Poe's Deception, Acrylic and Varnish on Wood Panel by Louisville artist Tommy Rallis
Dimensions: 8" x 8"
“In 1825, young lawyer Jereboam O. Beauchamp stabbed Kentucky statesman Solomon P. Sharp, a killing remembered as the “Kentucky Tragedy.” Edgar Allen Poe’s unfinished drama, Politian, recast the episode as a lush, romantic melodrama, and the press and later novelists sensationalized it far beyond Kentucky—reports even surfaced in Australian papers—turning a local crime into a myth with international echo. By contrast, historians examine the Old Court–New Court partisan crisis around Sharp and note how contemporaries tried to frame the murder as political, suggesting a grimmer reading of the act as an assassination shaped by factional struggle. In my two paintings, I hold both narratives in tension: in Poe’s Deception, the crow, an icon of deceit, presides over a decayed and corrupted shrine to falsehood—while Til Death Do Us Part tenderly encloses two lovers in a coffin, recalling the Beauchamps’ tragic self-wounding and their requested burial in an embrace. Together they ask whether we are moved by the romance we’re sold or by the harsher truth of power, reputation, and ruin.”