Novelguide: Search Study Guides  An Ideal Husband: Metaphor
Analysis   The Arts In keeping with Wilde’s idea that life
imitates art, rather than the other way around, he makes
constant reference to the arts as something superior to life,
something worthy of being copied. In his stage directions, for
instance, he compares the characters to portraits by painters.
Mrs. Marchmont and Lady Basildon, for instance, are two pretty
society women with a delicacy of manner that the French painter
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) would have loved to paint. By
evoking Watteau’s Rococo paintings of aristocratic society,
Wilde creates an atmosphere of formal manners, extravagant
dress, and theatrical poses. Lady Chiltern, on the other hand,
has “grave Greek beauty” (p. 1), indicating a more severe
character with moral dimension. At the top of the stairs she
stands under a French tapestry with a design made by FranÁois
Boucher (1703–1770) of “The Triumph of Love” (p. 1). This may be
the erotic “Triumph of Venus,” an allegory