How King Marke Found Sir Tristan, 1893
Aubrey Beardsley had six working years, a chronic case of tuberculosis that had already marked him for death by the time he picked up a pen professionally, and enough talent to redraw the look of an entire decade. He died in 1898, three weeks after his twenty-fifth birthday passed into his twenty-sixth year, having produced more than a thousand drawings, defined the visual language later called the Art Nouveau poster style, and put explicit female desire, cross-dressing, hermaphrodite figures, and same-sex intimacy into mainstream British publishing at a moment when doing so could end a career or a life. It very nearly ended his.
He was not, by his own account or his contemporaries’, a gay man in any way that fits neatly into a modern label. He is remembered anyway as one of the defining visual artists of queer decadence — not because of who he slept with, which nobody can say for certain, but because of what his drawings refused to hold still. Bodies swap gender mid-line. Desire runs in every direction at once. A recent Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt essay on his Salome illustrations put it directly: his work “queer[s]” Victorian values by blurring the gender binary into what the essay calls fantastical androgyny, regardless of what Beardsley himself wanted in bed.
Six years, from nobody to notorious
Aubrey Beardsley by Frederick Hollyer, 1893
Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872 to a family that had lost its money a generation earlier. He had his first attack of tuberculosis at age seven and lived the rest of his life on borrowed time, a fact he seems to have known and worked around rather than against. He had almost no formal art training. In 1892, the publisher J.M. Dent commissioned the twenty-year-old to illustrate a new edition of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and the commission let him quit his day job at an insurance office and draw for a living. A glowing profile in The Studio the same year made him locally famous before he had published almost anything.
Then came Salome. In 1893 and 1894, Beardsley produced a set of illustrations for the English edition of Oscar Wilde’s play, a text already banned from the London stage on grounds of “indecency.” His drawings for it — a decapitated head held aloft and kissed, a peacock-feathered dress that reads as both armor and drag, figures whose gender the eye can’t quite settle on — made him instantly, internationally notorious. He was twenty-one.
In 1894 he became art editor of The Yellow Book, a quarterly that became shorthand for fin-de-siècle decadence before it published a single scandalous word, mostly because of Beardsley’s covers. When Wilde was arrested in April 1895, newspapers reported, wrongly, that he had been carrying a copy of The Yellow Book under his arm. The publisher panicked, fired Beardsley within days, and the association stuck to him for the rest of his life regardless of the facts.
Mark, Dinadan and Palomides, 1893
He landed on his feet with Leonard Smithers, a publisher willing to print material other houses wouldn’t touch, and became art editor of a new magazine, The Savoy, in 1896. The same year produced his illustrations for Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and, far more controversially, for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata — drawings explicit enough that Smithers could only circulate them privately to subscribers, outside normal bookshops, because they were unpublishable any other way.
By late 1896 his lungs were failing badly. In March 1897 he converted to Roman Catholicism. In early 1898, dying in Menton on the French Riviera, he wrote Smithers a letter now held up as one of the strangest documents in the history of art patronage: “Jesus is our Lord and Judge. I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings… by all that is holy, all obscene drawings,” he wrote, signing it “in my death agony.” Smithers, who had a decent commercial stake in those drawings, ignored him. Beardsley died on 16 March 1898, at twenty-five. Everything that survives of his most explicit work exists because his publisher disobeyed a dying man’s last wish.
The work that made his name
Aubrey Beardsley by Frederick H. Evans, 1895
| Work | Date | Where to see it now |
|---|---|---|
| Le Morte d’Arthur illustrations | 1893–1894 | Victoria and Albert Museum, London; dispersed among print collections |
| Salomé illustrations, for Oscar Wilde’s play | 1893–1894 | Harvard Art Museums (Fogg), Cambridge, Mass.; Princeton University Library; V&A, London |
| The Yellow Book covers and illustrations | 1894–1895 | V&A, London; British Library |
| The Rape of the Lock illustrations | 1896 | Tate Britain, London |
| Lysistrata illustrations | 1896 | Victoria and Albert Museum, London |
| The Savoy covers and illustrations | 1896 | V&A, London; Princeton University Library |
| Volpone frontispiece | 1898 | V&A, London |
Salomé remains the work most closely tied to Beardsley’s queer reputation, and not only because of its subject matter. Wilde wrote the play in French; Beardsley illustrated the English translation and, according to Wilde himself, illustrated it in a way that had little to do with the text. The drawings replace Wilde’s Judean court with a hallucinatory, ahistorical world of peacocks, orchids, and figures whose gender the reader has to work to determine. The Cooper Hewitt’s design-history reading of the series argues that Beardsley’s androgynous figures and sexually assertive women gave visual form to two brand-new fin-de-siècle identity types at once, the New Woman and the Dandy, collapsing the “rigid polarity” of Victorian gender onto a single page.
The Yellow Book made Beardsley’s reputation as much through scandal by association as through the work itself. As art editor, he set the visual tone for a magazine that became, within months of launch, the byword for decadent taste in London — and then became collateral damage in the Wilde trial despite having no real connection to Wilde’s arrest.
Lysistrata is the most nakedly erotic and least apologetic body of work Beardsley ever produced: outsized genitalia, women in open desire and open refusal, drawn with the same cool, spare line he used for a Malory knight. Beardsley knew exactly how far outside respectable publishing it sat. It could only be sold by private subscription, and it was the specific target of his deathbed letter.
Under the Hill, Beardsley’s own unfinished erotic prose retelling of the Tannhäuser legend, ran in installments in The Savoy in 1896. It is less discussed than his drawings but confirms that the explicitness in his images wasn’t a commercial accident — he was writing the same material himself.
A queer circle, an ambiguous center
The Stomach Dance, 1894
Beardsley’s own sexuality is, and will likely stay, unresolved. No letter or diary states a same-sex desire in his own words, and the design historian quoted by Cooper Hewitt is careful to note that he probably identified as heterosexual. But the people around him were not ambiguous at all. He moved through a social world built by and for queer men: Robert Ross, Wilde’s close friend and, for a period, his lover, was one of Beardsley’s early champions. Marc-André Raffalovich, a wealthy gay writer close to the poet John Gray, quietly funded Beardsley for years and hoped — successfully, in the end — to bring him into the Catholic Church alongside himself. The vocabulary these men were reaching for, according to the Gay & Lesbian Review‘s account of the period, included brand-new coinages like “Uranian” and “invert,” words British writers were inventing specifically because “homosexual” didn’t yet exist in English usage and no honest word for their own experience did either.
That circle is the reason Beardsley’s work reads as queer regardless of what he did or didn’t do in private. He drew for it, was funded by it, was protected and later abandoned by parts of it after Wilde’s conviction, and put its aesthetic instability — bodies not settling into one gender, desire not settling into one direction — directly onto the page.
The afterlife
Beardsley’s influence on graphic design outran his six working years by a wide margin. His flat black-and-white contrasts, his whiplash Art Nouveau line, and his willingness to let negative space do as much work as ink shaped poster art, book illustration, and eventually comic art for the rest of the twentieth century. When London’s Victoria and Albert Museum staged the first full retrospective of his work in 1966, it landed directly in the middle of a counterculture already primed for it: an essay in the Gay & Lesbian Review on his rediscovery notes that his androgynous figures and newly unearthed “obscene” drawings became icons of 1960s sexual freedom, arriving in bookshops just a year before Britain partially decriminalized homosexuality in 1967.
His reach extended past Britain almost immediately. The Russian modernist writer Mikhail Kuzmin, a foundational figure in early twentieth-century Russian queer literary culture, used Beardsley by name as shorthand for homoeroticism in his own work, according to a study published by the digital humanities project BRANCH — proof that Beardsley’s specific visual vocabulary of ambiguous gender was legible as queer signaling to other queer artists within a generation of his death, in a country he never visited, in a language he never spoke.
He is still being reintroduced to new audiences on that basis. Tate Britain’s major 2020 retrospective and the V&A’s ongoing lecture series on what one of its own listings calls “the strange queerness of Aubrey Beardsley” both treat the ambiguity as the point rather than a problem to solve. Beardsley never had the years Wilde had to build a public identity, queer or otherwise. What he left instead was a way of drawing a body that refuses to confirm what it is, which turned out to be legible, and useful, to almost every generation of queer artists that came after him.
Sources
- Tate: Aubrey Beardsley exhibition guide
- Britannica: Aubrey Beardsley
- Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum: There’s Something About Salome
- The Gay & Lesbian Review: The Fall of Aubrey Beardsley
- BRANCH: The Queer Little Grove — The Adoption of Aubrey Beardsley by Mikhail Kuzmin
- Victorian Web: Aubrey Beardsley and Leonard Smithers
- V&A Collections: Lysistrata Defending the Acropolis
- Illustration History: Aubrey Beardsley
- Public Domain Review: Perverse, Grotesque, Sensuous, Inimitable — A Selection of Works by Aubrey Beardsley
- V&A: Lunchtime Lectures — The Strange Queerness of Aubrey Beardsley
