henry’s influence.⁶ The addition of Lord Henry as viewer and critic to the relationship between artist and subject yields a volatile mixture. Both Dorian and Basil identify themselves with the portrait. Dorian exclaims, “I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself.” Basil refers to it as “the real Dorian.” But Basil also identifies it with himself: he has “shown in it the secret of my own soul.” As he explains, “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.” When he later sees the corrupted portrait, aged and debauched, he reacts with horror; he feels as if “his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice.”⁷

The portrait becomes the evolving record not only of the aging of its subject, but also of his moral degeneration, which begins under Lord Henry’s influence. Thus, although Dorian never ages corporeally, the portrait physically records his descent into cruelty, vice, and even murder – this last reflected in a “loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood.”⁸

Chaïm Soutine, Les Maisons (1921). While portraiture is the topic of this post, this painting gives a sense of the kinetic energy of Soutine’s painting, which would be augmented by working on a mobile human canvas. In describing his practice as a tattoo artist, Drioli reflects, “Could he [himself] not draw the likeness of a lady and position it with such subtlety upon a man’s arm that when the muscle of the arm was flexed the lady came to life and performed some astonishing contortions?” Soutine’s portraits were often marked by strikingly asymmetrical, exaggerated features that suggest constant motion and distortion.

Beauty, Death, and Afterlife in Art

In Wilde’s novel, the art itself has been corrupted in its creation by the hedonistic desires Lord Henry inspires in Dorian. In the end, Dorian stabs the portrait, which reflects his true self, and dies. But when his body is discovered, it is “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage,” while the portrait has reverted to its former splendor. In the preface to the novel, Wilde wrote, “beautiful things mean only beauty…. All art is quite useless.” And upon Dorian’s death, the portrait is restored so that it again signifies “only beauty” and is no longer freighted with the alchemical emotions of the triangle that gave it being.⁹

The erotic triangle in Dahl’s short story has a very different conclusion. In 1946, when the story resumes, Drioli is alone, shivering and hungry in Paris. Soutine’s tattooed portrait of Josie is all that remains of the triangle; both Soutine and Josie are dead.

The uncanny consequences of embodying a work of art become clear when Drioli reveals Soutine’s masterpiece to the gallery crowd, “the colors as bright as ever.” He is immediately caught up between the gallery owner and the alleged owner of the Cannes hotel, who both make proposals to own the very skin on his back. Drioli is so desperate that he is willing to part with the painting that is a piece of his body and identity, but he does not see how it can be separated from himself. He asks, sadly, “Monsieur, how can I possibly sell it?”

The gallery crowd gets involved, criticizing the proffered price as too low and raising concern about how the tattoo can be sold: “It is part of himself!” The gallery owner and the crowd debate whether a skin-grafting operation would work (a gruesomely appropriate question given Soutine’s lifelong preoccupation with painting flayed carcasses). The gallery owner muses, “The picture itself is of no value until you are dead. How old are you, my friend?” A member of the crowd suggests, “Perhaps, if one were to offer this old man enough money, he might consent to kill himself on the spot.” The reader is left to wonder how, exactly, Drioli meets his end.

Dorian’s portrait is unburdened when he dies; it returns to being “only beauty.” In Dahl’s story, though, the sundering of the portrait from its living human canvas diminishes it. The kinetic nature of a tattoo is lost, and the portrait is a mere art-market commodity. In both stories, the art as it stands at the end – the restored portrait of Dorian, the “heavily varnished,” static portrait of Josie – comes at enormous cost.

Footnotes are below the buttons!

1. Dahl’s story is widely anthologized, and there is not much point in including page citations for such a short work. I have attempted to verify all quotations using the buggy wayback viewer provided by The New Yorker.

2. Ellipses in original; I used a bracket where I ordinarily would use ellipsis to indicate omitted words.

3. See Nicholas Frankel, “A Textual History of The Picture of Dorian Gray,“ Harvard University Press Blog (2011), available here; Philip S. Palmer, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Collection note, The Morgan Library & Museum, available here; Alex Ross, “Deceptive Picture,” in The New Yorker (August 8, 2011); and Testimony of Oscar Wilde on Cross Examination (April 3,1895) (Literary Part), available at UMKC Famous Trials website. I have used the 1891 text, which has evidence aplenty of the homoerotic overtones of the Basil-Dorian-Henry triangle.

4. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), chs. 1, 2, 9, and 10.

5. All quotations after footnote 3 to this point are to Dorian Gray, ch. 2.

6. Wilde has much to say about influence, but there is not space for that theme here.

7. Id., preface and chs. 1, 2, and 13.

8. Id., ch. 14.

9. Id., preface and ch. 20.