Aubrey
Beardsley's Illustrations to Salome
Lithographs
after the 1894 illustrations for Salome
The first separate publication of
Beardsley's classic illustrations, reproducing on Japanese vellum the
actual size of the original 16 drawings from Lane's 1906 edition, plus one
hitherto unpublished additional drawing "Salome on Settle." Very
scarce
Aubrey
(Vincent) Beardsley
(b Brighton, 21 Aug
1872; d Menton, 16 March 1898).
English draughtsman and
writer.
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The
Dancer's Reward
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He was brought up in
Brighton, in genteel poverty, by his mother. She gave her children an
intensive education in music and books, and by the time he was sent to
boarding-school at the age of seven Beardsley was exceptionally literate
and something of a musical prodigy. He was also already infected with the
tuberculosis that eventually killed him. There is evidence that his talent
for drawing was highly developed by the age of ten, and he was
subsequently encouraged by his housemaster at Brighton Grammar School,
Arthur William King. Beardsley left school at the end of 1888, and in
January 1889 became a clerk at the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance
Company in the City of London. Attacks of haemorrhaging of the lungs
forced him to abandon his job at the end of 1889. On the strength of a
short story sold to Tit Bits he tried to pursue a literary career,
but when his health improved in the spring of 1890, he returned both to
his job and to drawing. Final affirmation of the direction of his art came
in July 1891, when he showed his work to Edward Burne-Jones, who told
Beardsley: ‘I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art
as a profession, but in your case I can do nothing else.’
Burne-Jones’s enthusiasm is not perhaps surprising since there was much
of his own style in Beardsley’s work at the time, together with other
influences, notably Mantegna; both can be seen in his pen-and-ink drawing Hamlet
patris manem sequiiur [sic] (‘Hamlet following the ghost of
his father’; 1891; London, BM).
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