Someone told me they thought the statue looked just like Jonathan Ross, which I suppose it does a bit.

But the lolling figure could really be nobody but Oscar Wilde.

This striking work (see below) was executed by the Irish sculptor Danny Osborne and has stood since 1997 in a corner of Dublin’s Merrion Square opposite the writer’s childhood home, No 1.

Osborne’s aim, amply fulfilled, was to capture Wilde’s flamboyant personality.

His love of beautiful stones is reflected in the materials, which include Guatemalan jade for Wilde’s head and hands, nephrite jade for his green jacket and thulite for its pink collar, larvikite for his trousers and black granite for his shoes.

On a first sighting, on a stroll from the Merrion Hotel 200 yards away, the statue reminded me of lines by another great poet, WH Auden.

I refer to In Praise of Limestone where he writes of “the flirtatious male who lounges/Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting/That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but/Extensions of his power to charm”.

Yes, Osborne has found all of Wilde’s charm, which he famously possessed.

Merrion Square is an area rich in literary associations. William Butler Yeats, Ireland’s most famous poet, lived at No 82 in a property now marked with a plaque.

There is another on No 70, the former home of Sheridan Le Fanu, one of my favourite Victorian novelists.

His vampire shocker Carmilla was published in 1872, 25 years ahead of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Stoker was another Dublin man.

Statues of the famous can be seen throughout Dublin.

I admired the fine study of James Joyce, by Rowan Gillespie, in the Merrion Hotel’s garden, and, in a different vein, that of Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott outside one of his favourite bars, off Grafton Street.