Aubrey Beardsley was an English illustrator who drew in black ink alone. He was born in Brighton on August 21, 1872, and died of tuberculosis in Menton, on the French Riviera, on March 16, 1898. He was 25.
In less than seven years of work he illustrated Oscar Wilde’s play Salome and served as the first art editor of The Yellow Book. Victorian London judged his drawings indecent.
He became the best known artist of the Decadents, a circle of 1890s writers and artists who preferred artifice to nature and enjoyed shocking respectable readers.
He started out as an insurance clerk, and soon the whole of London knew his name. Then he lost everything because of a mistake in a newspaper, and the mistake was not even about him.
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Beardsley grew up in a family that had come down in the world. His father lived on an inheritance, and the money was gone soon after the boy’s birth. In 1883 the family moved to London, where they lived in rented rooms and were always short of money.
At seven, Aubrey caught tuberculosis, the disease that would return again and again until it killed him. It did not keep him from the piano. He was a gifted pianist, and he and his sister Mabel, a year older, performed together as a musical pair.
The family needed money, so he went to work young. He left school in 1888 for an architect’s office, then moved to an insurance company, the Guardian Life and Fire, where he copied figures into ledgers. He drew in the evenings, after work.
In 1891 he took his drawings to Edward Burne-Jones, whose dreamlike pictures of medieval legends made him one of the most admired painters in England. Burne-Jones received him and Mabel at his London home and looked through the portfolio.
His advice, in one account, came down to a single line: “You must learn the grammar of your art.” So Beardsley enrolled in evening classes at the Westminster School of Art under the painter Fred Brown, almost the only art teaching he ever had.
Leaving the office for King Arthur
His way out of the insurance office came from the publisher J. M. Dent. Dent asked the young clerk to illustrate Le Morte d’Arthur, Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century tales of King Arthur and his knights, a huge job for someone who still spent his days at a desk…
What You’ll Discover
Who looked at an insurance clerk’s drawings.
What Wilde thought of his Salome.
Whose book was under Wilde’s arm.
What he drew after he lost his job.
What he asked his publisher to burn.