The Toilette of Salomé 1

First appearing in the 1907 edition, this version is chronologically the second of Beardsley’s drawings of the toilette of Salomé, coming after the first one was turned down by the publisher and dropped from the first edition. It shows Salomé in an exceedingly flared dress sitting at a dressing table in the Anglo-Japanese style as a bald coiffeur wearing a Pierrot costume and an eye mask attends to her unwieldy hairdo. Among the books to be found on the lower shelf of the table, one can see Nana by Émile Zola, works by the marquis de Sade, Manon Lescaut by abbé Prévost, and Apuleius’s Golden Ass, all titles certain to raise a few eyebrows at the time the play was first published.