Felix Cherniavsky - Depictions of Maud Allan's "Vision of Salome"

Added 19th Mar 2022 by Beth Dobson (Archives and Programming Assistant, DCD) / Last update 19th Mar 2022

Maud Allan 1078a 51 2008-2-69.jpg
Maud Allan 1078a 51 2008-2-69.jpg
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Felix Cherniavsky - Depictions of Maud Allan's "Vision of Salome"

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Maud Allan Research Collection
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) 3 Right Aubrey Beardsley , First frontispiece to An Evil Motherhood 1895 . a Below Aubrey Beardsley , The Climax , illustration to Oscar Wilde's Salome 1894 . the insatiable female predator is one of the most common . His femmes fatales are usually bloated and grotesque and have lost their more desirable qualities Beardsley's school - boy prankishness and his attempts to shock by any means can also be attributed in part to his disease . He knew that time was short and that notoriety was easier to achieve than praise . He delighted in the blasphemous inversion of beauty and morality . Roger Fry called him " The Fra Angelico of Satanism ' . A commission to illustrate Oscar Wilde's Salome gave Beardsley the oppor tunity for his most notable treatment of the femme fatale theme . Beardsley ' designs are the ultimate in mannered and elegant decadence . He took the same cool and wittily irreverent attitude to Wilde that he had taken to the Pre Raphaelites . The illustrations to the play poke fun at the author and wilfully ignore the text ; Wilde hated them . Vevertheless , Beardsley became firmly associated with Wilde in the public mind , much to his embarrassment after the poet's trial and imprisonment for homosexuality . Wilde's Salome has beer eclipsed by Beardsley's brilliant illustrations and Richard Strauss ' operatic setting , but the original play , however fatuous , did give definitive form to a particular type of destructive female : the young girl in whom perversity and virginal innocence are piquantly mixed - the paedophile's femme fatale . With her childish prattle and whimsicality , Wilde's Salome is a diabolical version o David Copperfield's child - wife Dora and forerunner of Lolita and Baby Doll Salome was also the subject of the best - known and most characteristie paintings of the French artist Gustave Moreau . He returned repeatedly to the subject , exploring every moment and every aspect of the story . The two painting of Salome which Moreau exhibited at the Salon of 1876 inspired a passage i Huysmans ' novel Against Nature which is one of the most famous and typica expressions of the late nineteenth - century idea of the fatal woman : Here she was no longer just the dancing - girl who extorts a cry of lust and lecher from an old man by the lascivious movements of her loins ; who saps the mora and breaks the will of a king with the heaving of her breasts , the twitching of he belly , the quivering of her thighs . She had become as it were , the symbolic incarna tion of undying Lust , the Goddess of immortal Hysteria , the accursed Beaut 16