George Fleming describes the young Wilde, disguised as Claude Davenant, in her novel Mirage: (21 yrs)

'That face was almost an anachronism. It was like one of Holbein's portraits, a pale, large-featured individual: a peculiar, an interesting countenance, of singularly mild yet ardent expression. Mr Davenant was very young - probably not more than one or two and twenty; but he looked younger. He wore his hair rather long, thrown back, and clustering about his neck like the hair of a medieval saint. He spoke with rapidity, in a low voice, with peculiarly distinct enunciation; he spoke like a man who has made a study of expression. He listened like one accustomed to speak.'
 
 

Augustus Hare writes about the young Aesthetic:

'Mrs M.L. had recently met this type of an aesthetic age staying at a country house and described him going out shooting in a black velvet suit with salmon-coloured stockings and falling down when his gun went off, yet captivating all the ladies by his pleasant talk.

One day he came down looking very pale. 'I'm afraid you are ill, Mr Wilde,' said one of the party. 'No, not ill, only tired,' he answered, 'the fact is I picked a primrose in the wood yesterday and it was so ill, I have been sitting up with it all night.''
 
 

Lillie Langtry describes him like this:

'His face was so colourless that a few pale freckles of good size were oddly conspicuous. He had a well-shaped mouth, with somewhat coarse lips and greenish-hued teeth. The plainness of his face, however, was redeemed by the splendour of his great, eager eyes.

He had one of the most alluring voices that I have ever listened to, round and soft, and full of variety of expression.'
 
 

Paul de Reul remembered the 25 year old poet as:

'…tall and pallid, cleanshaven, with long, straight black hair; he dressed in white, white from head to foot, from the tall, broad felt hat to his cane, an ivory sceptre with a round top, which I played with often. We called him Pierrot.'
 
 

An American young man, Mr Babb, wrote (1882):

'He has a splendid diction and his descriptive powers are worthy of the highest praise. His sentences are mellifluous and sparkle with occasional gems of beauty. Munroe Browning and I had the pleasure of calling upon him at the Dunlop House. His conversation is very pleasant - easy, beautiful, and entertaining. He said that if he were a young man in this country the West would have great charms for him.'
 
 

On Oscar's arrival in America, the New York Tribune writes:

'The most striking thing about the poet's appearance is his height, which is several inches over six feet, and the next thing to attract attention is his hair which is of dark brown colour, and falls down upon his shoulders… When he laughs his lips part and show a shining row of upper teeth which are superlatively white… His eyes are blue, or light gray, and instead of being 'dreamy' as some of his admirers have imagined them to be, they are bright and quick... Instead of having a small delicate hand only fit to caress a lily, his fingers are long and when doubled up would hit a hard knock, should an occasion arise for the owner to descend to that kind of argument.'
 
 

The New York Times describes him meeting Mrs Langtry in 1882 (28yrs):

'He was dressed as probably no grown man in the world was ever dressed before. His hat was of brown cloth no less than six inches high; his coat was of black velvet; his overcoat was of green cloth, heavily trimmed with fur; his trousers matched his hat; his tie was gaudy and his shirtfront very open, displaying a large expanse of manly chest. A pair of brown cloth gloves and several pimples on his chin completed his toilet. His flowing hair and the fur trimmings of his coat were just of a shade, and they gave him the appearance of having his hair combed down on one side of him to his heels and up the other side.'
 
 

Mr Broderick says:

'Wilde has been the life and soul of the voyage. He has showered good stories and bons mots, paradoxes and epigrams upon me all the way, while he certainly has never failing bonhomie which makes him roar with laughter at his own absurd theories and strange conceits… I don't know that I have ever laughed so much as with and at him all through the voyage.'
 
 

Laura Troubridge writes in her diary (1883) (29yrs):

'Went to a tea party at Cressie's to meet the great Oscar Wilde. He is grown enormously fat with a huge face and tight curls all over his head - not at all the aesthetic he used to look. He was very amusing and talked cleverly, but it was monologue and not conversation. He is vulgar, I think, and lolls about in, I suppose, poetic attitudes with crumpled shirt cuffs turned back over his coat sleeves.'
 
 

Adrian Hope writes (1887) (33yrs):

'O.W. was at the Lyric Club, fat and greasy as ever and looking particularly revolting in huge white kid gloves.'
 
 

Wilfred Owen Blunt writes:

'He was, without exception, the most brilliant talker I have ever come across, the most ready, the most witty, the most audacious. Nobody could pretend to outshine him, or even to shine at all in his company…'

The Comtesse Gabrielle de la Rochefoucault remembers:

'My brother and I called him the slug, and we couldn't bear him because each morning he asked us to recite a poem in English and invariably he said to my mother: 'Alice, your children's accent is atrocious,' and our governess punished us.'
 
 

Marcel Schwob describes Oscar as (1891) (37yrs):

'A big man, with a large pasty face, red cheeks, an ironic eye, bad and protrusive teeth, a vicious childlike mouth with lips soft with milk ready to suck some more. While he ate - and he ate little - he never stopped smoking opium-tainted Egyptian cigarettes. A terrible absinthe-drinker, through which he got his visions and desires.'
 
 

William Butler Yeats writes:

'My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labor and yet all spontaneous.'
 
 

In the same year, Stuart Merill calls him:

'Gigantic, smoothshaven and rosy, like a great priest of the moon in the time of Heliogabalus. At the Moulin Rouge the habitués took him for the prince of some fabulous realm of the North.'
 
 

Jules Renard writes in his diary (38yrs):

6 April 1892. Oscar Wilde had luncheon next to me, he does not offer you a cigarette, he chooses one for you himself. He does not go round the table, he disarranges the table. His face is covered with broken veins, he has long decayed teeth. He is very large and carries an enormous walking stick.
 
 

Max Beerbohm characterizes Oscar in these words:

Luxury - gold-tipped matches - hair curled - Assyrian-wax statue - huge rings - fat white hands - not soignée - feather bed - pointed fingers - ample scarf - Louis Quinze cane - vast Malmaison - cat-like tread - heavy shoulders - enormous dowager - or schoolboy - way of laughing with hand over mouth - stroking chin - looking up sideways - jollity overdone - But real vitality…Effeminate, but vitality of twenty men, magnetism - authority. Deeper than repute or wit, Hypnotic.
 
 

Willie Wilde, his brother:

'Oscar was not a man of bad character. You could have trusted him with a woman anywhere...'