The knee breeches that made case law (2026)

Napoleon Sarony, the New York portraitist of Bernhardt and Mark Twain, photographed Oscar Wilde in January 1882, as Wilde began his American lecture tour. Sarony chose the costume, the pose, the drapery and the light himself, and the negative is No. 18 of the series. 1 A lithographic firm copied it and put out 85,000 impressions; Sarony sued, and in 1884 the Supreme Court held that a posed photograph is a writing by its author, the ruling that let a photographer own a picture. 2 The line printed on the mount, "Copyright 1882 by N. Sarony", was argued over in that same case. The colour is a reconstruction: black silk stockings, patent-leather slippers, a dark velvet doublet, the book of poems in his hand. 3