A rare photograph of Oscar Wilde as a student in Magdalene College has sold for £5,308 (€6137.64) to a “hard-core Oscar Wilde collector” at an auction in Gloucestershire, England.Wilde attended Magdalen College from 1874 to 1878. The photograph is dated from 1876 and went to auction with an original estimate of £3,000-£5,000. The Dublin author and playwright was born in 1854 and grew up at 1 Merrion Square, Dublin, before studying classics – first at Trinity College Dublin and then at Magdalen College in Oxford.Chris Albury, auctioneer with Dominic Winter Auctioneers responsible for the sale, said that the photograph was “a fantastic and lucky find by the seller”. Photograph of Oscar Wilde as a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, sold at auction. Photograph: Dominic Winter Auctioneers “He had casually bought a fairly typical Victorian photo album with images of Oxford and Devon because he was intrigued by a group of small photographs of rural Scandinavia that were in there,” Albury said.“It was only at a later date when browsing through it and staring at this group of students and wondering who might be among them that he spotted what he thought might be Oscar Wilde.”The seller contacted Albury for an opinion and a provisional valuation, but did not want to email the image for fear of it getting into the public domain. “So I had to wait till he brought it in to see it in the flesh.” “I was over the moon to confirm that it really was Oscar Wilde. I tried to find other copies but failed to do so, and it was only a couple of days before the sale that I was able to confirm that there is another copy of the same photograph in the Library of Congress, Washington DC. However, it is still a very rare photograph and no others have been offered for sale before, so we stood by the estimate of £3000-£5000,″ Albury said.After confirming the identity of the buyer on Thursday morning, Albury said “we are very happy for the vendor and buyer and it has been a great journey and a great story to be associated with”. Last photograph taken of Oscar Wilde on his death bed (£2,000-£3,000) at Bonham's auction on February 18th However, the photograph did not exceed sale expectations in the same way a photograph of Wilde on his death bed did at a Bonham’s auction in London in February earlier this year, where the picture was sold for 100 times its original estimate. The death bed photograph had a guide price of £2,000 to £3,000 and sold for £279,800 (about €320,000). It was taken on the day Wilde died, November 30th, 1900. Wilde’s plays – An Ideal Husband (1895), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Salomé (1891); his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and his poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), about his time in prison following his conviction for gross indecency – are among his most famous works.