The Black Cat, in Four Illustrations to the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

Aubrey Beardsley

The Black Cat, in Four Illustrations to the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

[Chicago:

Stone & Kimball,

1896?].

Throughout the 1890s, Beardsley’s contemporary, the artist Louis Wain (1860–1939), filled the pages of books and magazines with images of anthropomorphized cats and kittens—sometimes wearing just their fur, sometimes dressed in late-Victorian finery, but almost always charming, lively, and endearing. Beardsley was the anti-Wain. While it is true that the psychotic protagonist of “The Black Cat” (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) does regard both of his cats—“Pluto,” whom he blinds by gouging out one eye, then hangs, as well as its successor—as malevolent creatures, Beardsley created a cat that was positively demonic. Perched as an all-black figure atop the murdered corpse of the protagonist’s wife, who is rendered as literally dead white, this muscular and threatening feline is the stuff of nightmares. When hostile critics accused Beardsley’s style of being excessively morbid, this was the sort of thing they had in mind.

From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press