Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow’s feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. The picture had to be concealed. There was no help for it.
– Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. While Dorian may escape the clutches of the law and society for his crimes and sins, he knows that there is no hiding place from the portrait for his festering soul. He will appear eternally young, but every wrongdoing will be etched on the evil face of the aging, decaying portrait. The painted Dorian will grow hideous and wrinkled and twisted, a symbol of his mortality, and must be hidden.