Aubrey Beardsley; The Peacock Skirt Illustration from Oscar Wilde's Salome, art nouveau, victorian, gothic, minimalist, modern, on sale black white
5x7 inch Premium Canvas with easel stand here:
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The Peacock Skirt is an 1893 illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. His original pen and ink drawing was reproduced as a woodblock print in the first English edition of Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salome in 1894. The original drawing was bequeathed by Grenville Lindall Winthrop to the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard on sale University in 1943.
Aubrey Beardsley, J'ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan, illustration, The Studio, April 1893.
Wilde's one-act play Salome was originally written in French in 1891, while he was living in Paris. Performance of the play was prohibited in England, ostensibly on account of it depicting biblical characters.
The play inspired Beardsley to make an illustration, J'ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan ("I have kissed your mouth, Jokanaan"), which was printed with eight other drawings in an article, "A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley", by Joseph Pennell in the first issue of the artistic journal The Studio in April 1893.
Wilde wrote to Beardsley, recognising him as a "kindred spirit" and enclosing a copy of Salome, and commissioned him to illustrate the first edition of the play, which was published in English in 1894.
Description of The Peacock Skirt
The Peacock Skirt was the second of ten illustrative plates published with the English version of Wilde's play. It shows a rear quarter view of a woman, Salome, wearing a long robe decorated with stylised peacock feather pattern. Her headdress is also decorated with peacock feathers, and more long peacock feathers drape down over her back. The head of a peacock is visible over her left shoulder. Salome is turned to the right, to converse with a second figure, probably the "Young Syrian" mentioned in the text of the play, with an androgynous face but masculine hairy knees, elaborate hairstyle and pleated tunic.
The drawing was influenced by James McNeill Whistler's decorations in his 1876–77 Peacock Room, designed for Frederick Leyland's house at 49 Princes Gate, but now in the Freer Gallery of Art. The refined curving lines of Beardsley's drawing were also influenced by Japanese woodblock prints, and anticipate the forms of the Art Nouveau aesthetic.
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