An unpublished aphorism from the pen of Oscar Wilde has come to light.

“One can exist without art, but one cannot live without it,” the flamboyant author wrote in 1882, the year he embarked on a grand lecture tour of America.

Having ventured into the Wild West in his pantaloons and velvets to discuss art and aesthetics, he scribbled the previously unseen words in ink on a scrap of paper, apparently for an adoring autograph-hunter of the day.