One of Western literatures modern classics and the only novel by the brilliant writer Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, tells the story of a beautiful young man who agrees to sit for the prestigious portrait painter Basil Hallward, and how both become obsessed with the painting and with the idea of the fading beauty of youth. This gothic and hedonistic novel, reminiscent of the legend of Faust, met with the moral outrage of the critics of the time.