Aubrey Beardsley - 150 Years Young
Title
Aubrey Beardsley - 150 Years Young
Collection Items
The Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur, of His Noble Knights of the Round Table, Their Marvellous Enquests and Adventures, the Achieving of the San Greal, and in the End, Le Morte Darthur… Embellished with Many Original Designs by Aubrey Beardsley.
The story of King Arthur and his knights, as written by Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1405–1471), involved visionary aims and daring quests that ended tragically. Beardsley’s massive project of designing and illustrating this edition of Malory’s narrative…
Ellen Pitt Beardsley
Like Jane, Lady Wilde (1821–1896), the mother of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), who had a career in the arts (publishing poetry as “Speranza”) and who nurtured her son’s ambitions, Aubrey Beardsley’s mother greatly influenced his future. Ellen Pitt…
Aubrey Beardsley
Cross-dressing appealed to Beardsley in his early years and seemed to suit him. In this reminiscence written decades after his death in 1898, Beardsley’s mother described the amateur theatricals put on at home by the adolescent Aubrey and his sister,…
Venus Appeareth to Aeneas, in Nineteen Early Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley from the Collection of Mr. Harold Hartley, with an Introduction by Georges Derry
As a student at the Brighton Grammar School, Beardsley doodled obsessively and caricatured peers and teachers alike, while creating ridiculous images to accompany whatever he was reading. Assigned Virgil’s Aeneid, he tried translating it from the…
Illustrations in “The Pay of the Pied Piper,” in The Brighton Grammar School Annual Entertainment at The Dome on Wednesday, Dec. 19, 1888: Programme & Book of Words
Beardsley’s desire for literary fame equaled his ambitions in art. From boyhood onwards, he was writing poetry and prose. But he was attracted, too, to the world of the theatre. At age eighteen— a time when he described himself unflatteringly in a…
Autograph letter to G. F. Scotson-Clark, 9 August 1891
Beardsley admired both the art of James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and his dandified personal style. But whatever Beardsley thought well of, he could not resist mocking. He would later caricature Whistler as a nearly boneless figure, dwindling from…
Design for Border for Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
Having received little formal art training in his schooldays, Beardsley first taught himself to draw by copying. Even at the beginning of his professional career, which followed one year of evening classes at the Westminster School of Art, the…
Prospectus for Sir Thomas Malory, The Birth, Life, & Acts of King Arthur, of His Noble Knights of the Round Table, Their Marvellous Enquests and Adventures, the Achieving of the San Greal, and in the End, Le Morte Darthur…
When the firm of J. M. Dent commissioned Beardsley to illustrate this deluxe edition of a classic of medievalism, little did it know what it was in for, although the prospectus offered hints. Throughout this lengthy project, Beardsley’s style and…
The Birth, Life, and Acts of King Arthur, of His Noble Knights of the Round Table, Their Marvellous Enquests and Adventures, the Achieving of the San Greal, and in the End, Le Morte Darthur… Embellished with Many Original Designs by Aubrey Beardsley
The story of King Arthur and his knights, as written by Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1405–1471), involved visionary aims and daring quests that ended tragically. Beardsley’s massive project of designing and illustrating this edition of Malory’s narrative…
Design for Front Wrapper of the Parts Issue of Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
While Beardsley was turning out one drawing after another to accompany Malory’s Arthurian chronicles, he was, despite his poor health, simultaneously taking on other paid visual work. The effects of exhaustion, inattention, and inexperience—at the…