The Archive — Notes on a piece

It illustrates nothing

The Black Cape is one of Beardsley’s illustrations for Wilde’s banned Salomé — except it illustrates nothing in the play. It is a dress: a single black form on bare paper, the line block doing what it did best.
Aubrey Beardsley · The Black Cape, from Salomé · 1894 · line block
Aubrey Beardsley’s The Black Cape: Salomé as a single black form on white
Aubrey Beardsley, The Black Cape, from Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, 1894 (line block). Public domain.

In 1894 Oscar Wilde's Salomé appeared in English with sixteen drawings by the twenty-one-year-old Aubrey Beardsley.1 The play had been written in French and banned from the British stage — the Lord Chamberlain forbade biblical characters in the flesh — so its first English life was as an illustrated book, and the illustrations promptly stole it.2 This is one of them, The Black Cape. It is also the one that illustrates nothing.

A dress, not a scene

Most of Beardsley's Salomé plates seize a moment — the severed head, the peacock skirt. The Black Cape does not. Salomé stands in profile, swallowed by an enormous black garment, a little hat perched on stylised hair, a fan in her hand. It is a fashion caprice, almost unrelated to the text; by the V&A's account it stood in for a drawing, "John and Salome," pulled for being too much.3 Told to illustrate a play, Beardsley drew a dress.

One black ink

Look at what it is: an almost entirely black shape on bare white paper, pure line and solid mass, no shading anywhere.4 That is not only a style — it is the line block, the photomechanical process that turned a pen drawing into a zinc relief plate and printed it, in one black ink, in the same press as the type.5 Beardsley designed for it, and was very nearly the only artist who understood what it could do.6 The drawing was already a one-colour print.

Grotesque by intent

Beardsley had one stated aim — "the grotesque" — and about six years to pursue it before tuberculosis killed him at twenty-five.7 The Salomé drawings made him famous and faintly infamous at once; the book carried some thirteen of the sixteen, the rest held back as indecent.8 The Black Cape survived because, on the surface, it was only a dress.

A black form on cream, one ink, pure line — nothing redrawn. You wear the caprice, not the plot.

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Notes & sources

  1. Oscar Wilde, Salomé, English edition with sixteen drawings by Aubrey Beardsley; Elkin Mathews & John Lane, London, 24 February 1894.
  2. Salomé, written in French (1893), was refused a licence for the British stage (a ban on staging biblical figures) and not performed publicly in Britain until 1931. Wikipedia.
  3. The Black Cape shows Salomé in profile in an enormous cape; per the V&A it replaced "John and Salome," withdrawn as too erotic. V&A.
  4. An almost entirely black form on bare paper — pure line and solid mass, without half-tone.
  5. Line block: a pen drawing photographed onto a zinc plate, acid-etched and printed in relief in one black ink alongside the type. CAMEO/MFA; King's College London.
  6. Beardsley designed for the line block and was practically the only artist to exploit it fully. King's College London.
  7. "I have one aim — the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." Beardsley, The Idler (1896). He died of tuberculosis at 25 in 1898.
  8. The 1894 edition carried about thirteen of the sixteen drawings; several were held back as indecent.
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