Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley (Brighton, 1872 - Menton, 1898) was an English illustrator and draughtsman of the late Victorian period. His black ink drawings, with their stylised line and sharp contrasts between dark and blank areas, made him one of the central figures of the aesthetic movement and of the Art Nouveau style. He died at only twenty-five, yet his manner left a lasting mark on book illustration and poster design.

He was born into a middle-class family whose finances were fragile. His father had inherited some property but lost it soon after his son was born, and in 1883 the family moved to London, where they rented lodgings and struggled with poverty. As a child Beardsley performed as a musical prodigy alongside his sister Mabel, but he soon turned to drawing. He worked briefly in an architect's office and then for an insurance company, until, on the advice of Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, he took up art as a profession in 1891.

His first major commission was the deluxe edition of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which still shows the influence of Burne-Jones. His style soon became more personal, shaped by Japanese woodcuts and by the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec. He co-founded The Yellow Book, where he served as art editor, and he contributed to The Savoy. His illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salome brought him notoriety, and in his later work the line grew more intricate, with echoes of the rococo. He was also a sharp caricaturist, and his erotic and grotesque images provoked scandal.

Tuberculosis, which had afflicted him since childhood, shaped both his life and his output. He converted to Catholicism in 1897 and died in Menton in March 1898. His legacy is considerable: he influenced the French Symbolists, the poster art of the 1890s and later Art Nouveau artists, and in America so many imitators followed him that the resemblance became a common joke.