In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Salome dances for her stepfather Herod at his birthday feast, and, prompted by her mother Herodias, asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter as her reward, a request Herod grants reluctantly to keep an oath made in front of his guests^[4]. Wilde's 1891 play, written in French and later translated into English, changes the motivation entirely: his Salome desires John herself, and asks for his head only after he spurns her, turning a story about a mother's revenge into one about a young woman's own thwarted desire^[2]. That shift in psychology, from political manoeuvring to personal obsession, gave Beardsley a subject suited to his own preoccupations, and his illustrations lean into the play's most disturbing image, Salome's intimacy with the severed head, more directly than the play's stage directions require.

Beardsley worked in pen and ink on paper, drawing with the photomechanical line-block process in mind rather than for hand engraving, which let him combine extremely fine, hair-thin lines with large flat areas of solid black in the same image^[3]. He drew heavily on the flattened space, decorative pattern and asymmetry of Japanese woodblock prints, alongside more explicit erotic content borrowed from Japanese shunga prints then circulating among European collectors, and on the sinuous, plant-like line associated with French Symbolism and Art Nouveau design^[3]. Within the same commission his approach could vary sharply: some drawings closely follow specific moments described in Wilde's text, while others, such as The Toilet of Salome, cannot be tied to any single scene, functioning instead as free decorative responses to the play's mood^[3].

Beardsley's route into the Salome project began with a single drawing published in The Studio magazine in 1893, which impressed Wilde enough to secure Beardsley the commission for the full English edition^[3]. He had already built a reputation with his illustrations for Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, a project of more than three hundred illustrations, vignettes and ornaments commissioned in the early 1890s that first established him as a major figure in book illustration^[1]. Wilde's own reaction to the finished Salome drawings was mixed: he felt Beardsley's heavily Japanese-influenced Art Nouveau style sat awkwardly against a text he had conceived in a more Byzantine register, and was reportedly uneasy that the illustrations, striking enough to stand entirely on their own, threatened to overshadow his writing^[1].