An Ideal Husband is a play in four acts. It has all the features of a work of aestheticism, the movement with which Wilde is most closely affiliated, and features the trademark aestheticist conflation between life and works of art—this much is clear in the lurid descriptions of each of Wilde's characters, descriptions that depend upon sensual imagery of art, flowers, perfumes, and learned allusions to classical literature and other trappings of the intellectual elite. As the play opens:
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. On the right is the entrance to the music-room. The sound of a string quartette is faintly heard. The entrance on the left leads to other reception-rooms.
In addition to working in the language of aestheticism, as above, Wilde also writes An Ideal Husband as, at once, a satire of London society in the 1890s and a love story. These genres all intermingle throughout the work, but just as the aestheticist impulses are most obvious in the stage directions, the play's satirical dimensions are most obvious in the first half of the play and the love story most obvious in the second.
