Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley drew in black and white, changed English illustration in about five years, and was dead of tuberculosis at twenty-five. He was a clerk in an insurance office with no formal training beyond a few night classes; Burne-Jones looked at his drawings unannounced one Sunday and told him to give up the office. The technique was suited to the new photomechanical line block: flat masses of solid black against white, no shading, a line of extraordinary economy, and compositions borrowed from Japanese prints. Le Morte d'Arthur made his name and the illustrations for Wilde's Salome in 1894 made him notorious - erotic, cruel, and full of jokes at Wilde's own expense, which Wilde did not enjoy. He was art editor of The Yellow Book until Wilde's arrest, when the publisher dismissed him for an association the public assumed and the facts did not support. He went on with the Savoy and with Lysistrata, which was privately printed and legally unpublishable. He converted to Catholicism and asked his publisher to destroy the obscene drawings, which the publisher did not do. Wilde said the Salome drawings were like the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes in the margins of his copybooks, which was not meant kindly and was partly accurate. He was a serious amateur musician and had been a child prodigy on the piano. His sister Mabel, an actress, was close to him all his life and the subject of persistent rumour. He died at Menton in the south of France, nursed by his mother. Everything he is known for was made between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, and the style was imitated for a generation and revived in the 1960s.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history