Le Salon Tee Cropped

Few artists get to define an era in the way that Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) personified fin-de-siècle Britain. Even the manner of his death seems peculiarly fitting for his time. Beardsley passed of consumption “at the age of a flower”, as Oscar Wilde put it — that is, at twenty-five. His brief life was marked by contrasts. A masterful yet largely self-taught illustrator, he developed an intensely idiosyncratic visual language of solid black ink juxtaposed against the white of paper, “knit together with fantastic, nervous lines, almost or quite unrelated to nature”, noted editor Gleeson White, a colleague of Beardsley. Reactions to his artwork were likewise contrastive. His manifest world of aesthetic eroticism and self-conscious decadence captivated some Victorians as much as it repelled others. His influence was such that the phrase “Beardsley Period” was already coined by his contemporaries as a self-descriptor of their own time.

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