He produced 353 drawings over a period of 18 months, a colossal job to entrust to a 20-year-old its whole manner mimics the elaborately bordered and decorated style of Morris’s Kelmscott Chaucer, but in a much cheaper medium. Private Collectionīy the time he wrote this letter, he was deeply immersed in a new edition of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur for the publisher Dent. Strange hermaphroditic creatures wandering about in Pierrot costumes or modern dress quite a new world of my own creation.’ It is a world instantly recognisable, and the influence of Japan would persist in Beardsley’s asymmetries and use of line, as well as in his eroticism and eye for the grotesque. The subjects were quite mad and a little indecent. ‘Last summer,’ he bragged to an old school friend in 1893, ‘I struck for myself an entirely new method of drawing and composition, something suggestive of Japan, but not really japonesque.

This limitation Beardsley embraced and explored to the full, in an art that depends as much on what it eliminates as on what it (often startlingly) includes. Wherever possible Zatlin reproduces Beardsley’s original drawings, but almost everything here was designed for publication, and as with many advanced artists you see him exploiting a new medium, in this case reproduction by line block – a zinc plate far cheaper and quicker than woodblock, but unable to represent half-tones. Only occasionally an earlier attempt is refined later on – he drew Salome with the head of John the Baptist the year before he was commissioned to illustrate the English translation of Wilde’s play, and his later image is stronger in every way.

Beardsley is the master of the unexpected but unalterably finished article. The catalogue includes, early on, many schoolboy caricatures, and has an appendix of sketches found in Beardsley’s letters though of biographical interest, few even hint at the hand which created the supremely calculated public works. The experience is absorbing and exhilarating.įor all the speed there was nothing spontaneous in the execution of these drawings. Poring with Zatlin over every sunflower and poppy, every nipple and tassel and cloven hoof, studying her digests of the large critical scrutiny these pictures have attracted over more than a century, one seems to pass in entranced slow motion over a huge corpus of work produced at superhuman speed. Mortal illness lent Beardsley’s genius urgency, his mature career compressed into about five years.

Linda Gertner Zatlin’s magnificent new catalogue (Yale University Press) lists well over 1,000 drawings, none without interest, most of them masterworks, some the defining images of their time. Aubrey Beardsley was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of seven he started drawing a year later, and didn’t stop till he died, in 1898, at the age of 25.

Strange Doorways by Paul Beardsley