[1][2] The slim volume of 26 octavo landscape pages, 18.5 by 12 centimetres (7.3 in × 4.7 in), bound with card, was published by Paul Ollendorff [fr] in Paris on 1 April 1897, and was sold for one franc.
[4][5] The artist's book includes eight printed pieces: a series of seven monochrome artworks, each a solid block of a single colour – black, blue, green, yellow (or brown), red, grey, white – displayed within an ornamental frame, followed by the score for a silent funeral march, with blank staves covering two pages.
In the preface to the monochromes, Allais wrote that other painters were "ridicules artisans qui ont besoin de mille couleurs différentes pour exprimer leurs pénibles conceptions"[6] [ridiculous craftsmen who need a thousand different colours to express their painful conceptions] and that his ideal artist employed "pour une toile une couleur ... monochroïdal"[6] [for one canvas one colour ... monochromatic].
Bilhaud was not the first to create an all-black artwork: for example, Robert Fludd published an image of Darkness in his 1617 book on the origin and structure of the cosmos; Laurence Sterne included a black page in his novel Tristram Shandy in 1760, immediately after the death of Parson Yorick;[5] and Bertall published his black Vue de La Hogue (effet de nuit) in Les Omnibus no.7 in 1843, satirising the very dark canvas exhibited at the 1843 Salon by Jean-Louis Petit.
'[13][5] Allais's joke was repeated by Émile Cohl, himself formerly a member of the Incoherents, in a cinema film in 1910, Le Peintre néo-impressionniste [The Neo-Impressionistic Painter], which included intertitle cards introducing monochrome presentations, such as Un cardinal mangeant une langouste aux tomates sur les bords de la Mer Rouge [A cardinal eating a lobster and tomatoes by the Red Sea], or Chinois transportant du maïs sur le Fleuve Jaune par un temps d'été ensoleillé ["Chinamen" transporting corn on the Yellow River in the sunny summer].