2-880-181 - Shirley Markham Collection/Heritage Images

The Coiffing, from The Savoy No. 3, 1896. Woman with her hairdresser. Note diagonal line rising from the footstool to the crown on the Virgin Mary's head. Illustration for Beardsley's poem "The Ballad of the Barber", 'a carefully wrought and chilling little fable concerning a thirteen year old princess and a Sweeney Todd-like coiffeur who slits her throat with the jagged glass of a broken bottle of cologne, and then creeps away "on pointed feet"'. Published in "The Best of Beardsley" edited by R. A. Walker, [The Bodley Head, London, 1948]