At a Whistler exhibition, the mischievous painter brought the Punch caricaturist George Du Maurier face to face with the twenty-six-year-old Oscar Wilde, who was widely assumed to be the model for Du Maurier's enormously popular aesthetes, Postlethwaite and Maudle. ‘Which one of you two invented the other, eh?’ Whistler asked, relishing the incisiveness of his facetious inquiry. Whistler's chicken-and-egg question encapsulated the public's curiosity about the enigmatic origins of Punch's popular images of aesthetes by implying that Wilde and Du Maurier had created each other. Whistler was probably right to think that Du Maurier's caricatures of aesthetes had contributed as much to his own success as to Wilde's. Heralded as the real Postlethwaite and Maudle of Du Maurier's lampoons, Wilde's phenomenal artistic and social pretensions provided the material for Du Maurier's popular tongue-in-cheek tributes. Attempting to evade this connection, Du Maurier denied that Postlethwaite was a caricature of Wilde and, in later years, claimed the character was founded on the whole aesthetic school. For his part, Wilde saw the association as an opportunity and unabashedly told the New York Daily Tribune: