Aubrey Beardsley

• 1. Introduction

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  Aubrey Beardsley died on the 16th of March 1898 at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Menton, France, attended by his mother and sister. He was 25 years old. In the weeks before his death, he wrote a desperate letter to his publisher Leonard Smithers, begging him to destroy every copy of his most explicit drawings. He signed it "In my death agony." Smithers ignored the plea and kept selling them.

  Beardsley had packed more controversy into six years of work than most artists manage in a lifetime. His black ink illustrations, dense with hidden obscenities and grotesque erotica, made him the most controversial figure of the Art Nouveau era. Publishers learned to examine his work with a magnifying glass before sending anything to press.

  He moved in the orbit of Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler, co-founded two influential magazines, and shaped the look of an entire visual movement. Yet tuberculosis had stalked him since childhood, and it claimed him before he turned 26. What drove a boy from a Brighton household slowly sliding into poverty toward an art so dark, so precise, and so deliberately transgressive? That is the question this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Brighton to London

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  On the 21st of August 1872, Beardsley was born into a family already carrying the weight of social embarrassment. His father, Vincent Paul Beardsley, was the son of a Clerkenwell jeweller, and had been partially disabled by tuberculosis, the same disease that had killed his own father at the age of 40. Shortly after his marriage to Ellen Agnus Pitt, the daughter of Surgeon-Major William Pitt of the Indian Army, Vincent was forced to sell property to settle a breach-of-promise claim filed by a clergyman's widow who said he had promised to marry her. His mother, for her part, took to presenting herself as the "victim of a mésalliance" for having married below her social station.

  The family was living in Ellen's familial home at 12 Buckingham Road when Aubrey arrived. His sister Mabel was one year his senior. By the time he was seven, Aubrey had contracted tuberculosis. When Vincent's fortune dissolved shortly after his son's birth, the family moved to London in 1883. Vincent worked first for the West India and Panama Telegraph Company, then intermittently as a clerk at breweries. For the next two decades the family lived in rented accommodation.

  In January 1885, Beardsley began attending Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School. His first poems, drawings, and cartoons appeared in the school magazine Past and Present. By 1888 he was working in an architect's office, and then at the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company. In 1891, following advice from Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, he turned to art as a profession. The next year he enrolled at the Westminster School of Art, then under Professor Fred Brown.

• 3. The Ink and the Influence

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  Paris in 1892 changed what Beardsley saw and what he wanted to make. He encountered the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Parisian appetite for Japanese prints. Those twin currents ran directly into the flat planes and strong contrasts that would define his style: large dark areas set against large blank ones, dense passages of fine detail placed beside areas with none at all. Japanese shunga artwork fed the erotic dimension of his draftsmanship, and some drawings featured enormous genitalia drawn in that direct visual language.

  His first major commission came from the publishing house J.M. Dent and Company, who asked him to illustrate Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory in 1893. Beardsley tracked his own creative development through the form of his signature. His earliest work went unsigned. During 1891 and 1892 he moved to his initials, A.V.B. By mid-1892, around the time of the Le Morte d'Arthur and The Bon Mots period, he adopted a Japanese-influenced mark that grew progressively more graceful, sometimes accompanied by A.B. in block capitals.

  In 1894, a new translation of Lucian's True History appeared in a privately printed edition of just 251 copies, illustrated by Beardsley alongside William Strang and J. B. Clark. That same year Beardsley co-founded The Yellow Book with the American writer Henry Harland, serving as art editor for its first four editions and designing the covers. His most famous erotic illustrations circled history and mythology: drawings for a privately printed edition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, and illustrations for Oscar Wilde's Salome, which eventually premiered in Paris in 1896. An 1896 edition of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock was another major project.

• 4. Satire, Scandal, and Hidden Things

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  Beardsley said it plainly: "I have one aim - the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing." Oscar Wilde, who knew his face well, described it as looking like a silver hatchet with grass green hair. Beardsley arrived at his publisher's dressed in a morning coat and court shoes, dove-grey suits, hats, ties, and yellow gloves. The precision he brought to his appearance matched the precision he brought to the page.

  He was a caricaturist and drew political cartoons, mirroring Wilde's irreverent wit in visual form. His work took direct aim at Victorian attitudes toward sex, particularly the high value placed on respectability and the anxieties men carried as the women's movement made gains in economic rights and educational and occupational opportunities through the 1880s. The grotesque and the erotic were not simply provocations; they were tools for satirizing the world he lived in.

  Publishers learned caution. Beardsley habitually embedded obscene details in images that appeared decorative at first glance, and examining his work with a magnifying glass before publication became standard practice. His influence spread to the French Symbolists, to the Poster Art Movement of the 1890s, and to later artists including Frank C. Papé and Harry Clarke. He also co-founded The Savoy magazine, which gave him space to write as well as draw; his story Under the Hill, based on the Tannhäuser legend, appeared there alongside his poem "The Ballad of a Barber".

  Not everything bearing his name was actually his. A book titled Fifty Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, Selected from the Collection of Mr. H.S. Nicols contained works later identified as forgeries, distinguished by pornographic explicitness rather than the subtler erotic language Beardsley actually used.

• 5. Faith, Hemorrhage, and the Final Letter

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  In December 1896, a violent hemorrhage left Beardsley in precarious health. He had suffered recurrent lung hemorrhages throughout his career, periods when he was too ill to work or leave home. By March 1897, facing the unmistakable deterioration of his body, he converted to Catholicism. A month later, the failing health drove a move to the French Riviera in search of a more forgiving climate.

  The letter he sent from there on the 7th of March 1898 - postmarked that date - was addressed to publisher Leonard Smithers and close friend Herbert Charles Pollitt. It read: "Jesus is our Lord and Judge / Dear Friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings... By all that is holy, all obscene drawings. / Aubrey Beardsley / In my death agony." Both men ignored his wishes entirely. Smithers went further, continuing to sell reproductions and forgeries of Beardsley's work after his death.

  Beardsley died nine days after writing that letter, on the 16th of March 1898, at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Menton, Alpes-Maritimes, France. A requiem Mass was held the following day at Menton Cathedral. His remains were interred in the Cimetière du Trabuquet. He had been christened on the 24th of October 1872; his life spanned less than 26 years.

• 6. After Death, Before Forgotten

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  Beardsley's work refused to stay quiet. During a 1966 exhibition of his prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a private gallery in the same city was raided by police for displaying copies of the identical prints on show at the museum. The gallery owner was charged under obscenity laws. The same images were simultaneously acceptable in a national institution and prosecutable a short distance away.

  In 1982, the Playhouse drama Aubrey, written by John Selwyn Gilbert and starring actor John Dicks, dramatized the period from Oscar Wilde's arrest in April 1895, which had cost Beardsley his position at The Yellow Book, through to his death in 1898. The BBC also produced the documentary Beardsley and His Work that same year. Decades later, in March 2020, BBC Four broadcast the hour-long documentary Scandal and Beauty: Mark Gatiss on Aubrey Beardsley, timed to coincide with a Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain.

  His face appears on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and a 1977 horror film, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, uses the entombed spirit of an unnamed artist whose work and manner of death point unmistakably to Beardsley as its narrator. In 2019, the National Leather Association International created an award named after him for creators of abstract erotic art. The Cimetière du Trabuquet in Menton remains the site of his grave, a short distance from the hotel room where he died at 25.