Aubrey Beardsley’s Sublime and Sinister Illustrations For Edgar Allan Poe (1894)

Aubrey Beardsley (21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) illustrated the work of Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) for Herbert S. Stone and Company’s 1894 book Tales of Edgar Allen Poe. Beardsley illustrated Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Masque of the Red Death (1842 ), The Black Cat (1843) and The Fall of the House of Usher (1839).

The illustrations are sublime.

 

 

“Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries”
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue

 

 

 

“And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. ”
– Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

 

 

“The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat

 

 

“There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart–an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.”
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher

 

 

Via The Paris Review