Aubrey Beardsley

English artist

• Born: August 21, 1872
• Birthplace: Brighton, East Sussex, England
• Died: March 16, 1898
• Place of death: Menton, France

One of the best-remembered illustrators of his time, Beardsley assimilated diverse artistic influences to produce black-and-white illustrations for magazines and books that epitomize the achievement of the English aesthetic movement of the 1890’s.

Early Life

Born in Brighton, England, on August 21, 1872, Aubrey Beardsley was the son of Vincent Paul Beardsley, himself the son of a London goldsmith, and Ellen Agnus Pitt. He was educated in Brighton, the home of his maternal grandfather, Surgeon-Major William Pitt, but left Brighton Grammar School in 1888 to work in the District Surveyor’s Office, Clerkenwell and Islington, London. In January, 1889, Beardsley started as a clerk at the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance office in London, where he was employed until late 1892. He left the firm when the publisher J. M. Dent gave him a commission to produce illustrations for an edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485). For the rest of his short life, Beardsley worked as an illustrator and as art editor for various periodicals.

Beardsley’s career was brief but meteoric, especially for an artist without much formal training. He had drawn since childhood, copying the work of the illustrator Kate Greenaway at first and then developing a style reflecting the various influences of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Beardsley and his older sister, Mabel, soon to begin her career as an actress, called upon Burne-Jones in 1891. The older artist encouraged Beardsley to take classes, so for a time he studied with the painter Frederick Brown at the Westminster School of Art. That, however, was the extent of his academic training as an artist. Beardsley’s real education came from his observation of the work of others. He spent time with Mabel in the National Gallery and saw exhibitions in various London and Paris galleries, and he adapted for his own work motifs and techniques from the work he saw.

In filling his commission from J. M. Dent for illustrations, chapter headings, and page borders for an edition of Le Morte d’Arthur, Beardsley drew upon stylistic elements from the work of Burne-Jones and Morris. It took him eighteen months to produce the nearly six hundred individual designs that went into the edition Dent began publishing serially in 1893; from the first installment, however, it was clear that Beardsley had met Dent’s expectation that his pseudomedieval designs would recall work printed by hand at Morris’s Kelmscott Press. While working on these drawings, Beardsley was also producing sixty “grotesques” for Dent’s three-volume series of Bon-Mots (1893, 1894) by various English writers. These pieces are not in the style derived from Burne-Jones and Morris; rather, they reflect the graphic styles of Walter Crane and James McNeill Whistler: In them Beardsley allowed himself to explore a vein of fantasy not found in the drawings for Le Morte d’Arthur.

One of the motifs unique to Beardsley in the Bon-Mots series is the figure of a fetus, perhaps a miscarried or an aborted child but treated humorously. While Beardsley’s biographers disagree concerning the psychological significance of this figure, one inference drawn is that it represents the artist himself and reflects his reaction to the tuberculosis that eventually killed him. Beardsley was seven when his lungs first became a problem, and he lost time to illness while employed by the insurance company. His physical appearance signaled the presence of his disease. Tall and almost skeletally thin, as shown in a portrait done by Walter Sickert in 1894, Beardsley had piercing eyes and a shock of reddish-brown hair worn in a bang over his forehead. He kept his feelings about his illness largely to himself, frequently casting himself in the role expected by his associates. Even his letters are not very revealing of his emotions. The two people to whom Beardsley was closest throughout his life were his mother Ellen and sister Mabel.

Life’s Work

Beardsley began to do drawings for periodicals as well as the books to be published by J. M. Dent, and he prepared the cover and ten pictures for the first issue of The Studio in April, 1893. For this issue, the editor C. Lewis Hind commissioned from Joseph Pennell, an American graphic artist, an essay entitled “A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley,” and the combination of article and illustrations gave Beardsley his first taste of fame.

One of the drawings for The Studio is of the climax of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé, published in Paris (and in French) in 1893, the scene in which Salomé kisses the severed head of John the Baptist. Given public reaction to this startling drawing, John Lane and Elkin Mathews (of the Bodley Head publishers) asked Beardsley to do the illustrations for the English edition of the play, translated by Wilde’s male lover Lord Alfred Douglas and published in 1894. The Salomé illustrations contain motifs from Japanese prints and the etchings of Whistler, but they are not derivative at all. In their use of black and white and in their reliance on elongated forms and sinuous lines, Beardsley’s drawings prefigure the Art Nouveau style they helped to create.

Publication of the Bodley Head’s Salomé (1894) by Lane and Mathews preceded by two months the April appearance of the first volume of The Yellow Book , a magazine of literature and art conceived and edited by Henry Harland and Beardsley. It, too, was printed at the Bodley Head in the form of a hardback volume. Beardsley served as art editor for the first four quarterly issues (those published in April, July, and October, 1894, and in January, 1895), designing covers, bindings, and title pages for each volume, selecting graphic materials from other artists, and providing additional illustrations himself. The hardbound quarterly magazine was a novelty, and Beardsley’s contributions, given his recently published work in Le Morte d’Arthur, Bon-Mots, and Salomé, attracted both praise and negative criticism.

Those who saw Beardsley’s work as eccentric, too frankly sexual in focus, and even morally corrupt cited his association with Wilde as proof of his decadence. When Wilde was arrested in April, 1895, after losing his libel suit against the marquis of Queensberry, the father of Lord Alfred Douglas, he was carrying a yellow volume widely reported to be The Yellow Book. It was not, and indeed one of the conditions Beardsley had given Lane when he assumed the art editorship was that Wilde not be accepted as a contributor. Nevertheless, the damage to Beardsley’s reputation was done, and Lane, by this time the sole publisher of The Yellow Book, bowed to pressure from various authors, removed Beardsley’s work from volume 5 of the magazine, and terminated his service as art editor. Wilde was tried and sentenced to two years’ hard labor for sexual offenses involving other men.

Beardsley’s biographers agree that he was not actively homosexual, but in the public mind the association with Wilde made him suspect. For many people, he became the artist who drew the sexually suggestive illustrations for Wilde’s Salomé, and that was evidence enough to persuade some critics that Beardsley had an unhealthy interest in sexuality. This assessment ignores the work he did between 1895 and 1898, which matured in style and moved beyond Beardsley’s earlier need to shock the bourgeoisie.

When Beardsley’s arrangements with Lane ended, Beardsley turned to the publisher Leonard Smithers for backing for a new magazine called The Savoy . The first issue was published in January, 1896, with Beardsley as art editor and Arthur Symons, a friend of the poet William Butler Yeats, as literary editor. A quarterly for its January, April, and July issues, the magazine became a monthly in August, 1896, and ended publication with the eighth issue in December. Part of the problem was financial. Smithers did not have the capital to back a monthly printing schedule. Another part of the difficulty was Beardsley’s health. By the middle of 1896, he was experiencing symptoms of advanced tuberculosis, and he started the series of moves from one supposedly healthy location in England and France to another that ended with his death in Menton on March 16, 1898.

The quality of the work Beardsley was able to do, and the amount of it, given the state of his health, is remarkable. It includes the beautifully crafted set of illustrations he produced for Smithers’s edition in 1896 of Alexander Pope’s mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock (1712). The use of close-laid and dotted lines, for example, to achieve the effects of the textures of fabrics is remarkable, and while the Baroque and Rococo style of the drawings is not historically appropriate for Pope’s poem, Beardsley manages to make each convey a single dramatic and satiric moment in the text.

The tone of the illustrations that Beardsley produced for an edition (also in 1896) of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata(411 b.c.e.), which was also for Smithers, is more broadly satiric than that of the drawings for The Rape of the Lock. Prompted by the play’s fifth century b.c.e. origins, Beardsley turned to the style of figure drawing found on classical Greek vases, but he exaggerated the distortion of the figures to reflect the satire of Aristophanes’ text. The lines are heavy and definite. In style, the Lysistrata illustrations have little in common with those for The Rape of the Lock or for an edition of Ben Jonson’s Volpone: Or, The Fox (1606), on which Beardsley was at work at the time of his death. In these drawings, he sought to recapture the effects of seventeenth century engraving. They rely less on outline than Beardsley’s earlier work and more on highlighting to give them a three-dimensional effect.

Significance

Because Aubrey Beardsley died so young, and had a career as a professional artist that lasted only seven years, it is hard to say how his work might have developed if he had lived longer. The variety of styles he used, the rapidity with which one gave way to another, and the fact that he sought to match his style to that of the text he was illustrating all suggest that Beardsley might have continued to mature as an artist. His actual accomplishment was so singular, however, that contemporary artists William Rothenstein and Max Beerbohm both saw him as the chief artist in the black-and-white medium of the 1890’s. A generation later, Osbert Burdett suggested in The Beardsley Period: An Essay in Perspective (1925) that he epitomized the sense of identity and the accomplishment of his generation. While later commentators do not make so large a claim, they do see Beardsley as influencing the development of Art Nouveau in Europe. They claim, further, that his graphic work continues to appeal to each new viewing generation.

In various ways, Beardsley’s work reflects both the end of nineteenth century European Romanticism and the development of modernism in the twentieth century. His unfinished The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser: A Romantic Novel (1967), for which he produced both text and illustrations, is a case in point. Like so much of Beardsley’s work, it satirizes the conventions of romantic love. The mixture of cloying sentimentality and overt sexuality, however, in his description of the encounter of his central characters, drawn from the opera by Richard Wagner, becomes something close to a case study in sexual obsession. It invites psychoanalytic analysis, and Beardsley’s biographers have mined The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser for evidence of the artist’s real sexual nature. They are equally interested in Beardsley’s conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1897, debating the genuineness of his faith in the light of his financial dependence on André Raffalovich, whose influence led to Beardsley’s decision.

While Aubrey Beardsley’s art can be examined in this light, stressing its affinities with so much late nineteenth century literature and art in its obsession with the irrational elements of human personality, such an emphasis obscures the grace of so much of his accomplishment. In drawings, playbills, bookplates, and bindings, there is so much vital experimentation in design that Beardsley sparked a revolution in the way fine editions are printed and illustrated. That some of this work was overtly, even morbidly, sexual in emphasis does not detract from this accomplishment. Beardsley’s imagination was sparked by literary subject matter, both the texts he read and the men and women who, as authors and performers, brought the words on the page to life. His finest drawings also serve to bring words to life and to comment, at times sardonically, on them. Beardsley delighted in paradox. Appropriately, therefore, he is buried, a Roman Catholic convert, in the Protestant section of a cemetery in Menton.

Bibliography

Beardsley, Aubrey. The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley. Edited by Henry Maas, J. L. Duncan, and W. G. Good. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970. The most complete edition of Beardsley’s letters.

Benkovitz, Miriam J. Aubrey Beardsley: An Account of His Life. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981. This book benefits from later research into Beardsley’s life and artistic output.

Brophy, Brigid. Beardsley and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. While this book is essentially a pictorial introduction to Beardsley, it is reliable and easy to read.

Burdett, Osbert. The Beardsley Period: An Essay in Perspective. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. Reprint. New York: Cooper Square, 1969. A useful introduction to art movements of the 1890’s.

Calloway, Stephen. Aubrey Beardsley. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. This book accompanied a centenary exhibit of Beardsley’s drawings organized by Calloway, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The book contains reproductions of Beardsley’s drawings and an essay by Calloway, analyzing the artist’s life within the context of his work.

Easton, Malcolm. Aubrey and the Dying Lady: A Beardsley Riddle. Boston: David R. Godine, 1972. Challenging accepted interpretations, Easton provides analysis of the psychosexual elements in Beardsley’s life and art.

MacFall, Haldane. Aubrey Beardsley: The Man and His Work. London: Bodley Head, 1928. The first biography of the artist, MacFall’s book contains plenty of anecdotal evidence collected from contemporaries.

Reade, Brian. Aubrey Beardsley. New York: Viking Press, 1967. The most complete catalog of Beardsley’s work; Reade’s annotations are invaluable. Includes an introduction by John Rothenstein.

Sturgis, Matthew. Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1998. Biography of Beardsley, examining his life and the artistic influences that shaped him. The author describes Beardsley’s connections to both the Pre-Raphaelite and the aesthetic movements.

Weintraub, Stanley. Aubrey Beardsley: Imp of the Perverse. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. This is the most complete, and easily the most readable, of the Beardsley biographies.