Welsh artist linked to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray celebrated in new exhibition

Nation.Cymru Staff

A Swansea-born artist who moved in the same circles as Oscar Wilde and Toulouse-Lautrec, and is believed by some to have inspired the character of Dorian Gray, is the subject of a new exhibition exploring his remarkable life and work.

The work of Albert de Belleroche (1864 – 1944) will feature in the Three Highgate Arts Foundation and Liss Llewellyn exhibition ‘Albert De Belleroche: Dorian Gray’, running from 3 December 2026 until 31 March 2027.

Belleroche, whose full name was Count Albert Gustavus de Belleroche, was born in Swansea to a French Huguenot family who fled religious persecution in the seventeenth century.

Though he is remembered as a painter-lithographer of the Parisian Belle Époque, some of his most personal work was made in North London, gravitating early towards the intense, intertwined artistic circles in both locations.

His friendships with Helleu and Toulouse-Lautrec, and his close, possibly romantic relationship with John Singer Sargent, placed him at the centre of the Belle Époque’s creative hothouse.

Sargent’s numerous portraits of Belleroche, often sensual, emotionally charged, and unusually intimate, suggest an attachment that shaped both men’s artistic lives. 

After years in Paris, Belleroche settled in Hampstead and in 1912 he moved with his family to Glencairn, a large, detached house at 46 West End Lane, sharing studio space with John Singer Sargent during the same period.

The house and its garden became a sustained subject, such as In the Garden, Glencairn (1913), which captures the quiet intimacy of domestic life.

Similarly, L’Atelier, Hampstead (c.1912), considered to be among his finest lithographs, records the studio at the heart of the neighbourhood.

Among the exhibition’s most intriguing themes is the longstanding suggestion that Belleroche may have provided inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Curated by Alistair Hicks, the exhibition forms part of the Foundation’s charitable programme dedicated to preserving overlooked artistic legacies and revisiting artists whose work sits slightly outside the more familiar narratives of British and European modernism.

The exhibition runs from 3 December 2026 to 31 March 2027 at Three Highgate Arts Foundation, 3 Highgate High Street, London N6 5JR. For more information, visit the foundation’s site here.