Bookplate of John Lumsden Propert

Aubrey Beardsley

Bookplate of John Lumsden Propert

Photomechanical engraving,

1893.

Contemporaries who saw Beardsley as a leader of the emerging decadent movement defined decadence as a subversion of or transgression against convention through strangeness, morbidity, and ugliness. Beardsley’s decadence offended, but it also puzzled. Why would a pallid, ghostly Pierrot sue for the favor of a malevolent, black-clad woman with a face like an angry cat? The artist offered no explanation of the drama enacted in this bookplate, designed for John Lumsden Propert (1834–1902), and there was no reason to think that such a design would have suited a physician who was also an expert on miniatures. In an 1897 letter to a Birmingham bookseller, Propert himself called the bookplate “peculiar”; yet Beardsley obviously thought well enough of it to reproduce it in the April 1894 number of The Yellow Book.

From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press