The Black Cat
Greetings, collectors! Allow us to take a brief pause from our April celebration of National Poetry Month for a delightfully dark print release in praise of prose. Drawn in 1894 by 19th c. English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, our newest Vintage Edition, The Black Cat, served as a sinister companion to Edgar Allen Poe’s story of the same name.
In the grim tale, the narrator mistakenly walls up the furious cat with the corpse of his wife. Beardsley’s The Black Cat features the moment a wall is broken through, revealing the fierce one-eyed feline balanced atop the dead woman’s head. The crazed creature is rendered in fine white linework, blending almost completely with the solid black darkness of the inner wall with the exception of his single searing eye. His deceased perch is flatly white, economically delineated by eerily light penwork.
