Six feverish years of ink that scandalised Victorian taste
Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) burned through only six creative years before tuberculosis killed him at twenty-five. Japanese-inspired black ink, Yellow Book covers, and Salome drawings made him Art Nouveau’s most controversial English line-maker of the decade.
Beardsley was born in Brighton in August 1872. His father had lived on an inherited income that vanished soon after the boy arrived, and from 1883 the family rented rooms in London, fighting poverty for two decades while the father took clerical jobs. In 1884 Aubrey performed at concerts with his sister Mabel as a child musical prodigy, and his first poems and cartoons were printed in his Brighton grammar school’s magazine.
A trip to Paris in 1892 introduced him to Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and the craze for Japanese prints. His first commission, Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur for J.M. Dent, appeared in 1893. With the American writer Henry Harland he co-founded The Yellow Book, designing its covers and many illustrations as art editor for the first four issues, and he later helped launch The Savoy, where his own writing, including Under the Hill, was published. His signature changed over his six working years, from none at all to the initials A.V.B. and then a Japanese-style mark.
His pictures set big slabs of black against empty white, and fine detail against bare areas. Drawings for Wilde’s Salome and a private edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata made him the most controversial artist of Art Nouveau, mocking Victorian sexual respectability. He slipped obscene details into his work so often that publishers inspected his drawings under a magnifying glass. Even in 1966, while the Victoria and Albert Museum showed his prints, police raided a private London gallery for displaying copies of the same images.
He dressed with care in dove-grey suits and yellow gloves and declared that the grotesque was his only aim. Tuberculosis caused repeated lung haemorrhages throughout his career, and a violent one in December 1896 left him fragile. He became a Catholic in March 1897, moved to the French Riviera a month later, and in his final letter begged Leonard Smithers to destroy every copy of Lysistrata; Smithers kept selling reproductions and forgeries instead. Beardsley died at Menton in March 1898, aged 25.
Source: Aubrey Beardsley
