The Picture of Dorian Gray Summary & ending explained

The studio smelled of roses, and the canvas on the easel was the best thing Basil Hallward had ever painted.

It showed a young man of about twenty, golden-haired and blue-eyed, with a face so open and untouched that it seemed to glow. Basil would not exhibit it. "I've put too much of myself into it," he told his friend Lord Henry Wotton, who lay on the divan smoking and laughing at him.

Then the sitter arrived. Dorian Gray was even lovelier than the painting, and Lord Henry, who collected beautiful things and clever sentences, wanted him at once.

Basil saw the danger. "Leave him alone, Harry. He's good, and you'd ruin him."

Lord Henry began at once. While Basil painted, he talked: about living without fear, about saying yes to every temptation, since fighting one only made the craving worse. Out in the garden, with Dorian's face buried in a lilac, he said the thing that stuck.

"Your face is your fortune, Mr. Gray, and it won't last. A few summers, that's all. Then the gold fades, the skin sags, and you'll spend the rest of your life wishing you'd used it while you had it."

Dorian came back inside pale and silent.

Basil laid down his brush. The portrait was finished. Lord Henry offered anything for it; Basil said it already belonged to Dorian.

Dorian stood in front of it for a long time. For the first time he saw his own beauty, and saw that he would lose it.

"It isn't fair," he said quietly. "I'll get old and ugly, and this will stay exactly as it is, stuck in this one summer afternoon. If only we could swap. If I stayed like this and the picture did the ageing..."

His voice rose.

"I would give my soul for that!"

Basil looked startled. Lord Henry laughed. Then Dorian turned on the painter, cruel in a way he had never been before, and accused him of loving his art more than his friends. His eyes filled with tears.

Basil reached for a palette knife to slash the canvas.

Dorian tore it from his hand. "Don't! It would be murder."

So the picture was varnished, framed and sent to Dorian's house. Nobody in the room thought the wish meant anything at all.