Picture of Dorian Gray, The

Novel (1891) by Oscar Wilde. An artist paints a portrait of Dorian Gray, a young man described as flawless in beauty and character. The picture has the uncanny quality of registering the signs of age and accelerating moral decline of its subject while Gray himself apparently stays forever young and angelic. Although melodramatic in plot and lush in descriptive style, the story contains much of Wilde's paradoxical wit in its dialogue.