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Studio Art
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“The
night is dark and strength seems failing fast Bernard Shaw once stated that Aubrey Beardsley posed as being “a diabolical reveller in vices of which he was innocent”. In his short life Beardsley drew on influences from his life and from his imagination to create a world of erotic imagery that rattled not a few teacups in Victorian England. His mother Ellen Pitt came from a medical family. Although she had strong social pretensions Ellen provoked a scandal when she met (without introduction) Vincent Beardsley on Brighton Pier. They met clandestinely at Brighton Pavilion before marrying during an intense storm on 12 October 1870 aged 31 and 24 respectively. Although she emphasized their social gap Vincent Beardsley had inherited £350 at age 19 and a quarter of his maternal grandfather’s estate. Listing himself as a gentleman (with no need to earn a living) on his marriage registration it seemed that he came from an honourable background. It’s not certain how Vincent lost his money. Ellen gave one story that a woman sued him for breach of promise and how he had to pay her off on his honeymoon. He found a job working at the West India and Panama Telegraph Company and later worked at two brewery businesses while Ellen was employed as a governess. The newly married couple took up lodgings in London but their two children were born at Ellen’s father’s home in Brighton. Mabel was born on 24 August 1871 and Aubrey Vincent on 21 August 1872. His doting mother described Aubrey as “a delicate piece of Dresden china”. Ellen had intellectual pretensions for both children in music and literature “I would not let them hear rubbish, and it was the same with books. I would not let them read rubbish”. At age 7 Aubrey was diagnosed tubercular, a condition he inherited from his father and paternal grandfather Paul, a goldsmith who had died aged 40. For the sake of his health Aubrey was sent to a boy’s boarding school Hamilton Lodge in Hurstpierpoint, Sussex in the autumn of 1879. It was there that Aubrey began drawing which his mother felt was to the detriment of his musical development. The relationship between Aubrey and his mother was an intense one. Ellen became solely responsible for his support and cultural education as she gradually edged Vincent Beardsley out of his son’s life. She accused her husband of beating his son and behaving in a brutal fashion towards herself and Mabel. However this is not borne out by the letters between father and son which were affectionate. Ellen preferred to see herself as a martyr and twisted the facts to suit her stories. Aged nine Aubrey was taken to Epsom “to get strong”. It was there that he made his first sale from drawing when Lady Henrietta Pelham bought a picture before commissioning him to provide a decorated menu and guest cards for a family wedding. Earning £30 this helped the family who were in “destitute circumstances”. Moving from place to place seems to have been a recurring factor in Aubrey’s early life as he moved from Epsom to London (where Mabel and he played duets at drawing room entertainments) before returning to Brighton to live with Ellen’s “strange old aunt” Sarah Pitt. Their life with their great aunt was strict as the children were refused toys, allowed no books except Green’s “Short History of the English People” (1874) and no entertainment except High Anglican Church sermons. However Sarah Pitt generously paid for Aubrey to board at Brighton Grammar School in 1884. While there he made caricatures of his headmaster which his housemaster kept. He also developed a talent for verse which was published in the school magazine “Past and Present”. In June 1887 this published the first of his graphic works- eleven sketches illustrating “The Jubilee Cricket Analysis”. Sadly Aubrey left at the end of the summer term in 1888 to work as a clerk although he returned that December to take part in “The Pay of the Pied Piper” for which he also designed the costumes and programme. Theatricals were a favoured pastime of both Aubrey and sister Mabel whom he performed with in “The Cambridge Theatre of Vanities”. He also featured in “A Brown Study” staged in November 1890 at the Brighton Pavilion by the Old Boys Association. By 1891 Aubrey was living in Pimlico where he attended St Barnabas, a high Anglican church. The vicar, the Rev. Alfred Gurney, and the curate’s brother both became patrons of his work commissioning Christmas cards. Employment as a clerk proved extremely uninspiring to Aubrey who stated that he was “not (as yet) frantically attached” to the work. First employed at the District Surveyor’s Office of Clerkenwell and Islington he moved on to the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company in 1889.
On Sunday afternoon in 1891 he achieved the dream of meeting one of his heroes when Mabel and himself visited Edward Burne Jones’ studio. They were met by the great artist himself who showed them his paintings. Looking at Aubrey’s drawings he encouraged the young man to take up art as a profession which he later followed up with a four-page letter of advice. The visit was rounded off with afternoon tea where other guests included Oscar and Constance Wilde. Inspired by Burne’s encouragement Aubrey attended evening classes at the Westminster School of Art under Fred Brown although he only ever completed two paintings. However he was finally beginning to define his art “I am anxious to say something somewhere. On the subject of lines and line drawing. How little the importance of outline is understood even by some of the best painters”. Slowly he began to distance himself from the Pre-Raphaelites. Many of his pictures had literary subjects or sources. Always working indoors in ordinary rooms and often at night by artificial light he treated black and white as a means of implying colour. Aubrey would compose his pictures in pencil and keep correcting until, as a colleague recorded, the paper became “raddled from pencil, India rubber and knife”. He inked over this initial drawing and erased any pencil marks still showing. Increasingly ill he realised his life would be short so using pen and ink was a quicker way to make art compared to oil painting. Feeling an affinity to Keats and Raphael who both died young Aubrey told an acquaintance “I shall not live longer than did Keats”. In 1891 he wrote, “I am now eighteen years old, with a vile constitution, a sallow face and sunken eyes, long red hair, a shuffling gait and a stoop”. In 1891 his drawing of Hamlet was featured
in the November issue of “The Bee” published by the Blackburn Technical
Institute. It was also then through his Pimlico patron that he met Aymer
Vallance who worked with William Morris. Through Vallance Aubrey was introduced
to Robert Ross, a Canadian journalist and close friend of Oscar Wilde.
Ross looked through Aubrey’s portfolio and asked Aubrey often swapped drawings for books and was in the shop of Frederick H. Evans when he overheard a customer (publisher J.M. Dent) talk of his plans for an illustrated edition of Sir Thomas Malory’s “Morte D’Arthur” and that he was looking for a designer to take it on working in a Burne Joneish manner without the fee. Evans suggested Beardsley but Dent insisted he produce an illustration on spec without payment. Aubrey drew “The Achieving of the Sangreal” and got the commission. On the strength of this work he gave up his art lessons and clerking job. His parents were extremely upset about this but “of course now I have achieved something like success and getting talked about they are beginning to hedge and swear they take the greatest interest in my work”. Vallance later introduced Aubrey to C.Lewis Hind who edited “The Studio and Pall Mall Budget” both publications that would eventually employ the young artist. In the first issue of The Studio there was an article called “A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley” by Joseph Pennell. By 1893 Aubrey was besieged with work and on the strength of this set up house with his sister Mabel. They also both had the safety net of £500 left to them by their Great Aunt Sarah Pitt. The second half of the year he worked on “Salome” by Oscar Wilde translated by Wilde’s “sweetheart” Lord Alfred Douglas. Aubrey became a good friend of Wilde’s and in fact four of the Salome pictures were disguised portraits of the Irish writer. The Yellow Book was conceived on 1 January 1894 when Aubrey lunched with US expatriate Henry Harland whom he’d met in the waiting room of a specialist they both consulted. The magazine was bound in yellow and resembled the French novels of the time with the first issue appearing in April. At the same time as this he took on illustrating a ten-volume edition of the works of Edgar Allan Poe published between 1894-5. Despite the art critic in St Paul’s calling Aubrey’s work “sexless and unclean” commissions continued to flood in. However on 25 May 1895 Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour for homosexuality. By associating with Wilde and other known homosexuals of the time Aubrey’s work had become tainted by association and he was suddenly without an income. Giving up his home with Mabel he spent the next two years travelling in France, Belgium and Germany where it was cheaper to live. At around this time Aubrey met Marc-Andre Raffalovich a rich Anglo-Franco-Russian who besieged the artist with flowers, books, sonnets, chocolates and later £10 notes. Their relationship has remained unclear although Aubrey called him mentor. He also met Leonard Smithers a solicitor from Sheffield in his mid-thirties whose chief foible was collecting brass pigs. Smithers later became a publisher and Aubrey illustrated Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” (1714) for him in May 1896 as well as designing the Puck on Pegasus icon Smithers used on all his book publications. He also drew for the quarterly (later monthly) magazine “The Savoy” but retailers would not display this in an act of censorship against Aubrey and the magazine ceased in December 1896. Increasingly financially pressed Aubrey asked Smithers to sell his books and Japanese prints to raise funds. Smithers attempted to raise more money for his friend by publishing “A Book of Fifty Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley”. Raffalovich also attempted to help his protégé by giving him a regular allowance although he pressurised him to convert to Catholicism. In August 1896 Aubrey moved into a guesthouse in Boscombe and a few months later another in Bournemouth. In severe financial straits his health began deteriorating and suffered from haemorrhages. He felt illness was reducing him to a childlike state and was “quite paralysed by fear” by being “more or less in the mortal funk of a pauper’s life- and death”. In February 1898 Ellen Beardsley regained control of Aubrey’s life when she moved in to nurse him. She wrote “Aubrey was such a child always. People said his drawings were degenerate and vicious, but it wasn’t true. He was clear-minded and such a child”. How the artist felt about being trapped again in this smothering relationship can only be guessed at. In April 1897 Raffalovich’s doctor escorted Aubrey and Ellen to Paris before they moved on to St Germain. In July they journeyed to Dieppe where he once again met with Wilde who was living there under an assumed name. Spending autumn in Paris working on drawings for Mademoiselle de Maupin Aubrey finally arrived in Menton after a wearying “journey (that) nearly did for me”. The years of financial strain and restless wandering had finally taken their toll and on 26 January 1898 Aubrey Beardsley had another severe haemorrhage before dying on 16 March 1898 aged only 25 years old. ©Jen Longshaw 2007 Please do not copy in any manner, print or electronic, without permission from the author. Subscribe to a FREE Newsletter. |
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His
spare time was spent reading voraciously (both in French and English)
and attending the National Gallery with Mabel where they admired the work
of the Pre-Raphaelites as well as Whistler and Mantegna. 
to
buy a picture. He would later affectionately complain that when Aubrey
called on friends who owned early examples of his drawings he would “destroy
these early relics and leave a more mature and approved specimen of his
art”.