A short life of the author
Aubrey Beardsley was the enfant terrible of the 1890s — an artist of prodigious talent and scandalous subject matter who, in a career that lasted barely six years before tuberculosis killed him at twenty-five, produced a body of graphic work that transformed the visual culture of late Victorian England and whose influence on Art Nouveau, poster design, book illustration, and twentieth-century graphic art has been permanent. His drawings — sinuous black lines on white paper, depicting figures of languid elegance, grotesque sexuality, and darkly comic depravity — were unlike anything that had been seen before in English art, and their combination of exquisite technique with deliberately shocking content made Beardsley the most famous and most controversial artist of the decade.
The Prodigy
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872. He was a sickly child — tuberculosis was diagnosed before he was ten — and his health was precarious throughout his short life. He showed extraordinary artistic talent from childhood, producing drawings of remarkable sophistication while still a schoolboy. He had no formal art training beyond a few evening classes at the Westminster School of Art.
In 1891, at the age of eighteen, he visited Edward Burne-Jones, who was so impressed by his drawings that he urged him to devote himself entirely to art. The encounter was decisive: within two years, Beardsley was the most talked-about illustrator in London.
Le Morte d’Arthur and The Yellow Book
Beardsley’s first major commission was a series of illustrations for J.M. Dent’s edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1893–1894), produced in deliberate rivalry with William Morris’s Kelmscott Press books. Where Morris drew on medieval woodcut models, Beardsley created something entirely new — flowing, organic forms that combined Pre-Raphaelite influence with Japanese printmaking, Celtic interlace, and a perverse modernity that was wholly his own.
His illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894, English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas) were a sensation: images of sinuous, sexually ambiguous figures in a world of jewels, hair, and naked flesh that were far more disturbing than Wilde’s text. The illustrations made Beardsley famous — and associated him indelibly with the Aesthetic movement and the decadent 1890s.
He became art editor of The Yellow Book (1894–1895), the quarterly magazine that was the organ of the Aesthetic movement. When Wilde was arrested and tried for gross indecency in 1895, Beardsley was dismissed from The Yellow Book — not because of any personal connection to Wilde’s crimes, but because public hysteria conflated all Aesthetic art with Wilde’s sexuality.
Lysistrata and The Savoy
After his dismissal, Beardsley became art editor of The Savoy (1896), a rival periodical published by Leonard Smithers. His illustrations for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (1896) — privately printed by Smithers — are his most explicitly sexual works: frank, witty, anatomically exaggerated depictions of the sexual comedy that are simultaneously pornographic and brilliantly designed.
His illustrations for Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1896) are his most technically refined — delicate, intricate, and perfectly attuned to Pope’s satirical wit. They represent the apex of his achievement as a book illustrator.
Under the Hill
Beardsley was also a writer. Under the Hill — his unfinished erotic novel, a retelling of the Tannhäuser legend — was published in censored form in The Savoy (1896) and in a fuller version posthumously (1904). It is a rococo fantasy of decadent luxury, sexual excess, and literary pastiche that reveals a genuine, if minor, literary talent. The prose is mannered, perfumed, and deliberately excessive — Beardsley writing in the style of his own drawings.
Death and Legacy
Beardsley converted to Roman Catholicism in 1897 and died of tuberculosis at Menton, on the French Riviera, on 16 March 1898, at the age of twenty-five. On his deathbed, he asked Leonard Smithers to destroy the Lysistrata drawings and all other “obscene” works. Smithers ignored the request.
Collecting Beardsley
The illustrated books are the primary collecting targets: Le Morte d’Arthur (Dent, 1893–1894, 2 volumes), Salome (Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894), The Rape of the Lock (Smithers, 1896), and especially the Lysistrata (Smithers, 1896, privately printed) are all major items. Individual Yellow Book and Savoy issues containing Beardsley illustrations are also collected. Original drawings, when they appear on the market, command extraordinary prices.