The Black Cat, for Edgar Allan Poe's “Selected Tales of Mystery,” 1909

The Black Cat, for Edgar Allan Poe's “Selected Tales of Mystery,” 1909

John Byam Liston Shaw

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Byam Shaw here illustrates "The Black Cat," a story by Edgar Allan Poe that relates how a wife-murderer inadvertently walls up a cat with his spouse's corpse, then is eventually betrayed by the animal's cries. The artist focuses on the tale's dramatic denoument, using broken bricks and falling plaster to frame a furious one-eyed cat perched atop the body (all we see of the latter is a patch of brown hair and glimpse of a brilliant purple gown). Poe's macabre stories strongly appealed to imaginative artists who worked from the 1890s into the early 20th century, a period considered the golden age of book illustration.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Black Cat, for Edgar Allan Poe's “Selected Tales of Mystery,” 1909The Black Cat, for Edgar Allan Poe's “Selected Tales of Mystery,” 1909The Black Cat, for Edgar Allan Poe's “Selected Tales of Mystery,” 1909The Black Cat, for Edgar Allan Poe's “Selected Tales of Mystery,” 1909The Black Cat, for Edgar Allan Poe's “Selected Tales of Mystery,” 1909

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.