Aubrey Beardsley

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Name	Aubrey Beardsley
Caption	Portrait of Beardsley by Frederick Hollyer, 1896
Birthname	Aubrey Vincent Beardsley
Birthdate	August 21, 1872
Birthplace	Brighton, England
Deathdate	March 16, 1898
Deathplace	Menton, France
Nationality	English
Field	Illustration
Training	Westminster School of Art
Movement	Art Nouveau, Aestheticism

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings, executed in black ink and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau style and the poster movement was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death from tuberculosis.

Life

Beardsley was born in Brighton on 21 August 1872. His father, Vincent Paul Beardsley (1839–1909), was the son of a tradesman; Vincent had no trade himself, however, and instead relied on a private income from an inheritance that he received from his maternal grandfather when he was twenty-one. Vincent's wife, Ellen Agnus Pitt (1846–1932), was the daughter of Surgeon-Major William Pitt of the Indian Army. The Pitts were a well-established and respected family in Brighton, and it is widely accepted that Beardsley's mother married beneath her station. Shortly after their wedding, Vincent was obliged to sell some of his property in order to settle a claim for "breach of promise" from another woman who claimed that he had undertaken to marry her. At the time of his birth, Beardsley's family, which included his sister Mabel who was one year older, were living in Ellen's familial home at 12 Buckingham Road.

In 1883 his family settled in London, and in the following year he appeared in public as an "infant musical phenomenon," playing at several concerts with his sister. He attended Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School in 1884, before moving on to attend Bristol Grammar School, where in 1885 he wrote a play, which he performed together with other students. At about the same time his first drawings and cartoons were published in the school newspaper of the Bristol Grammar School Past and Present. In 1888 he obtained a post in an architect's office, and afterwards one in the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company. In 1891, under the advice of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, he took up art as a profession. In 1892 he attended the classes at the Westminster School of Art, then under Professor Fred Brown.

Work

His six years of major creative output can be divided into several periods, identified by the form of his signature. In the early period his work is mostly unsigned. During 1891 and 1892 he progressed to using his initials - A.V.B. In mid-1892, the period of Morte D'Arthur and The Bon Mots he used a Japanese-influenced mark which became progressively more graceful, sometimes accompanied by A.B. in block capitals.

Beardsley was active till his death in Menton, France, at the age of 25 on 16 March 1898 of tuberculosis.

Media portrayals

In the BBC 1982 Playhouse drama Aubrey, written by John Selwyn Gilbert, Beardsley was portrayed by actor John Dicks. The drama followed Beardsley's life from the time of Oscar Wilde’s arrest in April 1895, which resulted in Beardsley losing his position at the The Yellow Book, to his death from tuberculosis in 1898.

See also

Art Nouveau

References

Bibliography

Beardsley, Aubrey, Simon Wilson, and Linda Gertner Zatlin. 1998. Aubrey Beardsley: a centenary tribute. Tokyo: Art Life Ltd.

Beerbohm, Max. 1928. 'Aubrey Beardsley' in A Variety of Things. New York, Knopf.

Benkovitz, Miriam J. 1980. Aubrey Beardsley, an Account of his Life. New York, N.Y.: Putnam. ISBN 039912408X.

Brophy, Brigid. 1969. Black and White; a Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley. New York, N.Y.: Stein and Day.

Calloway, Stephen. 1998. Aubrey Beardsley. New York, N.Y.: Harry N. Abrams. ISBN 0810940094.

Fletcher, Ian. 1987. Aubrey Beardsley. Boston, M.A.: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0805769587.

Ross, Robert 1909. Aubrey Beardsley. London: John Lane.

Snodgrass, Chris. 1995. Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque. New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195090624.

Symons, Arthur. 1898. Aubrey Beardsley. London: At the Sign of the Unicorn.

Sturgis, Matthew. 1998. Aubrey Beardsley: a Biography. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press. ISBN 087951910X.

Weintraub, Stanley. 1967. Beardsley: a Biography. New York, N.Y.: Braziller.

Zatlin, Linda G. 1997. Beardsley, Japonsime, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521581648.

Zatlin, Linda G. 1990. Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 019817506X.

Zatlin, Linda G. 2007. “Aubrey Beardsley and the Shaping of Art Nouveau.” Bound for the 1890s: Essays on Writing and Publishing in Honor of James G. Nelson. Ed. Jonathan Allison. Buckinghamshire: Rivendale Press.

Zatlin, Linda G. “Wilde, Beardsley, and the Making of Salome.” Scholars Library, 2007; originally published in The Journal of Victorian Culture 5.2 (November 2000): 341-57.

Zatlin, Linda G. “Aubrey Beardsley.” Encyclopedia of Europe 1789-1914. Chicago: Gale Research, 2006.

External links

Aubrey Beardsley's gravesite, Menton, France (at findagrave.com)

Works displayed at Art Renewal Center website

Aubrey Beardsley Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Category:1872 births Category:1898 deaths Category:Old Bristolians Category:Deaths from tuberculosis Category:English illustrators Category:English immigrants to France Category:Art Nouveau Category:People from Brighton Category:Converts to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism Category:English Roman Catholics Category:British erotic artists Category:Infectious disease deaths in France