Typically for Wilde, his description of the setting for An Ideal Husband, in Act 1, Part 1, paints a scene of extravagance and beauty anchored by an allusion to an actual work of visual art that foreshadows the central theme of the play:
At the top of the staircase stands Lady Chiltern, a woman of grave Greek beauty, about twenty-seven years of age. She receives the guests as they come up. Over the well of the staircase hangs a great chandelier with wax lights, which illumine a large eighteenth-century French tapestry—representing the Triumph of Love, from a design of Boucher—that is stretched on the staircase well.
Thus the reader discovers the wonder of the “octagon room,” one of the play’s central set-pieces. The “Greek beauty” of Lady Chiltern nods to the influence of Greek aesthetics and philosophy on Wilde’s writing—and the art and literature of the aestheticist movement of which he was a part—and the classical allusion continues with Wilde’s description of the French tapestry: an apparent reproduction of an 18th century Neoclassical painting by François Boucher, likely one of a number of paintings he titled the Triumph of Venus. As the titles suggest, these works depict Venus, the Roman goddess of love, lounging around and surrounded by cupids. The explicit inclusion of such a scene in the Chilterns’ octagon room underscores the centrality of love as a theme in An Ideal Husband—and subtly foreshadows love’s ultimate victory over avarice and artifice at the end of the play.
In Act 1, Part 1, Robert Chiltern and Mrs. Cheveley interact for the first time in the play. Their interaction is rife with foreshadowing for the conflict to come, as Mrs. Cheveley reveals her shallowness and inscrutability.
Robert Chiltern: To attempt to classify you, Mrs. Cheveley, would be an impertinence. But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.
Mrs. Cheveley: Oh, I’m neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.
Sir Robert Chiltern: You prefer to be natural?
Mrs. Cheveley: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
From the very beginning of the play, no character is quite sure what to do with Mrs. Cheveley. As her answers to Robert’s question reveals, she is not readily classifiable according to personality traits or worldviews—she dismisses both optimism and pessimism as poses, or artificial dispositions—and prefers to be “natural,” or authentic, despite seeing even naturalism itself as just another pose. To Cheveley, everything is artifice: this is the source and justification for her deceit.
In Act 1, Part 3, Mabel Chiltern finds a diamond brooch stuck in a couch during a party held at the Chilterns’ house in London. The curious introduction of the brooch into the story foreshadows its role, at the end of the play, in unmasking Mrs. Cheveley’s deceit.
Lord Goring: I wonder who dropped it.
Mabel Chiltern: It is a beautiful brooch.
Lord Goring: It is a handsome bracelet.
Mabel Chiltern: It isn’t a bracelet. It’s a brooch.
Lord Goring: It can be used as a bracelet.
[…]
Miss Mabel, I am going to make a rather strange request to you.
[…]
Don’t mention to anybody that I have taken charge of this brooch. Should anyone write and claim it, let me know at once.
[…]
You see I gave this brooch to somebody once, years ago.
Mabel’s complimentary description of the brooch before this sequence draws the audience’s attention to it, but it is Lord Goring’s odd behavior around it, and his curious request, that foreshadows the brooch’s importance to the play as one of its central symbols: Goring knows it not as a brooch but a bracelet, which he had once given to his cousin as a gift, and now wants to know who exactly has brought it to the Chilterns’ party. Eventually, Mrs. Cheveley will ask after the missing brooch and Lord Goring will identify her as the thief who stole it from his cousin—thereby unmasking Cheveley as a fraud.
