Aubrey Vincent Beardsley

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’.