{"meta":{"version":"2.1","_links":{"self":{"href":"https://api.vam.ac.uk/v2/object/O685625"},"collection_page":{"href":"https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O685625/"}},"images":{"_primary_thumbnail":"https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2013GA5124/full/!100,100/0/default.jpg","_iiif_image":"https://framemark.vam.ac.uk/collections/2013GA5124/","_alt_iiif_image":[],"imageResolution":"high","_images_meta":[{"assetRef":"2013GA5124","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false},{"assetRef":"2006AM3773","copyright":"© Victoria and Albert Museum, London","sensitiveImage":false}]},"see_also":{"_iiif_pres":"https://iiif.vam.ac.uk/collections/O685625/manifest.json","_alt_iiif_pres":[]}},"record":{"systemNumber":"O685625","accessionNumber":"E.292-1972","objectType":"Drawing","titles":[{"title":"The Kiss of Judas","type":"assigned by artist"}],"summaryDescription":"","physicalDescription":"A drawing in black ink depicting a stylised image showing two figures set within a landscape of trees, sinuous rose bushes and plant resembling dandelion clock. An androgynous figure dressed in black appears to have fallen asleep against a tree. Beside the figure kneels a nude male grotesque, perhaps an interpretation of the Vampires from Osgood’s story, with the body of a baby and the head of a man, kissing the hand of the sleeper.","artistMakerPerson":[{"name":{"text":"Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent","id":"A8134"},"association":{"text":"artist","id":"AAT25103"},"note":""}],"artistMakerOrganisations":[],"artistMakerPeople":[],"materials":[{"text":"paper","id":"x30308"},{"text":"pen and Indian ink","id":"x47322"}],"techniques":[{"text":"drawing","id":"AAT54196"}],"materialsAndTechniques":"Pen and ink on paper","categories":[{"text":"Drawings","id":"THES48966"},{"text":"Illustration","id":"THES48938"},{"text":"Androgyny","id":"THES270073"}],"styles":[],"collectionCode":{"text":"PDP","id":"THES48595"},"images":["2013GA5124","2006AM3773"],"imageResolution":"high","galleryLocations":[{"current":{"text":"EXH2","id":"THES265485"},"free":"","case":"","shelf":"","box":""}],"partTypes":[[{"text":"drawing","id":"AAT33973"}]],"contentWarnings":[{"apprise":"No","note":""}],"placesOfOrigin":[{"place":{"text":"London","id":"x28980"},"association":{"text":"made","id":"x28654"},"note":""}],"productionDates":[{"date":{"text":"1893","earliest":"1893-01-01","latest":"1893-12-31"},"association":{"text":"made","id":"x28654"},"note":""}],"associatedObjects":[],"creditLine":"Purchased with Art Fund support","dimensions":[{"dimension":"Height","value":"31.8","unit":"cm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"16/06/2014","earliest":"2014-06-16","latest":"2014-06-16"},"part":"sheet","note":""},{"dimension":"Width","value":"22.5","unit":"cm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"16/06/2014","earliest":"2014-06-16","latest":"2014-06-16"},"part":"sheet","note":""},{"dimension":"Height","value":"309","unit":"mm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"2024","earliest":"2024-01-01","latest":"2024-12-31"},"part":"image","note":""},{"dimension":"Width","value":"218","unit":"mm","qualifier":"","date":{"text":"2024","earliest":"2024-01-01","latest":"2024-12-31"},"part":"image","note":""}],"dimensionsNote":"Pasted onto sheet: 37.7 x 29.4 cm","marksAndInscriptions":[{"content":"'THE KISS OF / JUDAS'","inscriber":{"name":{"text":"","id":""},"association":{"text":"","id":""}},"date":{"text":"","earliest":null,"latest":null},"description":"","interpretation":"","language":"","medium":"","method":"","position":"","script":"","translation":"","transliteration":"","type":"","note":"Lettered in ink"},{"content":"","inscriber":{"name":{"text":"","id":""},"association":{"text":"","id":""}},"date":{"text":"","earliest":null,"latest":null},"description":"","interpretation":"","language":"","medium":"","method":"","position":"","script":"","translation":"","transliteration":"","type":"","note":"Signed in ink, bottom centre, with the artist's monogram"}],"objectHistory":"This illustration accompanied 'A Kiss of Judas', a short vampire horror story by Julian Osgood Field written under the pseudonym 'X. L.', published in the 'Pall Mall Magazine', July, 1893.","historicalContext":"","briefDescription":"Drawing by Aubrey Beardsley, 'The Kiss of Judas', illustration for the plate prefixed to the story 'A Kiss of Judas' by Julian Osgood Field in 'The Pall Mall Magazine', July 1893, pp.339-366, pen and ink on paper, London, 1893","bibliographicReferences":[{"reference":{"text":"Calloway, Stephen. <u>Aubrey Beardsley</u>. London: V & A Publications, 1998. 224pp, illus. ISBN: 1851772197.","id":"AUTH332149"},"details":"p. 61","free":""},{"reference":{"text":"","id":""},"details":"","free":"Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley : a catalogue raisonne. New Haven : Yale University Press, [2016] 2 volumes (xxxi, [1], 519, [1] pages; xi, [1], 547, [1] pages) : illustrations (some color) ; 31 cm. ISBN: 9780300111279\r\n\r\nThe entry is as follows:\r\n\r\n313\r\nThe Kiss of Judas\r\nBy c.18 May 1893\r\nVictoria and Albert Museum, London (E.292-1972)\r\nPen, brush and Indian ink over traces of pencil on cream wove paper inlaid with window cut out and secured to backing by slotted hinges; 12 3/4 x 8 13/16 inches (323 x 222 mm); signed.\r\n\r\nINSCRIPTIONS: Recto inscribed in ink by artist at lower right: THE KISS OF / JUDAS ; [signature device under flowering bush]; Verso in pencil: ¾ B E[?] ½ T.J.[?] / 1 h Pl[illegible] 17 x 13 ½ / [in blue crayon in circle]: 500 / [in pencil: 4 ⅞ wide / E.292-1972 P&D\r\n\r\nFLOWERS: Rose [Ball type] (love, passion), cedar of Lebanon (incorruptible); Judas tree (betrayal, unbelief), daisy type (innocence).\r\n\r\nPROVENANCE: …; Sir Gerald F. Kelly (by 1923); Sotheby Sale 14 December 1955 (71); bt. Catherine Boelcke; bt. R. A. Harari, by descent to Michael Harari; bt. Victoria and Albert Museum in 1972 with the aid of a contribution from the National Art Collections Fund.\r\n\r\nEXHIBITION: London 1923-4 (19); Johannesburg ?1955 (197); London 1966-8 (295), 1973b (56); Tokyo 1983 (41); Rome 1985 (I.3); London 1993 (101); Kanagawa, japan 1998 (54).\r\n\r\nLITERATURE: Artist September 1893 (pp. 259-60); Vallance 1897 (p.204), 1909 (no. 60.ii); London 1923-4 (no.19); Gallatin 1945 (no. 853); Reade 1967 (p.334 n.263); Letters 1970 (p.48); Clark 9 December 1976 (p.41); Clark 1979 (pp. 13, 14); Heyd 1986 (pp. 71-4, 214-15); Samuels Lasner 1995 (no.23); Snodgrass 1995 (pp. 186, 188-9); Zatlin 1997 (p.7); Wilson in Wilson and Zatlin 1998 (p. 231, n.67)\r\n\r\nREPRODUCED: Pall Mall Magazine I.3 July 1893 (facing p.339); Early Work 1899 (no.16); Best of Beardsley 1948 (plate 1); Reade 1967 (plate 261); Clark 1979 (plate 15); Wilson 1983 (plate 10).\r\n\r\nThis drawing was printed on a full page in the Pall Mall Magazine accompanying ‘The Kiss of Judas’ by X. L., which retells the Moldavian legend that ‘children of Judas, lineal descendants of the arch traitor, are prowling about the world seeking to do harm, and that they kill you with a kiss’ (p.350). They adopt various guises, one of which, a character says, is an ‘ugly person [whose] physical ugliness betokens, of course, the malignant spirit within’ (p.350). After reading the story, Beardsley proposed a design to the editor T. Dove Keighley: ‘The subject of the legend seems to me to fit in well with pictorial treatment. I suggest that my drawing should contain in one decorative scheme - the strange form kissing its victims (as the centre), with the other incidents (such as the diabolical commission, the suicide and the victim after death) worked round it’ (Letters 1970, p.48 [c.May 1893]). Keighley’s position on the matter is unknown, but the completed work is much simpler than that planned. Beardsley’s next letter enclosed the drawing and a request: ‘I am sending by this post the Kiss of Judas which I hope you will like. I should like the broken effect of the judas flowers to be kept as much as possible. I didn’t know whether you would print all over the page or with margins, however the proportions of my drawing will fall in with either method’ (Letters 1970, p.48 [postmark 18 May 1893]).\r\nIn the story, the descendant of Judas is a beautiful ‘Madonna’-faced woman, in spite of the legend calling for descendants to be ugly. Beardsley seems to have adopted both and turned the ‘Madonna’ into the victim. Critics were confused; one presumed that the woman is the mother of Judas, not the victim, and complained that the drawing was ‘an illustration to a story with which it had no connection whatever’; this reviewer described Beardsley’s depiction of ‘the malignant spirit’ as ‘Judas, a bald, nude and hideous infant, kneeling at her side, lifts her wrist to kiss it. The chief object is the old and hateful face of the boy Judas, puckered and evil, with lips protruding for the kiss’ Artist September 1893 (pp. 259-60). The courtly, kneeling dwarf, who is about to kiss his ‘mother’s’ hand, subverts the religious enactment of the Judas kiss into a secular one, with the grown son ‘who has learned the ways of the world’ (Heyd 1986 p.72). The absence of direct contact is typical of Beardsley, and it also suggests that the dwarf, possibly an incarnation of his foetus figure, represents the artist who may have felt that people were repelled from direct physical contact with him because of his disease and the possibility of transmitting it through a mouth-to-mouth kiss (p.73).\r\nThe placement of the figures in the landscape echoes that in Puvis de Chavannes Pauvre Pecheur (1881) and the dwarf’ is based on the one at the left in Botticelli’s early Nativity (1470) in the National Gallery, London (Clark 9 December 1976 p.41; Clark 1979 pp. 13, 14). The forms of the woman’s head and the background trees are in his Le Morte Darthur design for Book XVII, chapter vi (no.268 below). But Beardsley’s mature technique is already forming, and ‘the biting satire of the Yellow Book period begins to show itself (Walker, National Gallery catalogue 1923-4, no.19). The stylisation of the trees and roses into abstraction has outdistanced Burne-Jones, and the Japanese influence predominates. In fact, Beardsley’s placement of figures and flowers closely resembles the details in Sugimura Jihei’s 1684 book illustration ‘Summer outing by a stream’, for Yamato Fyryu-e-kagami (Zatlin 1997 p.7), and he places interest into the top half of the drawing. The composition, built on ‘horizontals of unrelieved black and verticals decorated like espaliers, reappears in… A Platonic Lament, for Salome, and they were probably done at the same time’ (Reade 1967 p.334 n.263). In addition, Beardsley has begun to simplify his details at the same time: ‘The curious brevities, as in the simple curve of the woman’s arms, and the delicate suggestion of shadows in the thickening of the lines describing her legs are among its many perfections (Reade 1967 p.334 n.263). The limp female body is Burne-Jonesesque but her crisply curved dress and hairstyle are the forerunner of the clothes and hair of the Beardsley Woman. This design ‘already exhibits the dramatic use of large areas of white set off by dense, powerful black forms, and the extraordinary balance and tension between the purity of formal means and the disturbing nature of the subject matter, that reached its apogee in the illustrations for Salome (Wilson in Wilson and Zatlin 1998 p. 231, n.67). On the verso is a sketch of a female torso.\r\nThe drawing influenced David Hockney’s Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: The enchantress with the baby Rapunzel (1969) in both line and the theft of a baby; Hockney does not mention Beardsley as a source, possibly because of the ‘awkwardness of too close a similarity’ between Hockney’s mannish woman and Beardsley’s concept (Heyd 1986 (pp. 214-15). Beardsley’s woman finds a later literary echo: Alison Lurie might have had this work in front of her when she wrote: ‘She was like a Beardsley drawing… all long smooth curves of black and white. She was very striking then, beautiful really, very slim, with white skin and those great dark eyes, and masses of dark hair. She wore it in a long bob with thick bangs’ (The Truth About Lorin Jones 1988, p.138)"}],"production":"","productionType":{"text":"","id":""},"contentDescription":"","contentPlaces":[],"associatedPlaces":[],"contentPerson":[],"associatedPerson":[{"text":"Julian Osgood Field","id":"AUTH332176"}],"contentOrganisations":[],"associatedOrganisations":[{"text":"Pall Mall Magazine","id":"AUTH318080"}],"contentPeople":[],"associatedPeople":[],"contentEvents":[],"associatedEvents":[],"contentOthers":[{"text":"roses","id":"AAT33321"},{"text":"trees","id":"AAT132410"},{"text":"grotesques","id":"AAT10211"},{"text":"vampire","id":"x35823"}],"contentConcepts":[],"contentLiteraryRefs":[],"galleryLabels":[],"partNumbers":["E.292-1972"],"accessionNumberNum":"292","accessionNumberPrefix":"E","accessionYear":1972,"otherNumbers":[],"copyNumber":"","aspects":["WHOLE"],"assets":[],"recordModificationDate":"2026-03-24","recordCreationDate":"2009-06-30","availableToBook":false}}