Aubrey Beardsley was the rocket that exploded before the end of the Victorian era. A visionary English illustrator, his work was completely a new style in graphic design and book illustration, in bold black and white ink drawings. A master of the elegant line, Beardsley was at the very centre of the Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the 1890s, working at the heart of intense beauty and shocking, grotesque imagery. His story is so special because of the incredible speed in which he lived.
Early Life
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was born in the seaside resort town of Brighton, England on 21 August 1872. His family life had been a hodgepodge of middle-class respectability and financial disaster. His mother, Ellen Pitt, had a well-to-do, cultured family of doctors and military officers, and his father, Vincent Beardsley, had a family of jewellers, but no regular trade.
Personal Challenges
Beardsley’s most defining struggle throughout his life was with tuberculosis (consumption) and he never managed to cure it. The disease literally took him inside out, and he would suffer from violent lung bleeding so often that he was confined to bed for weeks at a time. All his artworks were made within the framework of a biological clock.
Career / Main Journey
Beardsley’s career only spanned a few years, but it had a tremendous rush.
Beginning of the Journey
When he was 19 years old, the young clerk mustered up the courage to go visit the studio of the well-known Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones’s portfolio impressed him and he urged Beardsley to attend night classes at the Westminster School of Art. It was his first and only formal training in art, and he would spend just a few months on it.
Major Achievements
Beardsley’s innovations stem from his ability to combine traditional European art forms with 18th-century Rococo style and 18th-century Japanese flat, asymmetric compositions, derived from woodblock prints and known as ukiyo-e.
The Yellow Book & The Savoy: He was the leading creative figure of the most prominent avant-garde publications of the era.
In 1894, Salomé Illustrations published the images of masterpieces such as The Peacock Skirt and The Climax, which became icons of aestheticism in the late-Victorian era.
Following his post-Wilde termination he began an incredibly intricate and “embroidered” style which he employed in the Rape of the Lock (1896), his most versatile and unmatched style.
Personality & Character
Beardsley was a typical Victorian “dandy”. He was extremely neat in his dress, dressing out in finely tailored gray suits, gloves and a silk hat; his hair was long and reddish-brown and was combed into a neat fringe above his forehead. He was very clever, good-natured and had a very theatrical turn of mind; he said once:
“If I am not grotesque I am nothing“
The bold, self-assured, visionary rebel was a sensitive young man who abided by his rule of keeping his pain all to himself. He was extraordinarily courageous to the end, turning his pain into some very intense drawing hours, most of which were done late at night by candlelight.
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Lesser-Known Facts
Before he could write his first note, the “Infant Phenomenon” was recognized as a musical prodigy, writing poetry and playing piano duos with his sister for London’s high society.
His sense of loneliness as an ill child had a profound impact on him, as seen in his Self-Portrait in Bed. In 1894 he created an evocative ink portrait, Self-Portrait in Bed, that depicts a small, frail figure lying under a large, tall canopy bed.
In his last few months of life, he became tormented by the knowledge that he was dying and his newfound Catholic faith, and penned a heart-wrenching letter to his publisher begging him to “destroy all copies of Lysistrata and all obscene drawings. Fortunately for art history, his publisher didn’t take it.
Final Years / Death
Beardsley’s health was totally broken by 1897. His doctors advised him to move away from the foggy and rainy London to the warmer French Riviera, and he took their advice. The last couple of months of his life were spent traveling from hotel to hotel in company of his loving mother and sister.
Aubrey Beardsley died on March 16, 1898, in Menton, France of tuberculosis at the Hôtel Cosmopolitain. His age was just 25. He was laid to rest in a modest requiem at the Cathedral of Menton, and was buried in a cemetery on the hillside above the Mediterranean.
Conclusion
Aubrey Beardsley’s life was a brilliant, short one. He was in the position of having a fatal disease that took the liberty of a creative explosion, for there he turned the serious physical handicap into an intense imaginative and productive surge. His story is one of the need for artistic genius to defy the moral panic of the time and the lifespan of the artist.
Timeline
- 1872 — Born in Brighton, England
- 1879 — He was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of 7.
- 1891 — Develops an acquaintance with Sir Edward Burne-Jones and starts to attend art classes in the evening.
- 1892 — Win a major commission to illustrate Le Morte Darthur
- 1894 — Appointed as Art Editor for The Yellow Book, Illustrates Salomé by Oscar Wilde.
- 1895 — Banned from The Yellow Book after the public scandal involving Oscar Wilde.
- 1897 — The Rape of the Lock and Lysistrata.
- 1898 — Passed away in Menton, France at the age of 25 from tuberculosis.
