A portrait takes the marks of a life its subject declines to carry: the years, the cruelty, the ruin. Lord Henry talks, Basil paints, Dorian acts, and the canvas keeps the account. Wilde's only novel is the place where his wit stops holding the horror at a distance. The Gilded Library gives it paintings of perfumed 1890s London, and an ornament borrowed from Dorian's own vocabulary — peacock feather, orchid, hand mirror.