Cover Design from A Portfolio of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings illustrating "Salome" by Oscar Wilde,

John Lane, London, 1906–12

Shortly after Oscar Wilde’s Salome was first published in 1891, the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley was asked by the Pall Mall Gazette to respond to the play with a drawing. Although the newspaper rejected Beardsley’s macabre rendition of the play’s final scene, his illustration was published in an issue of Studio magazine later that year. When Wilde saw Beardsley’s work, he inscribed a copy of Salome “for Aubrey,” calling him “the only artist” who could see the eponymous princess’s “invisible dance” of the seven veils, a performance said to have led to the execution of John the Baptist. Beardsley illustrated in full the 1894 edition of Wilde’s play, for which this cover design was created. The scrawled title echoes Wilde’s delighted description of Beardsley’s drawings as “the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes on the margins of his copybooks,” while the stylized peacock feathers function like a theater curtain, creating a sense of anticipation for the reader.