arts and design

The death of Aubrey Beardsley – archive, 18 March 1898

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The death is announced, at Mentone, of Mr Aubrey Beardsley, the young designer whose black and white work has gained so considerable a vogue during the last five years. He was born in 1874, educated at the Brighton Grammar School, and placed in an architect’s office at the age of fifteen. Disliking the profession, he left it in 1890 to become a clerk in a London insurance office, where he stayed a few years. Meanwhile he had begun to draw, and some of his designs, it is said, had gained the approval of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and M Puvis de Chavannes. He was, indeed, a disciple of the English painter, as the illustrations which he made for the Morte d’Arthur published by Messrs Dent in 1893 and 1894 showed plainly enough. In any case, the sometimes morbid originality of his work soon attracted attention, and he was able to devote himself entirely to design.

The Peacock Skirt, a Beardsley illustration from Oscar Wilde’s Salome.



The Peacock Skirt, a Beardsley illustration from Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Photograph: V&A Museum, London

He contributed drawings to various magazine especially The Yellow Book (1894-51) and The Savoy (1895); he illustrated books such as Salome (1894) and The Rape of the Lock (1896): and he designed posters, book covers, and book-plates. The extent of his work may be gauged by the fact that Mr Aymer Vallance’s catalogue, made a year ago, fills eleven quarto pages; that it has been so much discussed proves at least that it was not commonplace.

For one who had so brief a life – he was only twenty-four – and who had suffered almost continuously from ill-health, Mr Beardsley undoubtedly achieved much. He showed a feeling for the value of line and an ingenuity in devising striking patterns that were unusual in so young a man. In his later drawings, too, he seemed to be acquiring a sense of tone, and was no longer content to contrast masses of deep black with the white paper as in his Salome designs. His drawings for The Rape of the Lock are often pleasing in their general effect at least, by reason of the delicate gradations of tone which they display. Unhappily, most of his work was marred by a more than physical ugliness. Mr Hamerton wrote in 1891:—

There seems to be a peculiar tendency in Mr Beardsley’s mind to the representation of types without intellect and without morals. Some of the most dreadful faces in all art are to be found in the illustrations of the play Salome.

If that was true of his earlier work, it applied with tenfold force to his later productions. Beginning as an imitator of the Pre-Raphaelite conventions, then diverted still further from the true path by unwise flatterers, and controlled always by an over-excited imagination, for which, no doubt, his ill-health was mainly responsible. Mr Beardsley tended more and more to parody and deform the human shape and to seek applause by the audacity rather than by the artistic merit of designs. If his career had been prolonged under happier circumstances he might have shaken off these deplorable tendencies, for some of the illustrations to the Morte d’Arthur prove that be could appreciate what is really beautiful in form and spirit, though he afterwards set his mind on other things.

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