Aubrey Beardsley: six years of work and a long afterlife

Aubrey Beardsley reached a wide audience in April 1893, when the first issue of The Studio carried an article about a young draughtsman nobody had heard of. He was dead by March 1898, at twenty five. Inside those six years he illustrated Malory, made the drawings for the English edition of Oscar Wilde's Salome, ran the art side of The Yellow Book, lost that job, and started again with The Savoy. Very few artists have produced a finished body of work that quickly.

Until 1892 he was a clerk in a London insurance office. He drew in the evenings, took a portfolio to Edward Burne-Jones on a Sunday afternoon, and was told to go and study, which he did for a few months at night classes. The publisher Dent then handed him an enormous commission, hundreds of illustrations and ornaments for an edition of Le Morte d'Arthur, and he gave up the desk.

Why the work looked like nothing else

Beardsley drew in ink for photomechanical reproduction, which was new and which most illustrators of his generation treated as a compromise. He treated it as the whole point. Large flat blacks against bare white, a contour line of even weight, no shading and almost no texture, all of it built to survive the line block without loss. He took flat patterning from Japanese woodblock prints and linear discipline from the pre-Raphaelites, then stripped out everything that would have softened either one.

The Yellow Book made him famous and then removed him. He was art editor from April 1894, the quarterly sold, and the public read the whole enterprise as decadent. When Wilde was arrested in April 1895 the newspapers reported that he had a yellow book under his arm, and the publisher dropped Beardsley within days. He had never been close to Wilde and had mocked him inside the Salome drawings, which made no difference at all.

Leonard Smithers picked him up almost at once. Smithers published pornography alongside serious literature and paid Beardsley a retainer for The Savoy, which ran through 1896 and printed some of his strongest drawings. The arrangement suited them both and it also fixed his reputation at the disreputable end of the trade. He had been tubercular since childhood, and that year cost him most of what was left of his health.

• He drew for reproduction, so the drawings and the printed pages are two separate markets
• Original pen and ink sheets are scarce and most of the important ones sit in institutions
• First editions of Salome and early Yellow Book volumes turn up regularly and stay affordable
• Portfolio reprints from the 1900s and the 1960s are common and worth very little
• Paper browning is the usual condition problem, since the periodicals used cheap stock
• Attribution matters, because imitators were copying the line within about two years

The split between drawings and printed matter is the thing to understand before buying anything. A Beardsley page torn from a bound volume is a printed page and should be priced as one, however good it looks in a frame. The drawings are a different object entirely, they come to market rarely, and provenance on them is usually long and well recorded. Anything offered as an original drawing with a thin history deserves a specialist opinion.

What the afterlife looks like

He was out of fashion for most of the first half of the twentieth century. A large exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1966 put him back in circulation, and the timing was lucky, because the poster culture of that decade took his line straight into student rooms. Tate ran a full retrospective in 2020, and the Tate collection search gives a sense of what public institutions hold.

I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do same. By all that is holy all obscene drawings.

Aubrey Beardsley, letter to Leonard Smithers, March 1898

Smithers ignored the letter and went on publishing. That refusal is the reason the late drawings exist at all, and it is also the reason Beardsley spent seventy years filed under scandal rather than under English draughtsmanship. Both things are true and the market has never quite decided which one it is paying for.