Last fall New York’s Morgan Library & Museum received an astonishing present: a handsome album bound in red Morocco leather with a coat of arms stamped in gilt. Inside was the real treasure: a long-lost collection of Oscar Wilde’s manuscripts and letters, including the earliest surviving note written to his great love, Lord Alfred Douglas, known as Bosie. This spring, as visitors to the museum admire the volume in its vitrine, where it is part of a show of important recent acquisitions, a select group of fortunate institutions and individuals, including David Rockefeller, Jayne Wrightsman, Valentino and several Wilde scholars, will be receiving copies of a magnificently produced facsimile edition. “Almost no one does this sort of thing today,” says Christine Nelson, the Morgan’s curator of literary and historical manuscripts, of the painstaking reproduction. “It’s something that Pierpont Morgan would have done.”
Both the original and the facsimile edition were the final gifts of a remarkable woman, Lúcia Moreira Salles, a Brazilian philanthropist who died in January after a long battle with cancer. Still beautiful at 70, she passed away at a São Paulo hospital, where she was registered under an assumed name to avoid press. Born to a middle-class family in Porto Alegre, a city in southern Brazil, she learned French and moved to Paris in the early Sixties to work as a model. Her natural elegance and handsome dark looks caught the attention of Coco Chanel, who made her the house model. In the early Seventies she became both a muse and an international public relations liaison for Valentino, with whom she remained close until her death. “She was a perfect woman,” says the designer. “Everything she did was extremely refined and elegant. At the same time, she was very adorable, very warm. She was like my sister.”
Lúcia left behind her career in fashion in 1986, when she married banker and diplomat Walther Moreira Salles. Twice ambassador to the U.S., he was one of the wealthiest men in Brazil and a passionate collector in several fields, including that of rare books. With Lúcia, who shared his interests, he acquired the Wilde volume in the late Eighties from a source that remains unknown. (Lúcia couldn’t remember and passed away before the invoice could be found.) In the years following her husband’s death in 2001, Lúcia began to think about donating the book to an appropriate institution; she settled on the Morgan Library because of the strength of its other Wilde holdings and its commitment to scholarship. In 2005, during a conversation with her close friend Juan Pablo Queiroz, a young Argentine publisher, she decided to produce a facsimile edition before parting with the treasure. On her behalf, Queiroz contacted Merlin Holland, a leading Wilde scholar and the author’s only grandson, for guidance.
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