The statue
Danny Osborne’s Oscar Wilde does not stand on a plinth. He sprawls across a quartz boulder on the corner of Merrion Square, one leg trailing down the rock, watching the passers-by with a half-smile. Get the angle right and that is the statue’s best trick: from one side Wilde looks amused, from the other almost mournful, the expression carved to change as you walk around him. If you do one thing here, walk the full circle.
The materials are the other reason to look closely. Osborne built the figure from stone gathered on three continents: a torso of green nephrite jade from British Columbia, cuffs of pink Norwegian thulite, trousers of Norwegian blue-pearl granite, shoes of black Indian charnockite tipped with bronze shoelaces, and a Trinity College tie in glazed porcelain. He wears three rings, a wedding band and two scarabs. The boulder itself is quartz from the Wicklow Mountains. The porcelain head cracked over the years and was replaced in 2010 with a new one carved from white jadeite.
The face is modelled on Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, who unveiled the finished memorial in 1997 – the first monument anywhere to Wilde, put up 97 years after his death. Guinness Ireland Group paid for it; the budget started at IR£20,000 and more than doubled to IR£45,000 before it was done. The three people who sat as models for the sculptures all lived near Osborne’s studio in west Cork.
Flanking Wilde are two smaller bronzes: his pregnant wife Constance Lloyd, and a male torso of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and drama. On the two stone pillars behind, Wilde’s epigrams are reproduced in the handwriting of the Irish figures who copied them out, among them Seamus Heaney, John B. Keane, Michael D. Higgins, Bono and the artist Robert Ballagh.
Visiting
The memorial stands on the north-west corner of Merrion Square Park, free to see and open whenever the park is, roughly dawn to dusk. It is small, and it takes ten minutes rather than thirty, so treat it as one stop on a wider walk rather than a destination in itself. The coloured stone photographs best in late-afternoon light, when the sun is low enough to catch the jade.
Directly across the road at 1 Merrion Square is Oscar Wilde House, where he grew up. It is not a private home but open to the public: walk-in visits cost around €12 and guided tours around €22 on selected days, so check the hours before you go. In the park itself, the Giant’s Garden playground takes its name from Wilde’s fairy tale The Selfish Giant, which makes this an easy stop with children.
The park paths are level and paved, so the memorial is wheelchair accessible, with benches nearby. It is a 10-minute walk from Pearse Station, and several Dublin Bus routes stop along Merrion Street.