In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery’s first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted.

Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.

For hours he would lie absorbed in the economy of the ground.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

Written By V. S. Naipaul

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