Aubrey Vincent Beardsley

The English illustrator Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (1872-1898) was the most influential draftsman of his era in England. He was closely connected with the fin-de-siècle period.

Aubrey Beardsley was born in Brighton on Aug. 21, 1872. His father, the son of a local jeweler, lost the money he had inherited, so his mother supported the family by giving music lessons and working as a governess. Because of his mother's absence from home, Aubrey was sent to a nearby boarding school at the age of 6; his schooling was interrupted by attacks of tuberculosis. He began to draw in school, and by the age of 10 he was selling his drawings, which were imitations of Kate Greenaway's.

At the age of 15 Beardsley went to work in London, first for a surveyor and then in an insurance office. On the spur of the moment, he called on the painter Edward Burne-Jones, who prophesied that Beardsley would become a great artist. His first important commission, an enormous, highly paid one, to illustrate Malory's Morte d'Arthur, came at the age of 20; this work is a masterpiece. Beardsley's drawings in the first issue of the Studio magazine were a tremendous success; he said, quite rightly, that he had "already far outdistanced the old men" and that he "had fortune at his feet." His illustrations for Oscar Wilde's play Salome were a great success, but Wilde did not like the drawings, for he feared that they overshadowed the play.

Beardsley was a bit of a dandy, with "a face like a silver hatchet, and grass green hair, " according to Wilde. Beardsley was a public character as well as a private eccentric before his twenty-first birthday. He said, "I have one aim— the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing." Anxious to make the most of his life, which he knew would be short, he took on all kinds of commissions.

From its first issue, Beardsley was art editor of the Yellow Book, a magazine whose format and title were taken from the cheap French novel of the day. When Wilde was arrested, Beardsley's association with him in the public mind was so close that the publishers of the Yellow Book felt they had to get rid of him. Suddenly no respectable publisher would employ him.

Beardsley eventually made a connection with a new magazine, the Savoy. Many of the writers were former contributors to the Yellow Book. As with the Yellow Book, Beardsley was the outstanding attraction of the Savoy, and it was a great blow to the magazine when he had to suspend his contributions because of his health. He died in Menton, France, on March 16, 1898, at the age of 25, working right up to the end.

Beardsley was a designer of genius and a draftsman of a high order of talent. His illustrations are distinguished by a rhythmic, curving line that has many of the characteristics of engraving, and his whole conception of the art of illustration was profoundly personal and original. His style, overblown in manner and "decadent" in subject matter, was dominant in England and the United States during part of the "great age of illustration." Through Sergei Diaghilev it had a strong effect on the Russian ballet. Beardsley's influence on Art Nouveau was profound, and the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso were early admirers of his work.

Further Reading

The best book on Beardsley is Stanley Weintraub, Beardsley: A Biography (1967). Two earlier studies are Robert Ross, Aubrey Beardsley (1909), and Haldane Macfall, Aubrey Beardsley: The Man and His Work (1927).

Additional Sources

Benkovitz, Miriam J., Aubrey Beardsley, an account of his life, New York: Putnam, 1981.

Ross, Robert Baldwin, Aubrey Beardsley, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1977. □

Beardsley, Aubrey (b Brighton, 21 Aug. 1872; d Menton, 16 Mar. 1898). English illustrator and writer. Beardsley showed a talent for drawing from an early age and he had almost no formal training in art (he attended evening classes at Westminster School of Art for a few months). However, he read voraciously and studied the art of the past and present, and his work drew on a variety of influences, including the sinuous line of Burne-Jones (who encouraged him) and the strong patterns of Japanese prints (see Ukiyo-e). In spite of these influences, his style is highly distinctive in the way he contrasts subtle use of line with bold masses of black and in his blending of grotesque humour with a sense of morbid depravity. He made a name for himself with illustrations for an edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1893–4), and in 1894 he became notorious with the publication of his illustrations to the English version of Oscar Wilde's Salome and the appearance of the first issue of the Yellow Book, a quarterly periodical of which he was art editor. The decadent nature of his work horrified many contemporaries and the scandal of Wilde's arrest for homosexual offences in 1895 led to his dismissal from the Yellow Book (even though he disliked Wilde and his own personal life was blameless). In 1896 he worked for another short-lived periodical, the Savoy, which published extracts from his main work as a writer, the unfinished erotic novel Under the Hill (an unexpurgated edition, with his own pornographic illustrations, was privately published in 1907 under the title The Story of Venus and Tannhauser). Although he was only 25 when he died of tuberculosis, his output was large. He became one of the best-known artists of his day (he was satirized in Punch as ‘Aubrey Weirdsley’) and he ranks as a major figure of Aestheticism and of Art Nouveau.

Beardsley, Aubrey (1872–98). English illustrator and writer. Beardsley had a talent for drawing from childhood and had almost no formal training in art (he attended evening classes at Westminster School of Art for a few months). However, he read voraciously and studied the art of the past and present, and his work drew on a variety of influences, including the sinuous line of Burne-Jones (who encouraged him) and the strong patterns of Japanese prints (see Ukiyo-e). In spite of these influences, his style is highly distinctive in the way he contrasts subtle use of line with bold masses of black and in his blending of grotesque humour with a sense of morbid depravity. He made a name for himself with illustrations for an edition of Malory's Morte d'Arthur (1893–4), and in 1894 he became notorious with the publication of his illustrations to the English version of Oscar Wilde's Salome and the appearance of the first issue of The Yellow Book, a quarterly periodical of which he was art editor. The decadent nature of his work horrified many contemporaries and the scandal of Wilde's arrest for homosexual offences in 1895 led to his dismissal from The Yellow Book (even though he disliked Wilde and his own personal life was blameless). In 1896 he worked for another short-lived periodical, The Savoy, which published extracts from his main work a writer, the unfinished erotic novel Under the Hill (an unexpurgated edition, with his own pornographic illustrations, was privately published in 1907 under the title The Story of Venus and Tannhauser). Although he was only 25 when he died of tuberculosis, his output was large. He became one of the best-known artists of his day (he was satirized in Punch as ‘Aubrey Weirdsley’) and he ranks as a major figure of Aestheticism and of Art Nouveau.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley , 1872–98, English illustrator and writer, b. Brighton. Beardsley exemplifies the aesthetic movement in English art of the 1890s (see decadents ). In his short working span of only six years, he developed a superbly artificial and graphic manner, expressed in flat, linear, black-and-white designs. His works were by turns erotic and cruel in emphasis. The art editor of the famous Yellow Book quarterly (1894–96), Beardsley also edited and contributed some of his best work to Leonard Smithers's periodical, The Savoy, and illustrated many books including Wilde's Salomé (1894), Pope's Rape of the Lock (1896), Aristophanes' Lysistrata (privately pub., 1896), and Jonson's Volpone (1898). His fiction, distinguished by an elaborate and erudite prose style, was collected and published in 1904 as Under the Hill. Criticized for the erotic character of his work and condemned for his association with Oscar Wilde, Beardsley fell from public favor. Ravaged by tuberculosis, he died at the age of 25.

Bibliography: See his Early Works (1899, repr. 1967) and Later Works (1901, repr. 1967); biography by M. Sturgis (1999); his letters, ed. by J. L. Duncan and W. G. Good (1970); study by B. Reade (1967).

Beardsley, Aubrey Vincent (1872–98), illustrator and writer, notorious in the 1890s as the outstanding artist of fin-de-siècle decadence. His disturbingly erotic drawings develop rapidly from the murky sensuality of Pre-Raphaelite medievalism to rococo wit and grace. Beardsley's most important illustrations are for Wilde's Salome (1894), Pope's The Rape of the Lock (1896), the Lysistrata of Aristophanes (1896), and Jonson's Volpone (1898). He was art editor of the Yellow Book in 1894; the Wilde scandal led to his dismissal in 1895; he then became art editor to the Savoy. Beardsley's most significant achievement as a writer is The Story of Venus and Tannhauser, a charmingly rococo and highly cultivated erotic romance. An expurgated version entitled Under the Hill was published in the Savoy; an unexpurgated edition was privately printed in 1907; it contains a cruel caricature of Wilde as ‘Priapusa, the fat manicure and fardeuse’.

Beardsley, Aubrey (1872–98) English illustrator. His highly wrought, stylized, black-and-white drawings epitomize the English art nouveau style. Associated with the Decadent writers of the 1890s and the aesthetic movement, Beardsley illustrated the first four volumes of the Yellow Book (1894–95) and Oscar Wilde's play Salome. His mainstream work, such as Isolde (1895), enabled him to produce more outrageous, erotic ‘Japonesque’ illustrations.

Beardsley, Aubrey. See STUDIO.