"The Black Cat," by Edgar Allan Poe

In which there is a descent into Murderous Madness, facilitated by the eponymous Black Cat, as well as the Demon "Alcohol," and in which our narrator affects a "Spooky Manner."



To the best of my knowledge, the works of Edgar Allan Poe don't have any definitive illustrations, like Alice or Sherlock, or even any "original" ones, like Anne, but he does have the advantage of over 160 years of influencing literary history, and by extension artists of many stripes. Here are a few quick public domain "Black Cat" illustrations/artworks I found:

 This etching was done by Alphonse Legros, a French artist who did a series of these etchings around 1861 to illustrate Charles Baudelaire's French translations of Poe's works.

 This one, done by English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley in 1901, is in a very different style, inspired more by Japanese woodcuts. It does, though, show essentially the same scene, the same that most people choose to illustrate from the story: the climactic reveal of the cat atop the head of the narrator's dead wife.

This painting, though, is inspired by the story but not intended to illustrate it. Gino Severini painted this in 1911, and one can make out important aspects of the story if you look closely enough. The cat, of course, both before and after eye-gouging, but also the glass filling with wine, showing what Poe intended be the real monster of the story.

(Although the guy with the axe is also kind of the monster.)


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!