A selection of works by Aubrey Beardsley – The Public Domain Review

Beardsley’s ratings also fluctuated over time. In 1894, he was celebrated as the founding arts editor of the groundbreaking magazine The Yellow Book. 1894 also saw the controversial publication of the English edition of Wilde’s play Salome – illustrated by Beardsley. The precocious artist, who had learned from the older dandy, began to ridicule him. In Salomehe portrayed Wilde’s likeness as the moon, compared in the play to a crazy, drunken, naked woman who was “looking everywhere for loversThe following year, Wilde was tried and imprisoned for gross indecency. Tarnished by association, the cartoonist also fell into disrepute. After a shocked mob breached the magazine’s premises, Beardsley was dismissed from his editorial position. While other doors were closed, Leonard Smithers – a less scrupulous, shady publisher – stepped in to provide a lifeline for Beardsley’s imperiled artistic career. The result was The Savoya visionary successor to The Yellow Book but even more daring and short-lived. The choice of name was as daring as it was remarkable. Amid the consequences, The Savoy reminiscent of the grand hotel infamous during Wilde’s trial as the setting for his rendezvous. Beardsley, who once played with expectations, seemed to lean forward just as he was finally pulling back. At the height of his creative powers, but with rapidly declining health, Beardsley applied himself to a range of projects whenever he could, although most were unfinished. Yet his oeuvre reached more than a thousand drawings in just a few short years of professional production. Despite his serious conversion to Catholicism at the end of his life, this body of work cemented Beardsley’s legacy: perverse, grotesque, sensual and inimitable.