rarely right", and must be improved upon by the artist, with his own vision. Though differing with Whistler on several points, including his insistence that poetry was a higher form of art than painting, Oscar Wilde was generous in his praise and hailed the lecture as a masterpiece: not merely for its clever satire and amusing jests ... but for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its passages ... for that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting, in my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs. Whistler, however, thought himself mocked by Oscar Wilde, and from then on, public sparring ensued leading to a total breakdown of their friendship, precipitated by a report written by Herbert Vivian. Later, Wilde "symbolically murdered Whistler", basing Basil Hallward, the murdered artist in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray on Whistler. In January 1881, Anna Whistler died. In his mother's honour, he publicly adopted her maiden name McNeill as a middle name. Whistler joined the Society of British Artists in 1884, and on June 1, 1886, he was elected president. The following year, during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, Whistler presented to the Queen, on the Society's behalf, an elaborate album including a lengthy written address and illustrations that he made. Queen Victoria so admired "the beautiful and artistic illumination" that she decreed henceforth, "that the Society should be called Royal." This achievement was widely appreciated by the members, but soon it was overshadowed by the dispute that inevitably arose with the Royal Academy of Arts. Whistler proposed that members of the Royal Society should withdraw from the Royal Academy. This ignited a feud within the membership ranks that overshadowed all other society business. In May 1888, nine members wrote to Whistler to demand his resignation. At the annual meeting on June 4, he was defeated for re-election by a vote of 18–19, with nine abstentions. Whistler and 25 supporters resigned, while the anti-Whistler majority (in his view) was successful in purging him for his "eccentricities" and "non-English" background. With his relationship with Maud unraveling, Whistler suddenly proposed to and married Beatrice Godwin (also called Beatrix or Trixie), a former pupil and the widow of his architect Edward William Godwin. Through his friendship with Godwin, Whistler had become close to Beatrice, whom Whistler painted in the full-length portrait titled Harmony