Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) personified fin-de-siècle Britain and died of consumption at twenty-five. Oscar Wilde’s line was that he passed “at the age of a flower.” Largely self-taught, he built an idiosyncratic language out of solid black ink against white paper — lines “knit together with fantastic, nervous lines, almost or quite unrelated to nature,” as his colleague Gleeson White described them. Contemporaries were already calling their own moment the “Beardsley Period.”

The 1894 double moment is where the story turns:

  • He was celebrated as founding art editor of The Yellow Book
  • He illustrated the English edition of Wilde’s Salomé, slipping the older dandy’s likeness in as the Moon — which the play describes as a mad, drunken, naked woman “seeking everywhere for lovers”
  • Wilde was tried and imprisoned for gross indecency in 1895; tainted by association, Beardsley was sacked after a mob defaced the magazine’s premises

The lifeline came from Leonard Smithers — a less scrupulous, seedier publisher — and produced The Savoy, more daring than The Yellow Book and shorter-lived. The name was itself a provocation: the Savoy Hotel was notorious as the setting for Wilde’s trysts, so Beardsley appeared to be leaning in at the exact moment he was backing away. At the height of his powers with his health failing, he left over a thousand drawings in just a few years, and converted earnestly to Catholicism at the end.

The collection assembles a chronologically ordered gallery from The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley (1912 edition) and the 1901 and 1920 editions of The Later Work: illustrations for Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Salomé, Lucian’s True History, and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, plus an ex libris bookplate.

What’s more interesting than the images is the cycle the images have been through. Munch, Klee, Kandinsky, and Picasso are all demonstrably indebted to him. In 1966 the Victoria & Albert Museum opened a major exhibition where the Lysistrata illustrations could be viewed respectably — but the police confiscated any reproductions sold outside the walls on grounds of indecency, and the resulting outcry only increased his popularity. His challenge to bourgeois sensibility became the psychedelic underground’s badge of anti-establishment credibility, and then Beardsleyesque imagery spread onto clothes, bags, mugs, wallpaper, posters, records, and shopfronts until the cool factor dissipated.

H. C. Marillier’s 1899 preface to the first Early Work volume ends in ambivalence and mourning, offering the butterfly where Wilde offered the flower: “Outwardly he lived in the sunshine, airing bright wings. Inwardly no one can tell how he suffered or strove.”

Two censorships, two revivals, one commodification cycle — the case for Beardsley is less about scandal than durability.