A Portfolio of Aubrey Beardsley’s Drawings Illustrating Salomé by Oscar Wilde. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, [1907]. First Edition. Portfolio of grey-green paper boards, half bound in cloth, with green silk ties (no longer present), with the title and the rosebush motif from the 1894 edition in letterpress in gold to upper cover. Portfolio soiled & lightly worn, the plates within lightly age-toned along margins, but generally in very good condition.

Plates on Japanese vellum, measuring 34.7 × 27.2 cm.

In 1907 John Lane issued a portfolio of designs that Aubrey Beardsley created in 1894 for the first British edition of “Salomé.” Oscar Wilde’s play had been written in French in 1891 then translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas. Several of the images Beardsley submitted were judged to be too erotic to publish, and either altered or omitted. All were, however, included in this 1907 set.

In February of 1893, a British magazine commissioned Beardsley to create a single drawing based on the original French publication of Salomé. But the gorgeously grotesque piece he submitted — Salomé revelling in the severed head of John the Baptist — was too daring and the magazine rejected it. In April, a new art publication included the drawing in its inaugural issue and it made its way to Wilde, who was so taken with it that he offered Beardsley a contract for ten full-page illustrations and a cover design for the English edition. Beardsley was twenty-one and Wilde, whom he had met three years earlier at an artist’s studio, thirty-eight. A year after the English publication of Salome, Wilde was arrested for homosexual conduct. Beardsley died at the age of 25 just as he was becoming one of the most prominent graphic artists of his day.

His visionary genius is perhaps best captured by Wilde’s inscription on the copy of the original French edition of Salome he gave Beardsley: “For Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the Dance of the Seven Veils is, and can see that invisible dance.”