When Aubrey Beardsley left Brighton Grammar School he became a clerk, first in the office of a surveyor and then in the offices of a prominent life insurance company in London. This situation was so at odds with how the young man saw himself, according to the late Brian Reade, that he took to “aping” the manners and attitudes of the Aesthetes, particularly as promulgated in James McNeill Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (1890). By night he became a Wagnerite.
Mr Reade seems to have played an important part in reviving interest in Beardsley by organising a highly successful exhibition of his work at the V&A in 1966. Aubrey Beardsley developed out of the exhibition, and first appeared in 1967; the fine book in hand is a reprint of a revised edition published by the Antiques Collectors’ Club in 1987. It comprises a “comprehensive” survey of Beardsley’s work from childhood drawings in imitation of Kate Greenaway to his last, uncompleted illustrations for Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Most of the 502 works are immaculately reproduced, and are supplemented by detailed notes and by an introductory essay on the artist’s life and work. The frontispiece to Volpone is “one of the most exalted achievements of penmanship in the history of art”. A drawing called “A platonic lament” from the Salome sequence “has in it the seeds of the inventions of Kandinsky, Picasso, Mondrian, and many others to come”.
Beardsley was diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis at the age of seven, and was dead at 25. The only formal training he received was a year’s evening classes at Westminster School of Art. He quit the life insurance business after the owner of a bookshop he frequented during his lunch hours got him his first commission (illustrations to an edition of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur). He picked up ideas from Burne‐Jones, Durer, Greek vases, and Botticelli. Mr Reade considered him a very “English” artist ‐ “that curious humour, that mischievous irony, the innuendoes, the spleen, the stoicism” ‐ and saw an affinity with Edward Lear. It occurred to me that he could have illustrated the novels of Ronald Firbank. Towards the end of his essay Mr Reade describes his subject as a “solitary magpie”, and suggests that he was “evidently content to remain ... an amateur”, like William Blake:
If he had worked on a larger scale, or in colour, he might have compromised the standards he set himself.
